Reviews

Other reviews describe the series in more detail; this is just to add it to my list for the sake of people who haven't heard of it. To say it ought to be more widely known is an understatement - there appears not to be even a HTML fansite devoted to it, and it's a cultural artefact we really ought to have sent into space to impress the hell out of aliens.

That's an exaggeration and it isn't. Considered as a whole the series is very good but flawed, and other shows surpass it in this way or that. But individual episodes really, really might be, in my opinion are, the best television dramas ever made.

If you're a classic TV fan you do need to watch it. If you're a functioning human you ought to watch it. But you'll need a certain amount of patience with it. At the start of the second episode something so jaw-droppingly callous happens you'll probably want to hate the main characters and may want to give up already. Keep going. In a later episode something unbelievably mad and silly happens. Go along with it, or pretend it isn't canon. Worst of all, when the first of the best episodes ends on a cliffhanger and seems to change everything forever, leaving you wondering what the hell's going to happen next - well, you never really find out what happened next, and you're going to wonder if you skipped an episode by mistake, because the next one reverts to the status quo ante with no adequate explanation.

Never mind. You'll get over it. The rest of it is either rather good, very good or great, and there are at least three more best episodes to come.

The best episodes are written by Vincent Tilsley and star Robert Hardy as the tormenting and tormented Abwehr intelligence man Gratz. They are in my opinion the best-written, best-acted, most compelling and most powerfully affecting hours of drama ever on TV; nor have I seen better in film or on the stage. If you haven't seen Manhunt you may only think of Hardy as a solid and fairly charismatic character actor. No. He was a witch. Tilsley had enjoyed a distinguished 15-year career in scriptwriting including episodes of The Prisoner. He appears to have retired a couple of years after this at the age of about 40 and, as far as I can tell, written nothing at all for the next forty years of his life apart from one philosophical novel. Perhaps he decided he would never surpass or equal the work he did here. My symptoms included ice down the neck, not daring to breath, swearing, repeating 'Oh no, oh no' or 'Oh my God' over and over, tears starting, and finding my hands were held up in front of me as if to ward off or defend myself from what was going on on the screen. School textbook passages about ineluctable tragedy and purgation and catharsis and act-or blather about communion with the audience suddenly made sense.

I don't mean to denigrate the rest of the show even by comparison. I found it addictive even before Gratz came on the scene, everyone else is great, plenty of the other scripts are excellent, the ending will haunt me and other moments are unforgettable. All the other main characters are fascinating, especially Nina, an inadvertent femme fatale (played by Cyd Harman, one of the few actresses luminous enough to pull this off) and extremely reluctant heroine who just wants to be left in peace but may do ruthless things to attain it. Doubtless envisaged as a deliberate debunking of the glacially-cool SOE and Resistance heroines of 40s and 50s war films, she spends many episodes on the edge of hysteria or beyond it; may be the most put-upon and mentally-tormented character in TV history; can be selfish and, out of desperation, unreflectingly whorish; can also love and has or finds some kind of steel or integrity at bottom; is finally more consistent and real than any woman I've seen onscreen lately. I will duel anyone who does not have complete sympathy for her.

But the Gratz-Tilsley-Hardy conjunction, a freakish alchemy of perfect character and perfect writer for perfect actor - this bizarre little clown-genius-b*st*rd, this passive-aggressive self-effacing pathologically-loquacious insubordinate Third Reich Columbo or Machiavellian Schweik, this brilliant jumped-up self-made runty provincial nothing with a chip on his shoulder and a semi-Brummie accent whose every word you hang on and who you can't take your eyes off and never know what he's going to do next, who at times comes to stand for or express the pain of... anyone who's ever loved or anyone who's been unloved, or anyone who's felt driven to do terrible things in the name of either, or the sane man in an insane world or the man whom life is driving insane or the divided man in a world of people who seem whole or... I don't know what but call it flawed and tragic humanity for short - this phenomenon simultaneously elevates the rest of the series and derails it. When they realised what they had on their hands the creators (the producer and deviser was Rex Firkin and the script editor Alfred Shaughnessy, both of original 'Upstairs Dowstairs' fame) must have changed their plans to accomodate it; the story changes trajectory somewhat and other strands of it end up neglected or underexplored. Even apart from that I think it would have been a sometimes uneasy mix of series and serial, with disparate (but usually individually good) scripts folded into an ongoing arc less smoothly than tends to be done nowadays; also I think there must have been the problem common to the era of scheduling difficulties, so that secondary actors drift in and out while their characters are replaced by similar ones for a while.

