Firstly, anyone who has already bailed out on this series: shame on you. OK, so it’s no longer as sharp and nuanced as when Aaron Sorkin was penning every episode but, for all the changes and influx of new characters, The West Wing remains compulsively top notch.

We’re in season seven now. Who thought we’d all live so long? The annoying Mandy is a distant memory. CJ is now chief of staff. Leo is running for the VP’s job. Toby is facing jail for blabbing on matters of national security. Josh is a presidential campaign manager. Charlie has grown a beard.

If all this seems preposterous, consider the pace of change in politics itself. For instance, one minute you’re deputy prime minister with a huge department and salary, the next you’re deputy prime minister with a huge salary.

Season seven, to be the last, follows the campaign to replace President Bartlet, still played with great wit and humanity by Martin Sheen, though his appearances are all too infrequent.

The sides are clearly defined. For the Democrats, Matthew Santos, portrayed with Clintonesque zeal by Jimmy Smits; for the Republicans, Arnie Vinnick, as played by the always impressive Alan Alda. The show’s producers took the idea of a rivalry so seriously they staged a live debate between the two characters, not their best idea, it has to be said.

The West Wing has always been a left-leaning liberal utopian wet dream of what politics and public service would be like if the good guys and gals were in charge. Thus, the Democrats are who we are invited to cheer for. Even so, the often venal nature of political campaigning is laid bare: the stunts, the spin, the endless polling.

This week’s episode was poignant as its main story focused on Leo McGarry, the former White House chief of staff, struggling in prep for the VP debate. Leo, an ever present since the pilot, was played by John Spencer, who died last year.

He was a fine actor and a key component on the show’s success, portraying a character with fierce talent, strong belief and deep flaws, evidenced through addictions to alcohol and pills.

The other side of season seven is the last days of the Bartlet administration. There can never be enough CJ Cregg on screen, but there is less in this run than the previous six. Instead, the dreary, smug Will Bailey’s romance with the foxy national security advisor is allowed to take up too much time.

This is why many have turned their backs on The West Wing. If the show’s executive producer were a football manager they could be accused of playing their team out of position. The dignified, loyal Toby is revealed to be a snitch, albeit one who leaked for high moral reasons. Donna, the delightfully kooky assistant to Josh seems colder now, more political and less likeable as a result. Leo, who commanded total respect and had complete control when he was chief of staff, is at times out of his depth as running mate to Santos.

And yet, and yet … this is season seven. That means that by the end of the run there will have been 155 episodes. How many other drama series have lasted so long without having to evolve and adapt?

When Sorkin left, the quality dipped. Season five was the low point, but the race for the Democratic nomination in six re-energised the show and the presidential campaign is a logical way to end the Bartlet years.

This was a series that captured political life with humour, style and honesty. It debated the big issues and examined the tough choices those in power are faced with. It was a world away from the likes of Commander-in-Chief, the latest Washington drama to hit our shores (if abc1 counts).

And so The West Wing recedes into television history. We’ve been through it all with them on the roller coaster ride through the corridors of power; the shooting, the MS revelations, Zoe’s kidnapping, the removal and reinstatement of the president, Donna getting blown up, Sam leaving, Mrs Landingham’s death and CJ doing the Jackal.

We’ll miss them when they’ve gone.

What’s next?

Those of a cynical disposition may have been tempted to guffaw at the idea of a programme pondering why there aren’t many sitcoms around these days being presented by somebody who used to run ITV, a channel that has produced fewer enduringly funny shows than any other.

Indeed, the whole premise of Who Killed the British Sitcom? seemed flawed from the start when you consider that in the last year alone the likes of Nighty Night, The Smoking Room, Peep Show, Extras and The Thick of It have washed up on our telly shores and engulfed us in mirth.

Further, the viewer was not filled with hope when considering this was clearly an unofficial follow up to 2004′s Who Killed Saturday Night TV? (albeit, made by a different production company), a programme so prescient that it went out just a year before a third of the British nation sat down on a Saturday night to watch the finals of either Strictly Come Dancing or The X Factor.

In fact, these fears proved to be unfounded, largely because of the stellar cast of talking heads. This felt like a proper discussion of the shifting sands of television, its fashions and prejudices, and spoke to many of the people responsible for making us laugh over the past half a century: Galton and Simpson, David Croft, Eric Chappell, John Sullivan, Ben Elton, Carla Lane, Andy Hamilton, Victoria Wood, Ian Hislop, Simon Nye, Steve Coogan, Armando Iannucci, Andy Harries, Simon Pegg and Fred Barron among them.

