So there goes Prime Suspect (Sunday, ITV1). Another pleasure we’ll never have again — like watching Sinatra sing, or smoking fags in pubs.

The old girl went out in style, though — a final episode that made the final episode of Cracker look like a three-legged donkey. Helen Mirren was, of course, majestic throughout and there were fistfuls of great scenes: the nervy child with the gun, and Mirren whispering “You’re not going to take that to school, are you?” Tennison eviscerating her family in the pub, after her father’s funeral — eyes deceptively gentle with the drink, mouth ending every relationship she’d ever had. Tennison’s arrival at the funeral, shot like a metaphor for her life: on the wrong side of the road, her father’s hearse arrives — but the traffic will not let her cross. Everyone was on the other side, waiting for her. Everything was on the other side, waiting for her. Even death. And she could not get across.

And God, the tension throughout left you mildly ill. Child with a gun — that’s not good news. Tennison drunk with the teenage Penny, on a knife-edge of saying or doing something terribly wrong — that frayed the nerves. Tennison, glassy-eyed, leaving the pub, only to “Beep” open her car — nails dug into palms nationwide. There was nothing gross, nothing unbelievable, nothing crass — just the persistent, drizzly, low-level panic induced by things being incurably wrong.

Of course, by now, you know how the episode ended. At the time of writing, however, I don’t. The ITV1 press office weren’t letting any journalists see the last few scenes, in case the ending should leak out. Personally, I approve of press offices doing this kinds of thing. The world is pitifully low in instances of primetime dramatic surprise. I think the nation needs to gather around the television in moments of genuine trepidation once in a while. So no — I haven’t a clue how the whole thing ended. But what with the whisky, and the rain, and the loneliness, I suspect it didn’t conclude with a show-stopping musical number.

You know, the purpose of ageing is to learn finally what you really are, underneath all the lies and denial and hope. And in the ageing I’ve done since Saturday, when I previewed the first episode of Torchwood (Sunday, BBC Three), and now, when I’ve seen the second episode, I think I have finally caught sight of my real self. Despite all my previous, self- deceiving faux-concerns over Torchwood’s long-term dramatic viability, I must now admit that I am a simple woman. I think I really can sustain interest in a series, purely on the basis that Captain Jack Harkness is sexually charismatic, and runs around in period military outfits, flirting. It is enough. It is more than enough. Indeed, it is the point — Torchwood is purposefully post-watershed.

To be fair, you don’t have the second episode of your new series based on an alien who lives off human orgasmic energy unless you want your audience to have certain thoughts. To wit: Captain Jack Harkness being incredibly sexually charismatic is enough.

“I met my first wife, a Creole, in the Carribean, where she went mad — and so I brought her to England.”

“Jamaica?”

“Yes, actually — I locked her in the tower with Grace Poole, and kept all knowledge of her from the wider community.”

Ah, you’ve got to love a classic Mr Rochester gag. Wide Sargasso Sea (Sunday, BBC Two), the prequel to Jane Eyre, got the bump from BBC Four to BBC One this weekend — primarily because you don’t shoot a drama expensively on location in Jamaica, and then hide it away on Ocado FM.

Wide Sargasso Sea was, broadly speaking, a petticoaty shag-fest — scarcely ten minutes went by without Rochester and his missus having a sweaty, spicey Caribbean bunk-up, before descending into recriminations and sulking. The first Mrs Rochester, Antoinette, was a toothy, doe-eyed, hello-trees, hello-skies ingénue — basically Jane Birkin doing Je t’aime moi non plus, for real. Mr Rochester, meanwhile, was uptight, insecure and compromised by everyone’s desire that he should marry.

The third lead in the drama was Jamaica — making everyone sweat, sending up swarms of flies, putting a whispering, cat-eyed obi-woman at every window. The books rotted, in the tropical dampness, on the shelves. The Rochesters’ marriage rotted, in the heat, in their honeymoon bed.

“Give me peace,” Antoinette had asked, as her condition of marriage, when Rochester proposed. After an hour and a half, he had failed so miserably at this that she threw herself from the battlements of cold Thornfield, and left him free to marry Jane Eyre.

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