Still you ought to watch it. Warning, you can get hold of the first series on its own but not the second, or the whole thing in one box-set; so if you try the first half and get hooked you'll have to shell out for the whole thing including that again. Chances are you will so just grab the complete series to start with.

Peter Tilbury is not unlike a (very, very) British version of Woody Allen, endlessly complaining about life, death, the universe, his love-life, his boring job and vanishing hair. Nicholas Le Provost is his alleged therapist, who doesn't listen but instead complains to him about his own love-life and his other patients. Christopher Benjamin is his boss, who ought to sack him but grudgingly admires his lack of work-ethic and complains to him about the modern world and his daughter's awful boyfriend.

Struck by memories of people quoting lines at school I've just watched the first series and found it hilarious. I don't know why; it just has an alchemy. The dialogue is great and Tilbury, Benjamin and Le Provost are brilliant in delivery but I still can't say why often relatively ordinary lines cracked me up quite as much as they did. Somewhere online I once found someone who'd worked on the show reminiscing about the very cameramen cracking up, the only time he'd seen professionals do that, so it isn't just me.

It shouldn't work! It's just people sitting around yakking! But it does.

A man with psychic powers is recruited by a secret department devoted to the rum and uncanny. Good fun and very atmospheric and creepy at times. The first main villain is described as 'The man Crowley refused to meet... just in case.' I wonder if the spooky recurring symbol motif from 'Watchmen' was unconsciously borrowed from the very similar one in the early episodes of this?

In some ways it was ahead of its time and it's a shame a second series wasn't made. Re the other reviewer who suggests Mary Whitehouse put the kybosh on it - this seems unlikely as I found an interview with Louise Jameson online where she says that whenever Whitehouse attacked the show everyone involved was delighted as the ratings would go up.

This must have been one of the first 'event' TV shows with big budgets and production values as high as that of a film. It may have also been one of the last TV shows to actually be fun before everything turned to grimdark.

If you aren't familiar with the Nero Wolfe books, all you need to know is that he's a fat bad-tempered detective genius who refuses to leave the house and sends his wise-cracking ladies'-man sidekick Archie Goodwin to do the legwork. If you do know the books, this show gets everyone and everything right (except perhaps that Saul Panzer is younger and better-looking than I envisaged him), even the furniture.

It's proper eerie at times, especially the end. Where it really excels, though, is as one of the few successful depictions (it is not necessarily an unqualified celebration) of the swaggering macho of (a lot of) the kind of men who do things or discover things or drive others to do so, which the under-30s will find more horrific than the ghost, and the larky camaraderie of a good joint enterprise.

Sitcom set in a future Britain that's been invaded by the USSR and turned into a Communist country. God alone knows why there was only one series made. George Cole is great as ever as the Dad of the title, and his role is a great character, a true believer in or natural suck-up to the regime, forever scolding his family that all is for the best in spite of shortages, bureaucracy and repression, exalting the great leader Chairman Hoskins, and piously correcting any wrong thoughts that slip out with his eyes turned up to the spy satellites that may be listening. Almost a sort of soviet Uriah Heep, or a Micawber of the Five Year Plan, or a British version of some character out of Eastern European satire. In some ways he's awful, but he's not only a great comic turn but also invested with a certain pathos - he'll never get the party membership card he dreams of, he's too innocent to have the sense to know when to bribe people, he may be the only person left who believes in the system.

The exuberant invention and attention to detail in the world-building is truly excellent and puts many more serious alt-worlds to shame. The writing is informed by the absurd but awful truth of life in the Communist Bloc before the Berlin Wall fell. Alarmingly, there are bits that are relevant today. But only about half the jokes are satirical - a lot are more character-based and revolve around Cole's warm and likeable cockney family and their exasperated affection for him, or his more highly-sexed navvy wife's attempts to make him pay as much attention to her as to Chairman Hoskins - and there's malapropism and slapstick and downright silliness in the mix. I found it very entertaining and frequently laugh-out-loud. As a bonus for bookworms, Episode 3 is a tribute to 'Le Grand Meaulnes'. Really. At the time of writing there's no DVD available (sort it out, Beeb) but several episodes can be found online.