The presenter, David Liddiment, skulked about vast empty studios and dull offices effecting all the gravitas of somebody about to reveal the Watergate scandal. His thesis was clear: there aren’t as many sitcoms in prime time now as there were 30 years ago.

Five “suspects” were identified, though these actually represented five separate developments in television that had negative effects on the sitcom.

First up, alternative comedy, made flesh here by Ben Elton, was fingered for shattering the cosy suburban sitcom conventions typified by programmes like The Good Life and To the Manor Born.

Frankly, anyone who has sat through even a few minutes of Elton’s Blessed may already have him on a hit list but you can certainly see why the likes of Carla Lane were dismayed by the brash anarchy of The Young Ones, its shouty, in-yer-face style a world away from the cosy contemplativeness of Butterflies. Lane, who did not make any attempt to disguise her bitterness that she can no longer stroll into the BBC Head of Comedy’s office unannounced and walk out again a few minutes later with a contract to write a 10-part series of her choosing, seemed unhappy that the BBC had chosen to pursue the youth market, as if this group of people were somehow dirty.

Next up, Ted Danson as suspect number two. Again, this was tokenistic, this time of the series Cheers and American television comedy in general, with its slick conveyor belt of sharp, fast gags and high production values. The argument here was that once audiences had witnessed how well sitcom could be done, and not just for six weeks of the year but for more than 20, they would turn against the traditional British model.

This didn’t happen immediately but by dint of only getting the very best US show we here in Blighty would naturally assume they are superior (Frasier was voted best sitcom of all time by writers and producers in the programme that followed).

The third “suspect” was Jeremy Spake. Yes, that’s right, the chubby camp one off Airport. He represented reality television, that cheap, cheerful genre in which members of the public humiliate themselves for our entertainment. Ian Hislop argued that fly on the wall shows, edited as they are, have become faux sitcoms, without the horrid expense of actors, writers or, well, any talent whatsoever.

Suspect number four was Caroline Aherne, writer and star of The Royle Family, a sitcom which broke free of convention by casting out the studio audience and filming in real time, with great long pauses and not very much happening. She represented the challenging of traditional sitcom style, which has been followed by sundry shows since, The Office being a notable example. Victoria Wood, writer and star of the under-rated dinnerladies, admitted to her embarrassment at how The Royle Family made her show seem 50 years old in terms of its look and performance.

Finally, John Major was identified for being the Prime Minister who heralded in the digital age. 30 years ago there were only three channels, now there are 300. With that sort of choice, even if most of what’s available is utter tosh, getting a large number of people to sit down and watch the same show is near impossible.

Liddiment’s list of suspects all made sense, but he missed out the most obvious innovator, which did more than any other to challenge the traditions of sitcom: Channel 4.

It was C4′s arrival in 1982, and its stated intention to run the Comic Strip’s series of alternative sitcoms, that forced the BBC to commission The Young Ones. It was Channel 4 that brought us American favourites such as Friends, Frasier, Will and Grace and Scrubs. It was Channel 4 that pursued more offbeat sitcom ideas, like Father Ted, Spaced, Black Books, Phoenix Nights, Green Wing and Peep Show, winning audiences, awards and critical acclaim. But it wasn’t Channel 4 who killed the sitcom. It lives and breathes and though there are fewer in the schedules than in previous decades, quality has triumphed over quantity.

Yes, there are still shows that would fail to raise a grin from a stoned hyena but, right now, there is greater diversity in terms of sitcom types than ever, from the traditional (My Family), the satirical (The Thick of It), the surreal (The Mighty Boosh) and the dark (Nighty Night).

It could even be argued that what Ricky Gervais is doing now, playing, to varying degrees, a vain and deluded loser, is not much different from the central character in British TV’s first proper sitcom: Hancock’s Half Hour.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, as Del Boy wouldn’t have said.

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.

A young woman receives threatening letters. So we know what will happen here: they will become more explicit, she’ll get more scared, suspects will be introduced, she’ll come close to being killed and then be saved at the last minute.

It was a surprise, then, that said woman was murdered half way into the first instalment of this two-part drama. Hang on, wasn’t she the main protagonist? She must have been, as she’d been there from scene one, ever since she intervened in a mugging. And now she’s dead?

There was no time to dwell on this because the action swiftly moved on to a second woman, the wife of the man who was mugged at the start. She begins to receive letters. Ah, so this is now a whodunnit, right? Wrong. Because when she is murdered we see who commits the crime.

