Spooks (BBC1); Trial And Retribution (ITV1): TOM Quinn is in trouble for murder, treason and shooting his boss. Quite a big hole out of which to extricate himself. No wonder someone in the Spooks team declared, "Until this is resolved, no one sleeps - unless they are dead."

Spooks returned with a breathless hour of swirling camerawork, baffling plot and people running around a lot while talking very fast. It's all slickly done but perilously close to becoming like a French and Saunders spoof rather than Spooks. The third series opened with agent Tom (Matthew MacFadyen) on the run. Super-slimy intelligence top man Oliver Mace sees this as an excuse to clear out the Spooks department. "You are all suspended. This is going to be something of a bloodbath," he muttered, showing scant disregard for employment laws.

Spooks boss Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) didn't take this lying down, a position he'd adopted after being shot by the mighty Quinn. Soon he was back defending his department from a "conspiracy in the darkest corner of government" that would see the secret service run by Downing Street and doing exactly what the Government wanted.

The spooks came up with a plan to thwart Mace's scheme, although new member Adam Carter (Rupert Penry-Jones) advised against planning too much - "let things crinkle out", he suggested. What sort of spying term is crinkle? You have crinkle chips not crinkle plans.

Things were moving just as fast and incomprehensibly in the first part of the latest Trial And Retribution story. Lots of visual trickery - split screen, slow motion, that sort of thing - was used to further cloud an already murky tale of murder, sex and the sort of close family relationships that are illegal. The Government had a role to play in this too. A Cabinet minister, along with a judge and a high-ranking policeman, were clients of a prostitute who fell in picturesque slow motion from a block of flats. She was the daughter of a TV actress murdered in 1990.

The owner of a kinky S & M club was involved, which was a good enough reason to get detective Roisin Connor (Victoria Smurfit) into a tight leather outfit, although she looked positively decent next to Frances Barber (wasted in a small role) in her dominatrix outfit. All this was deeply unpleasant so that when pathologist Jean Mullins said: "And now we get to the unsavoury bit", you wondered if there was anything nastier left to reveal. Connor was at odds with her boss - what else would you expect in a TV detective story? - who was being pressurised from the top to sweep the sexual antics of top people under the aptly-named shagpile. He was one to talk as he was sleeping with one of the prime suspects, a prostitute, in the case.

If Spooks' Oliver Mace had got his way, this would have been easy enough for the Government-controlled secret police to do.

Published: 12/10/2004