It just is. A boy dreams of becoming the husband of a hairdresser and when he grows up does. That's very nearly the whole plot. Romantic, funny, sexy, sad.

I found this very watchable, in fact rather more-ish. Dystopian SF thriller series made in 1977 and set in 1990. In a run-down Britain a lot like the real late 70s extrapolated, journalist Edward Woodward tries to stop a nasty and repressive government becoming a flat-out totalitarian one and has a Pimpernel-style sideline in helping people escape abroad. Parts still strike a chord and raise a cynical smile today ('to safeguard freedom' MPs are exempt from the draconian laws inflicted on the rest of the nation, for example.) Connoisseurs of retro-futurism will enjoy things like a car-phone the size of a small fruit machine but the landscape is largely grey and 70s brutalist (and the phone is in an Austin Princess.) There are some good future-shock jokes - 'Oxfam are raising funds for us in India' and we've sold off the Crown Jewels (both only a matter of time.) One thing they got vastly wrong but which must have been a daring act of lese-majeste is that there is a King on the throne only 13 years in the future.

Woodward and friends are likeable and the situations are interesting. There's wiggle-room and a vestige of due process in the repression; things are just short of Orwellian, iron fist in velvet glove, in a way that also rings true: fascism (actually extreme socialism) with a saccharine smile in a polite British face. It's how it would happen or some might say did. The hero has a Deep Throat mole in the civil service, and his would-be squeeze is a woman high up in the security apparatus who may be trying to be human or may be using him for her own ends; this could have been schlocky or camp but their relationship is an entertaining mix of the cerebral and the playfully flirtatious. It's not just them who have charm and humour and appear to like each other, something missing from the dead-eyed robots on TV now. We care about even minor characters; as a result things get awfully tense at times. Modern TV drama commissioners, please take note. (Also that there's a whole universe of untapped possibilities outside child abuse, terminal disease and serial killing.)

That said, it gets darker as it goes; Woodward has some splendid victories but is sometimes powerless to help people, and ultimately it's less an adventure series than a shrewd and at times pretty grim study of the misuse of the levers of power - often 'soft' power - all the ways that freedom can die without people actually being shot (no need to imprison people when you can stop them from working; if you don't toe the line your wife and kids will suffer too) and how people variously knuckle under, go along to get along or courageously and self-sacrificingly resist. Anyone living in communist Eastern Europe would have recognised all of it; and similar pressures are to some degree still at work here, now. There are nice touches such as the surveillance room in the baddy HQ looking like a Benthamite panopticon, or a haunting moment dramatizing how poison in the political world seeps into our private ones when a dissident neglects his child because he's obsessively watching the news.

He's a policeman. She's an astrologer. Together they solve crimes, using astrology. The show plays this perfectly straight, and it's usually just shrewd psychological insights into the behaviour of different star-signs. I thought it was great fun but you should probably factor that I fancy Anouska Hempel. And my star-sign.

A plague wipes out 99-point-something percent of the human race and the survivors have to start again from scratch. The quality of the episodes varies but for me it was never less than good and I'd really put the best ones up there with 'I, Claudius' and the original 'Upstairs Downstairs' at the very peak of classic British TV drama - most notably an episode from the first series revolving around capital punishment and one from the third that's like a cross between a western, a horror movie, The 39 Steps and a Breughel winterscape, with philosophical interludes.

It does have flaws. Some interesting characters are written out too soon, and series stars left without their characters being written out, leading to that unsatisfactory situation I remember from other 70s shows where there are rumours of sightings of them and hints that they may return eventually.

Personally I liked that there was a mix of different types of stories, from adventure to character clash to ideas-based to ones based around technical ingenuity and the resolution of simple problems of coping without infrastructure, even that in the second series there were episodes or portions thereof that were almost idyllic where the major conflict was competing visions of the future. Most of the core characters were middle-class, old-school British, optimists, can-do types, planners, builders, and their belief that they could pull things together again, determination to make the best of things, even excitement at the chance for a fresh start helped make things bearable. But there's plenty of tension, menace, challenge, it's downright harrowing at times, and the deprivations the survivors undergo are a salutary lesson in not taking for granted all the things you tend to. I remember the relish with which I ate an egg after watching an episode where they're an incredible luxury.