So by the end of episode one the conventions of this type of drama had been abandoned, and we were into truly intriguing territory – namely we didn’t know what the story actually is. If there has been a more satisfying 90 minutes of home-grown TV drama this year, then it must have been very good indeed.

Unfortunately, this strong start made what followed all the more disappointing. Episode two fell back all too easily into cliché. Woman number three rolled along, and it was just like starting all over again. This time she became scared, was close to being killed and was saved at the last minute. Virtually all the suspense that had been built was lost because the story now began to unfold in a much more obvious way than before.

All three actresses playing the terrorised women gave strong performances. Stephanie Leonidas as the lovely, vulnerable first victim held things together nicely until her untimely demise; Emma Fielding as victim two realistically encapsulated the frustration of a sham marriage; while Rebecca Palmer, as the feisty third unfortunate was sympathetic without being pathetic.

There were other impressive turns too, not least Jamie Draven as the shambolic but earnest young policeman and Daniel Mays as the perpetrator. Phyllis Logan, playing perhaps the most incompetent police officer seen on television since the heady days of The Dukes of Hazzard, was good value as ever.

However, small plot points niggled away at the story’s credibility. If a woman is under 24-hour protection, how can she stroll off to visit the children of one of the victims? Would the police really rule someone out of a murder inquiry in which two people had died if they only had an alibi for one of the murders?

The programme-makers also wasted a potential twist-ending by revealing, a good few minutes before the dénouement, that one of the murders had not, after all, been committed by Mr Psycho, to whom we had become accustomed. Instead, we had the obligatory everything’s-OK-now finale at the airport, the woman in question all smiles and happiness despite going through the biggest trauma of her life.

Ultimately, Beneath the Skin became a victim of its own early success. The first part was beautifully paced, daring and impossible to turn away from. The finale lacked these elements and, for that reason, the appeal of the entire production slowly drained away until the audience was left wondering why they had returned to watch it conclude at all.

First up is Jennifer Ellison, the former Brookside actress who more recently won Hell’s Kitchen. She sings – well, mimes – an instantly forgettable pop confection called Bye Bye Boy. She also wears a crop top bearing the Beatles logo, proving her stylist, at least, appreciates irony.

Cat Deeley then appears. She’s excited by pretty much everything. If someone were to tap her on the shoulder and tell her Diet Fanta was half price in a shop round the corner she’d probably have a seizure. Breathlessly, Deeley introduces the news segment of the show – the Mercury Music Prize nominees, something inconsequential about Rachel Stevens, something even more inconsequential about Jessica Simpson and then a clip of some appalling Nashville rock outfit.

Next up, Shaznay Lewis, who wrote those catchy All Saints songs. Sadly, her solo material, based on this outing, doesn’t measure up. A tune would have helped, but Deeley at least enjoyed it judging by the way she squeals with delight when it comes to a merciful halt. We’re then onto Hotshots Review, the part of the show where three guests (in this case Radio 1 DJ Edith Bowman, that dopey looking frontman Tom from Keane and, oh no, Ellison) discuss a selection of videos.

Dizzee Rascal, last year’s Mercury winner, hardly makes CD:UK-friendly music, so they ignore him and discuss the prize itself.

Ellison believes Busted and McFly should be on the list. “It’s more about being cool,” she says by way of explanation. Bowman, a judge on this year’s panel, does a very good job of not slapping the Liverpudlian popster about her chops, although there isn’t a court in the land that could conceivably have convicted her had she done so. The Libertines, troubled rock outfit much favoured by the NME, are next. Bowman gives her views on the travails of singer Pete Doherty proving that, once away from Colin Murray, she can, after all, talk in complete sentences. Deeley then stokes up some kind of running feud between Keane and The Darkness. Tom, who may or may not be from Middle Earth, plays it down far too politely and reasonably for it to be interesting and it’s back to Ellison to find out if there are any surprising CDs in her collection.

“I judge every song on its own,” she says, earning the sobriquet “eclectic” from Deeley. There isn’t time to work out what on earth she means because Twister, who thieve from an old Bill Withers track – yes, that one – are up next. According to Bowman it’s “subtle.”

After the break, Deeley does a piece to camera in which you get a chance to revel in just how many teeth she seems to have. Did she grow some more during the intermission? There’s plenty of opportunity to ponder this while Avril Lavigne plods through her latest dull single.

While she does, it’s worth noting how little the format and look of this genre of television has changed since TOTP began some 40 years ago. There is, it seems, only one way to put together a studio-based chart music programme and that’s the way it’s always been done. It’s also worth noting that The Chart Show – you want eclectic, Cat, this was eclectic – was axed in favour of what we’re now watching.

