Why is watching 24 like picking your nose?

I don't have a television in America. Having had some brief experience of American television in hotels when I was here on business, I saw enough to make me think that I didn't want to watch it at all. I find the myriad of channels mega confusing, and I didn't grow up with commercials on most of the TV channels, so I find commercials really annoying. I didn't watch the TV much in the UK anyway. I find I only have an hour or two at the most available each day for TV watching and there is enough UK TV and radio available for internet streaming to keep me going, I also subscribe to Netflix. I bought a TV converter box for my big iMac once and little tabletop aerial, but all I was able to get was something really fuzzy in English, and the rest of it was in Spanish.

Back in 2004 when I was back in the UK, 24 began its run there. I was initially fascinated by this concept of a real time show. However, my life was such at the time, that I was only able to watch the first episode. I'm also not sure I realised it was meant to be a series at the time, so when the first episode had, what I considered to be, an inconclusive finish, I was rather disappointed!

When I was considering moving to the US, a colleague told me about Netflix. I thought it sounded a great concept. The ability to order a few DVDs and keep them as long as you wanted, for not a lot of money seemed one of the better things about America. A year on in from first discovering 24, I decided to order the first 24 disc, and see the rest. It was funny trying to catch up with the story, two years on, but my bigger surprise was that, there was actually another 4 series to watch!

24 is addictive. I quickly got hooked. I think I will actually defend the first series, it was very suspenseful and worth watching for Dennis Hopper's appearance, at the end, alone. I first got into 24 at the same time as I got a video iPod, and I have fond memories of sticking episodes of the first series on my iPod and watching it down the fitness suite at work. I also used to watch it on the iPod when I was stuck on my own in restauraunts.

However, about 9 months after watching series one, I am about at the end of series 6, I have seen EVERY episode up to the current episode that first aired on US TV on April 9th. Having seen so much 24 now, I have decided that it is unhealthy for me - a form of addiction, a bad habit that I must break. The first series was good, escapist TV, but it has spiralled down and down ever since.

I may be accused of taking everything too literally, but how many people has Jack Bauer killed over the last 6 seasons? How come the bad guys can never seem to shoot straight, but every time Jack is in a firefight, he seems to just down the bad guy, first time. Are bad guys just disposable? Don't they have families too?

I'd also love to know what kind of cellphone batteries Jack uses, as he is always getting these important things downloaded to him by Chloe - it'd be great if he said "download that to my PDA" and then the battery died. I looked up Kiefer Sutherland, who plays Jack , on IMDB.com and discovered that he is about 2 weeks younger than me. Why, over a whole 24 hour period, does he never once walk into a room and forget why he walked into that room? I do that all the time. While I'm at it, how come no one ever yawns in 24? They are up for 24 hours after all. I have to fly to the UK tomorrow and I'll be up for around 32 hours without sleeping, I'm sure I'll yawn once or twice. They must all take caffene pills in CTU.

And, most importantly; what happens during the commercials? It's supposed to be real time, right? So, on the DVD, the clock just stops and starts again 4ish minutes later (btw, imagine sitting through 4 minutes of commercials, three times during a TV show, no wonder I don't watch American TV!). Does Jack just say to all the bad guys - "OK stop fighting and start again in 4 minutes, we have to persuade loads of Americans to eat more fast food now and we need to scare them about their credit history". It's just stupid, the show seems to go into suspended animation three times an episode. Every show is around 43 minutes on my DVD's from Netflix, that means 24 is really 17.2!

And the baddies!! There are no American "chief baddies". The chief baddies sometimes have American helpers, often yet another CTU operative who has been compromised - how many times can one counter terrorism unit be compromised! But, as I remember, the chief baddies have been Serbian, English and Middle Eastern, most often Middle Eastern. The middle eastern thing is hilarious. The makers of 24 seem not to want to identify any one country as the home of all the chief middle eastern baddies, so they have all these embarrassing lines like: "We have to target Marwan's country", "Marwan comes from the north of his country". It's never named. It's just called "his country". Having a number of friends and colleagues who were born in the middle east, I find the continual, lazy stereotyping of the middle east as the home of all the big baddies, quite offensive, and the fact that it was only when we had European big baddies that we named their countries, seems to make matters worse.

Since Dennis Hopper's great performance as Serbian big baddie, Victor Dreysen, there seems to have been absolutely no attempt by the makers of the show to give the big baddies any depth, character or texture. The latest middle eastern big baddie in season 6 is so much a cardboard cut out baddie, that I can't even remember what his name is meant to be. And the way they talk! It's soooo stupid! All these middle eastern people from the un named country, speak english with a funny accent to each other! There was one great moment when one of the American CTU guys was able to overhear them talking in their funny accented English about one of their plans and thwart that particular plan. Why were they making it so easy for CTU? Why not talk in Arabic or Phasri? I'm missing something here.

But I think the biggest problem I have with the way 24 has gone, is the totally single leveled approach to solving any issue. It's getting worse. Putting Jack Bauer's father and brother into the latest series and making them bad guys was quite a an interesting idea. When Jack found out that his brother was a bad guy, there were a million and nine interesting directions a talented scriptwriter could have written Jack's response to this, and what he may do to get his brother to give him the information he needed.What did Jack do? He pointed a gun at his brother and tortured him. When Jack had to persuade the CTU doctor to chose between saving Audrey Rains's husband and a suspect who had information that he had shot and that he needed to keep alive to get information, did he appeal to the doctor using the urgency of the situation as an argument? Was interesting dialogue written as Jack persuaded that the saving the bad guy and sacrificing the good guy was necessary? No - Jack pointed a gun at the doctor and threatened to kill him. OK jack, what use is a dead doctor? Jack Bauer's only answer to anything is to torture or shoot.

This is such a single levelled show - and it's getting soooo repetitive! So, David Palmer was almost removed from office by a vote of the cabinet. Surprise surprise, they do the same thing with the new President Palmer, two series later.

OK - if it's so bad, why am I still watching it. Because it's addictive! It's a bad habit that I can't break, and I stopped picking my nose when I was 10 (I guess!). The 24 makers even put the first 3 and a bit episodes onto DVD so you can get it on Netflix, but you have to pay $1.99 each to download the others off iTunes, as the new series is not out on DVD yet. I didn't even realise that the show was on US TV now, so I now can only download an episode a week, as my downloading has caught up with the series transmission dates.

But, I must be brave. Having excavated my last snotter as a hobby in 1976, I must break this new bad habit. There ought to be a warning from the surgeon general - 24 is addictive! And it's bad for you, it teaches you all the big baddies are middle eastern who talk english with funny accents to each other so that CTU know what they are doing, and that CTU is so crap that it's always being compromised, taken over, shut down, gassed, blown up and they keep having to bring Jack Bauer back even though he 's been a drug addict, died once (really - in series 2), faked his own death, been captured by the Chinese, released by the Chinese, only to be offered up to a big baddie by the Americans to be shot. Mostly it teaches you that every problem can be solved by torture and pointing guns at people. Really, listen kids, it can't.

So I think I will break the habit. Jack Bauer may be a goodie in 24, but he's king of the bogies as far as I'm concerned. So stuff the end of your latest series Jack. Copy that.