If you like (surely the wrong word) John Wyndham's apocalypses or are fascinated by Robinson Crusoe daydreams of 'What would I do if...?' this is especially for you. Avoid the remake like the plague.

John Woodvine (the doctor out of American Werewolf) is great as the Cromwellian dictator of a dystopian future Britain. Julian Fellowes (yes, that Julian Fellowes, writer of Downton) is excellent as his scheming second-in-command, one of the snidiest connivers in TV history. He manipulates, sneers, looks great in kinky leather, and does action-adventure things I won't spoiler but which will make me look at him in a new light the next time I see him in a chintzy sitting-room talking about 1920s country houses. Gareth Thomas and Patrick Troughton are resistance leaders. For a kids' show and for its era it was ambitious in scope and production values and presumably budget (the look is medieval knights with motorbikes, helicopters, computers and machine-guns). I never saw it as a kid, which is a shame as I would have thought it the greatest thing ever, but even as a grown-up I had fun. It meanders at times, after a brisk opening getting mired down in certain sub-plots for slightly too long, but it all builds to a climax of jaw-dropping mayhem. Points of interest include that despite his scariness the dictator Prior Mordrin isn't a 2-dimensional villain but believes he's doing the best for the country; and that despite their name and crusader-monk aesthetic his organisation the Knights of God are pretty frankly Nietzschean and contemptuous of real religion.

An Englishwoman inherits property from a Norwegian industrialist she's never met, and, and, see the other reviews, or take my word and watch it without knowing what to expect.

A naïve and straight-laced Englishman travels to Cyprus after his brother is killed there and is entangled in the shenanigans of mysterious plotters. I suspect this may be too slow-paced and tame for many who are more at home with slam-bang modern thrillers but I found it very enjoyable. It's well-plotted, continually intriguing, very tense at times, and features an enigmatic beauty (Alexandra Bastedo) and Brian Blessed on top form. The daring and unconventional twist slowly dawned on me towards the end, but the final episode was still jaw-dropping and contained an additional, 'easter-egg' and very pleasing surprise that strikes me as ahead of its time. There's romance, local colour, thugs in vintage Mercedes, and, warning, an evocative theme tune you just can't get out of your head.

All of these were entertaining to some degree; 'Baby' was genuinely scary, with a creepy build-up and a final scene that made me make an incoherent noise of terror. I remember kids at school who were somehow allowed to watch that one coming in traumatized the next day, huddling together wide-eyed in a sort of support group. I quite understand now: it almost did for me as a grown man.

Kids have adventures back and forth in time. The show had flaws in some ways. In spite of the fact a respectable name is credited as scientific advisor, and a legitimate Scientist Man prefaces several episodes assuring us it's all plausible and trying to explain how it might work, I never did quite get the hang of the rules, and several times it's suggested that they're in effect only hallucinating, which would lower the stakes if true but is surely contradicted by other things. The overall story arc is fairly clearly being made up as they go, and without the slickness with which some modern shows do this, and the ending breezily retcons an early part in a way that made no sense to me.

But it's very entertaining and just has a certain something about it, perhaps just the charisma of the leads, in particular the kids and Dennis Quilley as the machiavellian Traynor, and some very good scripts, and it fully deserves its enduring cult status. The parts revolving around the children encountering their future selves and not much liking how they've turned out are especially great. There are some good twists and cliffhangers, images that stay with you and much food for thought, and it gets eerily apocalyptic at one point in a way I've rarely come across. Among other highlights is a turn by CJ out of Reginald Perrin as a genuinely chilling and intimidating mad scientist that has to be seen to be believed.

A silent home movie made by Evelyn Waugh and friends including Elsa Lanchester! Waugh himself stars as the priapic Dean of Balliol who tries to debauch the Prince of Wales in furtherance of a diabolical plan by the Pope, and Lanchester is the fallen woman who tries to save England. He is hilarious and she is radiant. It can be seen at the BFI website.

In the early 70s in Britain race becomes an issue in a by-election and a far-right party starts to gain ground. This is superb. It ought to be revived as a stage play and would certainly be timely. Everything it touches on is still (or again) true or more so today. Perhaps the biggest change is that we don't have plays as good as this on TV any more. Its depiction of back-room squabbles and shenanigans in the Labour, Tory and National Front-equivalent parties is so good I suspect the writer of not merely having done homework but of having spent time journalistically 'embedded' with all three.