Naturally, you’re never more than 15 or so minutes away from Busted, and here they are with their new video. Then it’s Keane live in the studio doing an album track, then it’s a break, then – whoa! – they’re giving away a laptop. Not just a laptop, mind, a laptop, er, signed by Jamelia.

The chart rundown reveals The Streets to be the new number one, Mike Skinner’s literate, and in the case of Dry Your Eyes, mournfully bittersweet brand of pop blows away everything before it. It’s brilliantly performed, too, and just about saves the day. For once, Deeley has underplayed her ubiquitous enthusiasm.

CD:UK isn’t a perfect pop show by any means. This sort of TV relies on a never ending conveyor belt of Busted/McFly/Rachel Stevens/Will Young/Blue/Girls Aloud/Sam and Mark/Liberty X etc etc. That isn’t a problem for the producers. Because of the proliferation of reality shows these ready made pop stars just keep crawling out of the shiny, carefully manufactured woodwork. If you don’t get A and B, you’ll get C and D, and, if you stick around, A and B will turn up eventually. The odd decent, interesting or new act thrown in may just persuade the starry eyed kids in the audience that there is more to be discovered out there, but you can’t really be sure.

However, there’s one very important thing to remember and that’s this: it isn’t Top of the Pops Saturday, and for that we should all be eternally grateful.

For an hour on Sunday nights, Channel 4 gives those viewers endlessly fascinated by the habits and lifestyles of an eclectic bunch of characters an hour of sheer people watching bliss. It starts when Big Brother ends.

Six Feet Under, a superior American import, is set in a family funeral home and begins each week with a death, which is sometimes gruesome, sometimes upsetting and sometimes just funny. The body is brought to Fisher and Sons, run by brothers Nate and David, and serves as a backdrop to the meatier stories woven through each episode by writer/director Alan Ball, the man behind Oscar winning film American Beauty. Indeed, the series carries on where this movie left off, essentially stripping away the supposed niceties of American family life to reveal the seething mass of dysfunctional behaviour that lies underneath.

The opening episode of the first series featured the death of Nate and David’s father. In subsequent editions, the impact of his death is explored through the lives of the brothers, as well as their troubled younger sister, Claire, who is high on crack on the night he is killed, and their prim and proper mother, Ruth.

Nate, played with great charm by Peter Krause, has flown home and encounters the pretty, sassy, Brenda at the airport, where they promptly have sex in a cupboard. It is the start of a difficult relationship, not helped by Brenda’s bipolar photographer brother, whose chief function is to go nuts at every conceivable opportunity. By the end of series one Brenda makes the difficult decision to commit him to a mental institution.

David, as portrayed by Michael C Hall, has his own problems. He is gay but heavily closeted. He has a relationship with Keith, a black cop, but this ends because Keith wants him to be more open and David, a church going, upright, responsible figure within the community, struggles to come out. Claire (Lauren Ambrose), meanwhile, becomes involved with Gabriel, a drug taking bad boy whose little brother accidentally kills himself with a gun while he is supposed to be looking after him. This leads Gabriel to attempt suicide and brings him closer to Claire.

Ruth’s reactions to her husband’s death are complicated by the revelation that she has been having an affair with her hairdresser, played by the always solid Ed Begley. Ruth (Frances Conroy) eventually comes clean to the family and goes camping with the hairdresser, a bizarre event which includes her accidental trip on a tab of ecstasy. In the end, she decides she prefers her Russian boss at the flower shop where she gets a job and begins a relationship with him instead.

All in all, life at the Fisher’s sounds rather depressing but that would be underestimating Six Feet Under. There is a braveness in the way the series tackles death with black humour and often moving truth. There is nothing schmaltzy, as in, say, The West Wing. There is no heavy pathos, only an attempt to portray a reality, hard as this may be to accept for many conservative viewers.

David’s homosexuality for instance is not a token storyline, designed to make the show appear trendy. It is seen for what it is: a deviation from the norms of American family life and therefore difficult for David to handle. Of course, set against the rest of his family, he appears to be the most settled of all the characters and his mother, though not necessarily accepting of his lifestyle, tries to find a way of understanding.

Series two begins where the first had left off, with Nate discovering he has some kind of tumour which may kill him. In the second episode, he does his level best to avoid having to think about this, ironically evading thoughts of death in a funeral home. We see him shouting angrily at the ghost of a 21-year-old footballer, who the brothers are burying, with Nate insisting that everyone has to die at some point and that the young man should accept this.

