Linda Herrick: Journey to nowhere

Although everyone knows the outcome of those four flights on September 11, 2001, director Antonia Bird's docu-drama The Hamburg Cell, which screened on TV One on Sunday night, still produced two hours of gut-wrenching suspense.

Obviously, all the terrorists - or jihadists, as they saw themselves - were played by actors but nevertheless, the journey of this group of young men was almost unbearable in its inevitability.

What was so disturbing was the focus on Ziad Jarrah because he appeared to be so normal, a likeable and intelligent young man in love with a beautiful girl. How he tipped from being a Lebanese student in Germany into a jihadist committed to mass murder remains speculation. However, the drama scarily showed how lonely young Muslims living in foreign countries are recruitment targets for al Qaeda.

The meetings between the young Islamists and the older men with the agenda were powerful exercises in the manipulative blend of fundamental religion, and anti-American propaganda was pounded into the hearts of susceptible youths. There was no joy except in the prospect of paradise.

The other main character was the ascetic Mohammed Atta, a man who took no pleasure from material things and sustained himself on a singleminded diet of faith and mashed potatoes.

It was chilling to see how Jarrah, once settled in Florida and taking his pilot lessons, was still attracted to Western comforts like nice cars, a barbecue, even a beer, to the disgust of Atta. Yet Jarrah never wavered from his mission, which, as the clock ticked by, was horrible to watch.

On the eve of the flights, Jarrah was stopped for speeding and admonished, "Please drive safely." Then the final countdown of preparation: washing, shaving the body, praying over the accoutrements of travel, including the box cutters. Jarrah's final call to his wife, in hospital to get her tonsils out, said, "I love you, I love you, I love you."

Her widening eyes as she watched the collapse of the World Trade Centre's twin towers indicated that she was starting to comprehend what her husband's flight lessons had really been about. Terrible.

On a lighter, perhaps more reassuring note, Jack is back in a new series of 24, which TV3 threw at us for three nights in a row. Once again, Islamic radicals are embedded in Los Angeles, in the form of a family with a young son being used by his father to take part in a major attack plan.

Jack's off the smack, his boss is a bitch and he's in love with the daughter of the Secretary of Defence. But she's been kidnapped by the bad guys, along with her father, and Jack is hellbent on their trail.

24 is pretty ludicrous. The secret service's ability to track every living soul via satellite belies the vulnerabilities exposed by the real events of September 11. No one's cellphones ever seem to run out of power or range. The whiz-bang multi-camera shots are as disorienting as the interrogation techniques used by some of Jack's less astute colleagues - Jack proved a single shot in the leg can be just as effective in the first episode.

But what I like about 24 is the knowledge that no matter how clever the plotters are, Jack will get them. He will get beaten up, shot, possibly, drive for miles at breakneck pace around California, and talk computer nonsense to the staunch Chloe - but within 24 hours it will be over.

Unfortunately, it's a fiction that doesn't mirror real-life politics in the 21st century.