If television is the idiot's lantern then the subjective opinions of someone unqualified to write about television must surely be the idiot's lectern.

Spooks

9pm Tuesdays, BBC1

Hurrah – Spooks is back at last. Now in its sixth season, Spooks is probably the best show currently in production. It narrowly pips Battlestar Galactica to the post because Spooks has never featured a storyline where a character goes on a quest to find a magic arrow, nor has Spooks ever tried desperately to be The West Wing in space. Instead, Spooks stands as a sort of television equivalent of a Big Mac and fries. I think it was Morgan Spurlock who explained how McDonalds revised and revised every aspect of their product to make it as good as it could possibly be at delivering instant gratification. Nothing was left to chance, no generic ingredients were used – they refined every tiny detail until their product (disgusting as it may be to people like me) was perfect. Spooks feels as though Kudos (the company who makes it) have gone through the same process. Everything is designed to keep you at a pleasantly uncomfortable level of tension for seventy minutes (the sixty minutes it runs and ten minutes afterwards where you make your cocoa and breathlessly think how good that was).

They do this by making everything 110% of what you’re expecting. The paranoia is 110%, the explosions are 110%, the peril is 110%, the threat is 110%, the twists and turns are 110%. You don’t ever feel short changed by Spooks if that’s what you’re looking for in an evening’s viewing. It may be that you’re some kind of televisual vegetarian and don’t like twenty first century paranoia-action drama. In which case you won’t like Spooks because it does what it does and leaves absolutely no room for anything else. There are no jokes, there are no character developments to speak of and you won’t come away with a greater understanding of world politics.

The first thing that ever made Spooks famous was when a leading character had her face thrust into a deep fat fryer (a word I initially got wrong and made it sound as if she’d got intimate with Robin Hood’s ecclesiastical comrade). Almost from Day One the rule was that anyone in Spooks could meet with a grisly fate at any time. Not for them the tradition of waiting for the big season finale – if your time was up, your time was up. Not that characters necessarily had to die – one was convicted of an unlawful killing and was spirited away to a life in South America, another was framed for murder and had to disappear after faking her own death. It really doesn’t matter from a dramatic stand point whether the characters die or simply leave – they don’t come back. They’ve not yet burned the audience out with departures which are reversed in a few weeks or killings which turn out not to be the case. In this week’s episode, Zaf gets a lethal infection and appears close to death. In any other show we’d be waiting for his miraculous cure. In Spooks we know he may well die. For real. And not come back.

This season of Spooks appears to be a single 10-part storyline of governmental conspiracy, Islamic extremists, biological warfare and general terror. "After three hundred years it’s finally happened" growled George Cowley wannabe Harry Pearce, "a plague is back on the streets of London". The advantages of doing one long storyline are that it means we won’t have to accept several governmental conspiracies, several Islamic extremists and several states of general terror on the streets of London over the next ten weeks. If there is a criticism of Spooks it is that they have had altogether too many massive Establishment conspiracies. Rotten eggs have been found in the barrels of MI5, MI6, the cabinet, the civil service, the CBI, the police, the army and probably the BBC. All have sought to hold the country to ransom or stage their own coup d'état only to be thwarted by the bright and slightly cold boys and girls of MI5’s D Division.

Because of the ongoing problems of deaths and departures, the cast of Spooks tends to be fairly fluid. The original trio – Tom, Zoë and Danny – are all long gone and in their place are Adam, Ros and Zaf. Only Edward Woodward wannabe Harry Pearce has been in every series, which is good because we can trust him (and probably only him). You need one person you can trust or you can’t really gauge the betrayal of everyone else. Zaf is a likeable enough fellow but the main focus is clearly on the blonde and beautiful duo of Adam and Ros – the splendidly named Rupert Penry-Jones and the almost Harry Potter-esque Hermione Norris.

In the olden days, Rupert Penry-Jones would be in line to play James Bond. Back when appearing in a similar role on television was enough to get you the tux, the car and the almost inevitable Hollywood career. His character, Adam Carter, is basically a functioning basket case. His wife was killed on the job (which was fine because we didn’t like her) and he’s been in and out of therapy ever since. That doesn’t count as character development by the way – it’s just an excuse for him to break down every now and then and not be the completely proficient spy he is the rest of the time. The number one thing a hero needs is for the audience to believe in him as a hero and Adam Carter has that by the bucket load.

Ros Myers began life as a cold, heartless and unlikable bitch with a vaguely scary face who seemed to be on the wrong side of the tracks. For one thing she worked for MI6 – the next best thing to branding someone’s face with the word ‘BASTARD’ in Spooks-land – and for another she was an out and out traitor. But she saw the light and brought her vaguely scary face and ice cold personality-void to MI5. And, without really changing much, she’s become absolutely fantastic. She’s a woman who is equally convincing in a glamorous cocktail party or on the run in a blood soaked t-shirt being chased by radioactive dogs and fanatical Irish Muslims who want to blow up Britain. She is exactly what a post-feminist television character should be – her gender is never any kind of issue. In any given script you could swap her lines and Adam’s lines and not notice any difference. She’s also gorgeous – her vaguely scary face really grew on me by the end of the last season.

Spooks plays off the paranoia that the media whips up about terrorists, Muslims, bombs and surveillance. In some ways it exploits it, in other ways it comforts us. Yes, it tells us, there are lots of crazy Muslims out there who want to kill us, but there are lots of heroic people on our side who are able to stop them without us ever knowing anything about them. So its irresponsibility is counter-balanced by restoring out faith in a security service which only ever seems to be talked about when it is blamed for something.

Is Spooks genuinely great TV? I’m not sure – I’ve only ever seen each episode once and rarely has it ever been anything short of brilliant. But while it is brilliant on a Tuesday night, by Wednesday morning when you come to tell a colleague what happened, it all begins to sound a bit silly. When the buzz wears off you can see it for what it really is – fast food for the eyes and brain – and wonder why you thought it was brilliant. By next Tuesday you’ve got the craving again and devour another happy hour of Spooks. In an age where most television is so obviously shite, it is good that there are a few programmes left which can deceive you (in the nicest possible way).