When Nate realises he must do he same, he tearfully reveals his distressing condition to his brother, and the camera pulls away, as if not wishing to intrude on an emotional family moment.

The viewer feels their pain, too, and this is the point of Six Feet Under. Despite being a programme that draws heavily on fantasy sequences, it feels real. It may be a savage reality but it is still a reality. You believe that they are a family and that they are experiencing the problems we observe on screen. The characters as individuals are not especially likeable but put together you come to realise how they depend and rely on one another. In short, you care what happens to them.

And this is because Six Feet Under has the vital ingredients: funny and sad in equal measure, there are moments to make you laugh out loud and scenes that would bring a tear to a glass eye.

Just like family life, in fact.

The subject matter is a familiar one. Four Cambridge men who attained leading positions in the British establishment were, in fact, spying for Russia at the height of the Cold War. As they leaked highly sensitive information to the KGB, these men are generally regarded by history as traitors to their country.

Peter Moffat’s script, however, offers the alternative view. Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and Donald Maclean were communists, yes, but only because they despised fascism so much. In this way, the argument goes, they were true patriots. Certainly the over wrought emotion of one of the drama’s final scenes, where Burgess and Maclean are sailing across the channel, never to return, and stare tearfully at the English coast would have you believe that these men loved their country. Their motivation was not the downfall of the British establishment, but the perpetuation of it, in the face the threat from Hitler.

“The choice is between communism and fascism,” Philby says in the opening episode. “Nothing in the middle matters.” But of course, he very probably never said this, and that is the central problem with Cambridge Spies: it is based on events but basically a drama, where imagination compliments fact rather than accedes to it.

The programme makers do make clear at the start of each episode that it is a dramatised account of events and certain characters have been invented. There is, however, such authenticity in the writing, performances and direction that the drama becomes powerfully persuasive.

Toby Stephens, as the suave, good looking Philby, seems permanently scared witless by what he is doing (apart from when he’s seducing women), but by contrast, Samuel West, as Blunt, brings a sense of calm detachment and old fashioned British reserve, to the quartet, as if he is the steadying influence. This seems consistent with the man, who was the only one of the spies to remain in Britain after Maclean was unmasked. Blunt who confessed to his crimes in exchange from immunity, was not revealed to have been part of the spying ring until 1979. Maclean, played by Rupert Penry-Jones, comes across as a slightly reckless, and restless, young man who gets in too deep. Indeed, the further up the establishment ladder the spies climb, the more useful they become to the Russians and therefore the closer to being found out by the British.

Stephens, West and Penry-Jones are all believable and watchable but there is no doubt that the star of the show is the brilliant Tom Hollander as Burgess, a drunken, gregarious homosexual, whose intelligence and charm dug him out of trouble time and time again. Hollander has the best lines and the best scenes. His portrayal of Burgess is another reason why the viewer may conclude that the spies were not so bad after all. For example, in the final episode he drives through a line of white picket fences, an obvious symbol of Americana, and sarcastically proclaims “God bless the USA”, while pointing out the Land of the Free’s treatment of blacks and communists. It is hard not to feel yourself applauding his actions, and here, in a nutshell, is Cambridge Spies: the viewer is asked to sympathise with the motives of the four men, and then given plenty of reason to do so.

Stylistically, Cambridge Spies is a quality production. The direction from Tim Fywell maintains a sense of tension and threat of imminent exposure, although it seems odd that the main characters don’t appear to age in the 20 years in which they are involved in the conspiracy. The Russian KGB officers, meanwhile, do what they always do on television and film, namely wear hats and long coats and shuffle about London looking suspicious, muttering dark threats to their agents. We see them meeting the Cambridge spies on park benches or in gloomy pubs, always with an air of danger and conspiracy. Equally, the British top brass fit their accepted celluloid type, being bluffly nonchalant in the face of a crisis and arrogantly dismissive of the idea that anybody of proper schooling could possibly commit treachery against their country.

Overall, however, there is an unfulfilled taste in the mouth, leaving the viewer wanting more. The story of the Cambridge Spies is well documented so perhaps a drama detailing the lives of Burgess, Philby and Maclean after they left Britain would have been more interesting.

History has many judges. Perspectives change as the years roll by so we should not be overly surprised that the most notorious spying ring in British history has had their moment in the sun. Whether their reputations are retrospectively rehabilitated as a result depends on the extent to which the viewer remembers that they were, in truth, watching a fictional drama.