All the acting is good; Nigel Hawthorne as the sinister but tragedy-touched and by-his-lights virtuous Rolfe narrowly steals the prize. The speech is down-to-earth but heightened at times - what I think Arthur Miller called 'emergency language', prose-poetic soliloquies forced out by desperation - almost everyone gets at least one barn-storming aria and makes the most of it. And with the possible exception of the fascist party leader, we are able to sympathize with everyone and see their point of view, including an idealistic speech-writer for the far-right party and the ordinary men and women who have been drawn to them out of a feeling of betrayal. The play is honest about the negative impact of immigration and globalisation on the working and lower-middle class and sharply depicts the effects of decline from imperial splendour on the classes above them. If a teacher might show this play to a class-room to warn about the far right, a member of the far right might also show it to their mainstream friends to explain where they're coming from. Perhaps the most poignant line comes from an ordinary former Tory woman who's defected to them: 'I just want a reason to have children.'

This isn't from anything as dull as a dutiful sense of balance - although what I wouldn't give for that to still exist in the British media - but from a basic awareness that drama is the clash of viewpoint. Not only could we not have a TV play as grown-up as this about the far right now - you probably couldn't or wouldn't have one showing a noble liberal Tory candidate as this one does. In fact if a BBC play showed Tory back-room debates now, let alone nationalist party ones, the moderates would be the ones who wanted to sacrifice fewer babies to Satan.

Ian Hendry is Don Quixote in space! (Or at least an idealistic do-gooder.) The SS man out of Raiders of the Lost Ark is his down-to-earth Sancho Panza! Margaret Nolan is a sexy space android who learned English from TV ads! Anouska Hempel is a sexy space-hippy! So is that man who's in Game of Thrones. Thorley Walters out of the St Trinian's films and Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother is a hippy space-guru! It has other people who are always good in things and was directed by Mike Newell! It's fantastic. It can be found online. Please someone else watch it so I can be sure I didn't dream it.

I just wrote 'I'm astonished it exists' while reviewing something else and it goes double for this. Others have already made better attempts to review it than I can, but I want to add it to my list for the sake of those who haven't heard of it.

I'm not even going to try to describe it, but here are some of the things I have exclaimed to people when failing to do so after watching it:

Sting is an Angel! Or perhaps some kind of alien! Hywel Bennett is in love with him! Or vice versa! Hywel Bennett descends into Hell or some kind of parallel world which is like Liverpool only they speak Estonian backwards and there's constant tannoy and posters warning you about crab monsters! There's a long-haired musical genius with this statue of a goddess who causes suicides all around him and is going to play a song that will end the world!

It's three hours long! They showed it without a break on the BBC at Christmas back when there were only three channels! And when TV was allowed to take risks.

It's not for everyone but for me the three hours passed in a flash. Some of it went over my head but at bottom it's a simple and powerful morality tale. Unlike some other reviewers I loved the poetic dialogue. It's worth watching for the bizarreness and unlikeliness and grandiose ambition alone - the joyous sense that you can do anything you damn well like in art and that some people have done - but it has far more going for it than that.

I recommend watching the writer David Rudkin's fantastic Penda's Fen first as an introduction to his world.

I thought this was great fun. I only heard of it recently and accidentally and am astonished it exists. The title character is a cosmic traveller gone astray; his look is a cross between David Bowie and Jesus Christ - his spiel too, albeit with a touch of steely ruthlessness, amoral survival instinct and the anger of Jesus with the moneylenders - and he's destined to become a god. But he doesn't belong in this time and place so he's attacked by Nature itself - vines and leaves and winds and a sinister human incarnation of it. It's inventive and intelligent and properly creepy and eerie at times. I don't want to spoiler the various neat touches and good developments, but to give you a taste one episode features an excellent sort of were-crow almost as a throwaway bit. It starts off quite good and gets better and wilder as it goes on. But if you can't get along with 70s special effects, forget it.

This is a hard review to write - I don't want to oversell this film or sell it short. I caught it while idly flicking round British TV one afternoon. I had better things to do but minute by minute it managed to keep me away from them and I didn't regret it.

