Paranoia around the clock

Joel Surnow, the co-creator of 24, once described himself as a 'right-wing nut-job'. As the new series gets underway, he tells John Patterson, in Los Angeles, that scaring the viewers is not the same thing as promoting an agenda

As I pull off the Ronald Reagan Freeway into suburban Chatsworth, on the northern rim of the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles, I belatedly realise that 24's production offices are to be found in the world capital of hardcore porn, as are many of its locations. It is a blank suburb appended to a series of industrial parks and huge porno warehouses, and divided by the straight, wide roads and soullessly empty streets characteristic of a planned, once-brand-new city.

The place exactly fits 24 co-creator Joel Surnow's description of the classic 24 location - desolate, shabby, depressing, "places that aren't Beverly Hills or the beach, places you've never been to . . ."

The sixth season of 24 started on Sky One last Sunday, with a double episode to hook us all back into another traumatic day for Kiefer Sutherland's CTU agent, Jack Bauer. Full of the usual white- knuckle mayhem, this season brings the war on terror home to American shores.

"We thought this year to make the terrorist threat smaller and more real," Surnow tells me when we settle into his unpretentious office, the primary adornment of which is a huge flag sent to him by a tank crew serving in Iraq (one of the programmes in the new series is dedicated to a helicopter crew shot down there). Surnow is lean, in his mid-40s, very smart, and good company.

"This time we thought, let's play the projected nightmare - and to its full extent," he says. "And that is that the war on terror is here, in America, it has landed. Now what are we gonna do? And all the questions that you see talked about by the pundits on TV - let's just bring that into the White House, put those conversations in people's mouths."

Last time we saw Jack Bauer, he had been kidnapped by the Chinese government and was being shipped off to Shanghai. Season six opens with a radical Islamist-backed bombing campaign unfolding in cities across the nation. The late President Palmer's brother is now in the White House (the first president to have a shaved head and a goatee, incidentally) and negotiating for Bauer's release. There is brutally random racial profiling of Arab-Americans and homeland security detention centres are springing up everywhere. It is a dauntingly different but far from implausible future America.

What has not changed are the things one loves about 24: the ridiculous techno lingo, the multiple reiterations of the phrases "we don't have a lot of time" and "patch me through to . . .", and Chloe O'Brian's grumpy, "who farted?" grimace (courtesy of Mary Lynn Rajskub, siren of the nerds). There are the outrageous 180-degree plot twists, which are the meat and drink of the serious 24 addict (for example, by episode two this season, Jack is fighting alongside a character who is, as Surnow cheerfully acknowledges, a barely disguised Osama bin Laden looking to make peace with the West). And there are the hero's dubious moral choices - murder, torture, anything really - in the pursuit of his nation-saving ends.

As for the less familiar (along with new guest stars, such as Peter McNichol, Powers Boothe and James Cromwell, plus Surnow's pal, Stephen Merchant, who can be spotted as, appropriately, an extra in episode one), episode four ends with a true shocker, which I'll hint at only with the code words "smoking gun".

THESE LAST TOPICS have got the media talking about 24 in far more hostile terms than in the past. This week, several US cable news shows (none of them on Fox News, of course) asked whether 24 intentionally exploits a climate of fear in present-day America, and whether, in some diabolical collaboration with evil old Rupert Murdoch, it is peddling torture as a necessary weapon in the war on terror, perhaps to hasten the general public's acceptance of the practice. Online magazine Slate, under the headline "One Nation, Under 24", asked: "Can Jack Bauer exist only in a decadent superpower?" It was a very slow news day, but the debate has some purchase on reality, since torture often functions as a kind of money-shot in episodes of 24, and terror is never in short supply.

Surnow, who once jokingly described himself as "a right-wing nut-job" (you'd never guess) and who made, in October 2006, a $2,000 donation to the doomed and almost comically reactionary Pennsylvania senator, Rick Santorum, finds the accusations ridiculous.

"I think a lot of these people haven't seen the show or bothered to get into it properly, because 24 is so filled with these complexities, that for people to say that it's liberal or conservative is really missing the point," he says.

"I mean, we have this character, Assad, this year, who is a terrorist who has renounced terrorism and wants to start the peace process with the West. That's not left, right or centre, that's just another interesting approach to terrorism. You could argue every side of it. If wanting to stop terrorism makes you patriotic, then I guess we're patriotic. But you're right, it's a slow news day. It'll dissipate in a day or two."

And as for trafficking in fear?

"Certainly we're trafficking in fear. That's the point. If the show's not scary, we haven't succeeded."

Surnow has an idea where the media backlash originated, though.

"You know what hurt us, or helped us, or at least brought this up? We did an event at the Heritage Foundation [ one of the largest, most powerful right-wing think-tanks] last year," he says. "There was a 24 symposium, there was a liberal pundit and a conservative pundit, all given equal time. We were on a panel, '24 and Terrorism'. [ Right-wing radio host] Rush Limbaugh was the moderator, and Clarence Thomas's wife, Ginny, put the event together. So it had some conservative people behind it, but I think afterwards some people identified the show as somehow 'shilling' for George Bush, which I think is absurd.

"We have the whole political spectrum both within our show and on the writing staff. This season and last, we have stuff that pisses off people on the right. We had a corrupt president last year, racial profiling is an issue this year, and our take could have been written by a liberal. We mainly want to keep the audience off- balance. It's just a story, it has nothing to do with anything."

The best alibi is the star, Kiefer Sutherland, son of the star of M*A*S*H, not exactly a fascist tract, and grandson of the first socialist premier of Canada, Tommy Douglas.

"Exactly and, get this, Barbra Streisand is a huge fan of the show - and she's as liberal as they come!" says Surnow.

Other fans include Tina Turner, a slavish addict who has 24 episodes airlifted to her home in Germany by Surnow, and sends lavish Christmas gifts in return.

SURNOW'S TAKE ON torture in the show, and in the war on terror, is a little more controversial.

"I think torture does work. It would work on me! I believe torture has been around since the beginning of time, because it works. I just think that for any person in the circumstances that Jack Bauer is in, you'd be a fool not to. If someone's family was going to be killed in 10 minutes unless you tortured something out of somebody, they would do it.

"A lot of these experts, people in the human rights field, will tell you it doesn't work, it may not work, that there may be more humane ways to get information out of people, and I believe that, but in our show, if you have 10 minutes to stop a nuclear bomb, tell me what you're going to do. I mean, it's unrealistic, and it's not how the world works, but we're not purporting to be the world, and we're creating our own little world. And we're not saying it's good, bad or whatever. We're saying, tell me what you would do.

"I would bet there are a lot of soldiers fighting wars, on all sides, in all sorts of conflicts, under pressure when the bullets are flying and wanting information, who do all sorts of things. And I don't want to know about it. I just want to be safe. We're just exposing a little of what maybe does happen. The military hates it. People call us a conservative show, but the military will tell you they never use it. We use it as a last resort."

Right now, Surnow, his co-creator Robert Cochran and the writing team are writing episode 19 - with no idea as yet how the show will wrap up this season. They work a merciless schedule, necessitated by 24's pioneering non-stop format (other shows have two-month-long hiatuses per season, while 24 runs for consecutive weeks). After writing the opening episodes, they had no idea what would be happening by episode six. If the writers aren't perpetually surprising themselves, says Surnow, how can they expect to keep surprising the fans?

"I don't know how we'll get Jack back in a good place so we can pull the rug out from under him all over again - but we'll try!" he says. "It's brutal, it's rough: 18 scripts from July to January, six from January to June. So it starts to feel about now that we have the ending in sight - even though, of course, we don't know the ending."