I don’t know about you, but I love sci-fi and action series — they’re one of my favourite ways of winding down after a stressful week at work.

If I can’t find old reruns of Enterprise or Stargate I will happily tune into old Spooks programmes.

This classy spy drama is one of the best action series around and always has quite decent plots. Now a new series of Spooks has returned with a bang, well several actually.

Dear old Roz got blown to pieces at the end of the last series, but Lucas is still there being all mean and manly and spy geek Ruth is probably the female equivalent of polymath Stephen Fry — but without the laughs.

On my large screen with full surround sound I often feel as if I’m in there with the boys, Sir Harry and the rest of the dashing spies, battling evil forces wherever they may raise their nasty little heads.

One little moan — the action is always set in London — what’s wrong with taking the characters out of their comfort zone and bringing them up north once in a while?

This week, instead of muslim terrorists it was the turn of the Chinese to be baddies and they had a dastardly plot to kill off all competition in a bid to gain top secret desalination technology.

This was entertainment at its best. The action is neatly paced with good plot twists and fine acting from the central characters who, however implausible the technology might be, make these stories highly watchable.

It’s wonderful to see them access street CCTV whenever and wherever they want in an instant and then use face recognition technology to ID their suspect which allows them to follow him via street and shop cams.

This week, they found a van bomb and defused it with a cigarette lighter in the time it takes most people to eat their tea.

If only beating terrorism, crime and industrial spies, was so easy. But I never let that get in the way of a good yarn, great acting and plenty of action — and Spooks supplies all of these.

It has been consistently good since it started and has not so far succumbed to tired plots or cliched writing as other similar series have, mainly because, I think, the central characters change so often.

They get bumped off in horrible ways and then you see them again in a Dickens or an Austen period costume drama a few months later. Apparently appearing on Spooks is good for an actor’s career — even though they often come to a gory thespian end.

But this being a spy series, there had to be a plot within a plot — and it looks like Lucas is the one the Chinese hit team are really after.

It appears that he is not really Lucas at all, but someone called John, so I wonder if his character is due for the chop.

Perhaps he can hear the distant call of a costume drama.

But whatever the show’s bosses do, they musn’t let anything happen to section head Sir Harry, played to perfection by Peter Firth, as he is the lynchpin for the machinations in both the political and spy worlds.