At first I thought 'Cheap afternoon TV movie'. A few minutes later I added the rider, 'with solid production values and an above-average level of effort and energy.' A while later again: 'And an astonishing amount of care and ingenuity over detail. Did you see what just happened in the mirror? And did they hire a troupe of boisterous improv actors as extras? I need to find out who wrote and directed this.' Then: 'The special effects are too good for a TV film, especially the excellent time-line display gizmo. It must be a bigger-budget studio number. Why haven't I heard of it? Probably one of those things that came out in the wrong week or something and slipped under everyone's radar.' And soon: 'There is so damn much in this film in the way of backstory and world-building and little loving doodles in the margins, too much for a normal film. It must be an extraordinarily faithful adaptation of a book - not just a book, but the first in a whole series of books. They must be big in America. So well-loved that the fans would lynch people if they left anything out, so they've put it all in and are making quite a good job of explaining it to the rest of us.' And eventually: 'Who cares what it is or where it comes from? I'm still watching and it's getting even better.' By the end I was not only completely gripped and invested but so moved I had to stifle a little manly tear at one point.

Bear in mind: it IS low budget, albeit usually very well disguised. And you've seen most of the things in it before, but they're done with slightly new spins and so much verve in execution they come to seem fresh.

The first half of the film is - not exactly slow, but stays mysterious for an unusually long time. This can be a bonus if you enjoy making guesses. If you're impatient or are used to being spoonfed, forget it. (I think a lot of the people who've given absurdly negative reviews must fall into this category. Although I suspect those who've been over-critical of the acting of malicious trollery - the acting was either perfectly good or quite perfect.)

The best thing in the film, and the best example of the care and inventiveness that's gone into it, is the main gimmick (there are several). One of the characters in effect has a sort of superpower. This is very well handled. We are gradually shown rather than told and I was deep into the film before I fully grasped it. All the implications of it were thoroughly worked out - including the ingenious ways that enemies could counteract it. Most importantly, it was handled in such a way that, rather than becoming the equivalent of a Get Out Of Jail Free card, it actually had the effect of doubling or tripling the tension.

All in all I enjoyed it a lot. I would like there to be a sequel (for one thing I would love to see what happens when one '95er' fights another) or, perhaps better, a TV series. Most of all I would like the director and his collaborators to be given a bigger budget to play with. Congratulations to all involved on some remarkable work.

No-nonsense gold-digger Audrey Tautou seduces a hapless barman by mistake; smitten, he follows her, is cleaned out by her, and then becomes a gigolo under her tutelage. What could have been tasteless has oodles of charm and several laugh-out-loud moments. Tautou, in a part that's almost a completely one-eighty from her breakthrough role in Amelie, has never looked more gorgeous. Co-star Gad Elmaleh, meanwhile, is a comic master: resembling a gallic Buster Keaton in his almost total deadpan and tiny but hilarious lapses from it, he wrings laughs out of dead air and is also touching without working for it. They are served by a script worthy of them, its structural felicities and ringing of changes on certain lines of dialogue reminiscent of a Billy Wilder script at times. Watch this, savour it, shudder to think what the Hollywood remake will be like.

You've seen this, right? I mean, you have seen it? Just checking. Because I only saw it the other day. No-one had ever told me. I don't say there was any big conspiracy against me; they just all assumed I knew. So I'm just checking you know, in case you only find out about it later and you're cross.

Someone had tried to tell me recently, actually, but I just curled my lip and thought, 'Huh, I bet it's not that good.' Because most things, I find, are rubbish. And that's actually a good attitude with which to start to watch a film. It saves on disappointment, and the rare occasions when you're startled out of it the surprise adds to the joy. So I'll try not to build this up too much. And I don't want to give anything away. Just... watch it.

This must be a universal work of art. There must be Afghan warlords who love this. This is the real thing. If you work or aspire to work in a creative field, the chances are you'll watch it and think, 'I want to do something like that, I must try harder,' with a happy gratitude innocent of any jealousy.

It's at once classic and completely original. It's often hilarious. It's inventive and refreshing. It's... the necessary words get overused until they're meaningless. This deserves them.

This is a comic gem, an utterly charming diversion, a cunningly-wrought fable and a stealth classic that seems to have wandered out of a more sophisticated era of film.

Some time in the recent past a group of young upper-crust Manhattanites attend debutante balls and gather afterwards to party, philosophize, gossip, bitch and fall in love. If that capsule description sounds unappealing, watch ten minutes and see if you aren't addicted.

Of the four most important characters, three are adorably, refreshingly innocent, idealistic, striving to be virtuous - and the fourth is simply the greatest snob-fop-wasp acid-tongued cynic in cinema since the heyday of George Sanders and Clifton Webb, but still has a code of honour.

