Hermione Norris, Peter Firth and Richard Armitage

Having enjoyed perhaps its most critically acclaimed season ever (and with next week’s finale still to come), the show has regularly been attracting over 5.7 millions viewers to BBC1 and BBC3.

Ben Stephenson, Controller, BBC Drama Commissioning says: “I’m delighted Spooks is returning to BBC1 and BBC3 next year. It continues to be a channel defining show, consistently pushing the boundaries of television drama while maintaining strong viewer loyalty and attracting critical acclaim.”

Kudos will begin filming series eight in March 2009. While most of the cast expect to return, Miranda Raison (Jo Portman) has already stated she’ll only be in “some” of next year’s episodes.

Exploding back on to our screens with series four of the MI5 drama in which earnest men and women run about looking serious, preventing calamity and making witty asides to their colleagues, Spooks kicked off with a two-parter based around a terrorist campaign in London.

Truth isn’t stranger than fiction, it’s more, well, real. Only two months after the 7 July attacks on the capital, the BBC had to tread carefully with the subject matter. Although made before the suicide bombings, it was important not to strike an insensitive tone.

It is unclear whether there was any late re-editing but the most obvious thing about the terrorist attack portrayed at the start of the first episode, and indeed throughout, was the tangible lack of terror on display, save for a couple of hundred extras running about a railway station in mock panic. If people died, we didn’t see it. Truth is, though, we didn’t need to.

This is because Spooks is about the daily travails of the security services, not the great unwashed. Past series have revealed our spies to be brooding types and generally good-looking, although the entire security of the country seems to rest on about seven people.

Step forward Adam Carter, as played by Rupert Penry-Jones, who, in the space of a few hours, managed to prevent three bombings, kill a man by dropping him from the top of a block of flats, remove his own shirt for no apparent reason and save Martine McCutcheon from being blown up with two seconds to spare. And people get excited about Freddie Flintoff.

Carter and crew were on the trail of Shining Dawn, a terrorist group threatening to cause an explosion every 10 hours unless their leader’s planned extradition to the US was called off. Perhaps the producers of Big Brother could look into this tactic as a way of boosting flagging ratings. It certainly got the lads and lasses at MI5 HQ excited, though they seemed to spend most of their time accusing each other of being traitors and squabbling about past operations.

The burly American CIA man was, soon enough, revealed to be a wrong ‘un, which led to a lot of people tearing down corridors until they found him in the car park. McCutcheon was among them, having been pulled in to identify a terrorist she had the grave misfortune to bump into earlier in the day.

She ended up chained to a huge bomb in a hospital and came perilously close to death, though a few hours later she bore this with great stoicism, not to say mild disinterest.

A few thoughts sprung to mind while all this was going on. Firstly, terrorists in film and television would save time if they didn’t insist in making and fitting electronic countdown clocks to their bombs that ultimately help those charged with stopping them from going off. Also, hitherto unseen chirpy juniors with a wife and young son are always going to be shot in the head early on. It’s probably in the job description if only they’d read down that far. And, of course, the boss will be a rough diamond with more skeletons in his closet than a provincial serial killer but will, despite everything, be revealed to be brilliant by the end.

The BBC certainly can’t be accused of making entertainment out of the events of July and they were at pains to point out that Islamic extremists had nothing to do with the fictional scenario, to the extent that Martine asks at one point, “Who’s doin’ this, then? Is it them Muslims?”

There was no such compunction about taking sideswipes at politicians in general and American politicians in particular.

There was even time for some pro-establishment propaganda at the end when a knackered looking Carter turned on the car radio only to hear some dreadful civil libertarian bleating on about how rubbish the security services were at not preventing the first attack, little knowing three had been thwarted.

And so, the country is safe again. Until next week, that is, when we’ll be in for more of the gloriously entertaining same.

Spooks explosively returned last week with a bomb going off and a shower of ropey-looking CGI rubble in a tale of evil Serbians. This week, the featured baddies are evil Muslims (or, as they are described by their leader in the episode “a nest of angels”). The subject of Islamic terrorists has been everywhere in the news since the Twin Towers fell and it was surely only a matter of time before the Spooks team got around to dealing with the theme. Fortuitously, the real life story surrounding Abu Hamza and the Finsbury Park Mosque broke not long after this episode was made, ensuring that due to this (and the episode’s other main theme of immigration) the show has remained topical.

Interestingly, BBCi list Spooks in their Drama, rather than their Cult section of the website, and while Spooks is a completely different kind of programme from most of the drama output that the corporation produces, for some reason it has me continually hooked. Spooks isn’t a deadly serious political thriller a la State of Play, but as good as that particular programme is, who isn’t in need of something a little less taxing and a little more dynamic from time to time? It’s never going to be the most complex or challenging of programmes, but I welcome this. It doesn’t need to be anything more than it is. Spooks is set in a completely different world to any of the usual stuff and is a huge cut above the last show that tried to do something similar – Bugs. Everybody should just sit back, watch it, and enjoy Spooks for what it is: a great piece of entertainment.

Afghan Mullah Mohammed Rachid is deadly serious in his plan to Islamicise his adopted nation from the apparent safety of a Birmingham mosque, and MI5 deploy an Algerian dissident to infiltrate the establishment. Is the dissident genuinely willing to help, or is he a double agent? Alexander Siddig is very good: his character Khaldun is presented very much as the hero here, giving his life at the end in a vain attempt to prevent a 16-year old suicide bomber (complete with his “martyr’s shroud”) from blowing himself up. Doing its bit for race relations, the simple message of the episode is that not all Muslims are bad, which is shown through the contrasting actions of Khaldun (“suicide is a bit extreme even for a Villa supporter”), and Rachid (“the best martyrs are disposable”).

One of the only things that I have not been keen on in this new series so far has been the disappearance of Quinn’s girlfriend Ellie and her daughter. After narrowly escaping death in the first episode I had expected them to play a main part in subsequent ones: they were such an integral part of the first series and they appear to have fled rather quickly in the new run. Considering this, it didn’t take Quinn long to jump into bed with another woman, which surprised me due to his apparent depth of feeling for Ellie. Is his new relationship with Natasha Little’s Vicki Westbrook merely a case of being on the rebound? Is she more than she seems? Somehow, I can’t see the new relationship lasting, and have a sneaking suspicion that Tom’s family will be making a further appearance later in the run. We get a brief glimpse of new character Ruth Evershed in the episode, and I suspect that she will come to the fore fairly quickly in upcoming tales, while something is clearly being set up for the future in the shape of Zoe’s new friend Carlo. Who exactly is he and what is he after? Season one regular Jenny Agutter gives a spit and cough performance here too, and it seems likely that Tom will be paying her private agency another visit before too long. I have an inkling that MI5 are going to need her for something at some point …

I don’t know how accurate all of the technical detail is, or even how near the truth the workings of MI5 that are presented in Spooks are, but it seems from the webpages that the production team have certainly done their homework. Barring another David Shayler making an appearance and spilling beans that are not meant to be spilt, Spooks is as close as we, the public, are likely to get. And with a story centred on suicide bombers in the UK, we can only hope that Spooks is not as accurate at predicting things to come as it is in mirroring things that have been…