God, Spooks (Sunday, BBC One) is good. Has Spooks always been this good? I don’t know — I’ve never watched it before. It fell into one of those random schedule holes that occur in everyone’s lives — I have a friend who’s never once seen The 10 o’Clock News because “that always seems to be the right time to have a bath”. Similarly, my sister has never seen a Comic Relief telethon because “every time, like it was some kind of sick anti-rom-com curse from Richard Curtis, I’ve been breaking up with a boyfriend”. And I think I also got Spooks a bit mixed up with Hustle (also made by Kudos). Early 21st-century, flashy multi-cast primetime BBC dramas did all have a slight tendency to look the same in the trailers.

But now it’s taken me a mere four years to watch Spooks, I’m hugely in love. I know it’s a little hysterical — Armageddon at every turn and glaring plot inconsistencies (this week, all the characters appeared, usefully, to sleep in their shoes). But for sheer elemental life force and passion, Spooks is like a gorgeous, galloping, slightly mad horse leaping over the stymied goat of most other British dramas.

It appears to have three times the brain, guts and balls of any other comparable show. Maybe it’s written by triplets. Maybe it’s sucking the auric essence out of some smaller, cleverer beings, as detailed in one of the sub-plots of The Dark Crystal. Who knows?

Whatever it takes, it’s paying off handsomely — the season five opening episode blew everything else in last night’s schedules out of the water. In a mere hour they had resurrected the critically ill, critically handsome Adam (Rupert Penry-Jones), killed a regular cast member in a wood, tried to kidnap the Prime Minister’s son, tried to assassinate the Secretary of State and half of MI6, successfully did murder the Deputy Prime Minister, and lined up another Armageddon — this time, a fascist coup d’état of Great Britain.

And yet, despite a plot that could clearly think of three impossible things before breakfast, Spooks also managed to ratchet up a degree of queasy tension one more normally associates with 24.

Take the murder of the dweeby MI6 tech-head, Colin. He’s been in the show since the start. There was no whisper of his death anywhere before broadcast. On a surveillance job in a wood, he got picked up by rogue agents, who took him for a long, uncomfortable drive. Ostensibly, nothing really happened in the car, but anyone trying to eat a packet of crisps while looking at the fear in Colin’s eyes will have suffered subsequent digestive issues.

Finally making a run for it and unable to run in any other way save, frankly, like a girl, Colin was hunted down by the rogue agents — who still hadn’t, in a masterly display of drama reticence, really said or done anything definitively menacing. There was still a hopeful air of ambiguity about the whole thing — Colin might just have been having a surprise training programme, or about to get the strippagram of his life.

“I’m not made for all this running and fighting business,” he said, half apologetically — still hoping that this was a situation where self-deprecating comments might have some currency.

“The problem is, Colin,” one of the rogue agents said, pulling a rope out of his pocket, “that the world just isn’t make for weak people any more.”

And they hanged him from a tree.

I know that this is a show that deep-fried Lisa Faulkner’s head in series one but Colin’s hanging still seemed shocking. Not a speck of blood. No screaming. No last, lingering shot of his eyes. Just death treated with a restrained, unsettling casuality, before the plot galloped on again, like the mad gorgeous horse it is.

Who knows how the rest of the returning Afterlife (Saturday, ITV1) will pan out, but on the evidence of the first episode it seems it might well be into an insignificant pile of bosh. Having ended the last series with the university lecturer and supernatural sceptic Robert Bridge (Andrew Lincoln) being contacted by his dead child through medium Alison Mundy (Lesley Sharp), the second series opens with Bridge suddenly being not sceptical at all.

This non-scepticism is conveyed by his shouting a great deal at his students about “having an open mind” in a demented way — all scripted so badly that Andrew Lincoln, usually a very likeable and low-key actor, appears to have adopted a mid-Atlantic, David “Kid” Jensen-style accent, to distance himself psychologically from the debacle.

With a hackneyed supernatural plot — three teenagers in a car crash don’t realise they’re dead — it all comes across like a modishly shot episode of Tales of the Unexpected. Except it is quite expected. That’s a bit of a drawback.

Explore Film

• Film Reviews

• Trailers

• DVD

• London Film Festival

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010