Other reviewers have already invoked comparisons to Woody Allen and Jane Austen and I can't readily think of anything more apt. Perhaps a funnier, anglo Eric Rohmer? In modern cinema Whit Stillman's dialogue is only rivalled by Allen's. It is elegant, witty and intelligent; almost every other line ended up printed on my brain, and dozens of them float up from time to time to make me laugh out loud again years later. The film is more than just a talkfest, though: on repeat viewing it proves to have the momentum and taut plotting of a stage play, and a morality play at that. He has a remarkable knack of crafting both scenes and lines that seem merely comic at first but which prove - sometimes only after watching or rewatching the film, sometimes only when one has grown wiser oneself - to contain a steely moral.

The ensemble of unknowns are talented and appealing. I'm mystified that some of them have done little on film since, and like to think that after working on something as good as this they simply turned down all lesser scripts out of disdain. In particular, the charismatic Chris Eigeman makes Stillman look twice the genius he undoubtedly he is every time he speaks.

If you enjoy this, Stillman's 'Barcelona' and 'The Last Days of Disco' are also wonderful.

For a time (the second half of the first series and all of the second) this was the best fun on telly, if you were in the mood for escapism: a sort of Jane Bond / Mission Impossible given an extra special ingredient X in the ongoing hunt for the works of Rambaldi, a 15th century monk who was like Da Vinci multiplied by Nostradamus and has left behind devices which are in advance even of today's technology and are sought by various competing Illuminati-type organisations bent on fulfilling his prophecies and taking over the world. Other things it had going for it were the gorgeous Jennifer Garner in the lead and regularly kitted out in sexy disguises; the impossibly gorgeous Lena Olin as her evil-ish genius mum; a leading man whom even as a hetero I found almost more beautiful than either and yet somehow sympathetic; a uniformly great supporting cast, especially Ron Rifkin as a much more evil genius; and very very high production values - special effects you'd only expect to find in big-budget films, and an uncanny ability to successfully make locations in Southern California resemble exotic locations all over the world. It was played so straight and written so well that it really did suck you in. At times like all modern TV it dwelled too much on Personal Relationship issues - hard to give a damn that a secret agent on the track of a nuclear device isn't spending enough quality time with her room-mate - but at its best it really was ace.

It went rubbish in series 3 - there were episodes that appeared to have been written by housewife slash-fiction writers - and then disappeared from British terrestrial TV anyway, so I never found out how it ended until now. Thanks to DVD rental I've just worked my way through series 4 and 5 and am happy to report that in these Alias returns almost to peak form. In 4 Jennifer Garner is teamed with a new half-sister, the gorgeous Nadia, played by Mia Maestro, an actress who is so perfect a cross between her and Lena Olin I suspect the producers genetically engineered her. For the first half the backstory is toned down and the show concentrates on one-off missions. In the second half the Rambaldi mythos returns and it builds to an apocalyptic climax of jaw-dropping bravura. This would probably actually have been a better end to Alias as a whole than the end of series 5, but then we would have missed out on the last two minutes of series 4, one of the best moments in television for years, and all the good things in series 5.

For the first half of 5 Garner was pregnant and so a lot of her running-jumping-shooting duties devolved on a new trio of babes: a loose-cannon French girl played by Elodie Bouchez, an icy villainess played by Amy Acker, and a reluctant new CIA recruit played by Rachel Nichols. This actually worked well and in particular the episodes with Garner mentoring the latter brought something refreshing to the formula and provided some strong stories. In the second half Garner is back in business and Rambaldi rears his head again. The show starts to gracefully build to an ultimate ending and dangling threads from earlier series that one had given up on are picked up again. I had high hopes for a completely satisfying resolution.

Unfortunately the show was cancelled before the end and the producers were given a very small number of episodes to wrap everything up. Within this limitation they did admirably. They sort of, kind of, almost, resolve the mystery of Rambaldi's plan. Much-liked characters are killed off abruptly, which at least adds impact. At the very end one previously ambiguous-at-worst and very intelligent character suddenly becomes almost motivelessly nasty. But there are satisfying endings for other characters and plot strands. While it could have been better, I wasn't badly disappointed. It at least stays fun until the last drop, and I finished it with a smile and didn't regret getting involved with it again.