Unmissable viewing

It has taken some time, but the second series of 24 is now exerting the same terrifying grip as its predecessor. The producers of the show appeared to be taking perverse delight in weighing down their pacey thriller with a lot of excess baggage, most of which took the form of female characters who were taking the story nowhere in a flurry of second-rate acting. Now the focus of the action is much tighter, although as in the first series, there are at least four distinct vortices of tension whirling away at any one time.

The other weakness of the show, which I have pointed out before, is the complete lack of any form of humour. I grant you that it is hard to go into a stand-up comedy routine when the immediate environment is full of very bad men indeed, who are intent is setting off large bombs and dragging the world to war. Nevertheless, it is a universal truth that humour, albeit of a somewhat bleak nature, tends to rise to the surface when things get really ugly.

I am prepared to forgive Keifer Sutherland's Jack Bauer his lack of levity, because that character has been constantly tortured, both mentally and physically, since the clock starting counting down. Elsewhere, the best we can hope for is the occasional wry half-smile from David Palmer and he's the President Of The United States, for goodness sake.

But let us leave these quibbles aside, because 24 is causing me to indulge in that most embarrassing of behavioural tics: shouting at the television screen in the hope of influencing the action. Last week's episode - and I'm talking about the terrestrial episode, not the cheat's leapfrogging show on BBC3 - placed the entire future of the western world in the direst jeopardy. All the good guys had been taken out of the game, temporarily or permanently, and the eyes of the evil men were gleaming as they sensed ultimate victory. This was furniture-biting stuff.

Beyond the raw tension of the plot, what is exceptional about 24 is its refusal to play the simple game of goodies and baddies. The nominal enemy is three un-named Arab states, but we already know these are not the real foe. There are the obviously bad men, such as the cold-eyed torturer Stark, but the real villains are a more ambiguous bunch, whose aim is chillingly stated as 'controlling the chaos'. The moral decay spreads upwards as far as the Vice-President - who goes by the amusing name of Prescott - and downwards to the lowest levels of society where the redneck tendency is easily exacerbated. 24 is currently saying a lot about America and none of it is very comforting.

In the end, though, this is a thriller, not a moral tract. Will the doves bring down the hawks? I shall continue to shout at the television set until I get an answer.