Agent Jack Bauer, maverick hero of the fictional US department called CTU (Counter-Terrorism Unit) was launched upon the world in late 2001. The show was called 24 after its chief stylistic conceit — the action in each series takes place over a period of 24 hours. Each of these narratively overstuffed episodes purports to follow three or four characters as they face some America-destroying crisis or other, the threat inevitably created by terroristic baddies of denominations ranging from murderous Mexicans to maniacal Middle-Easterners. One of the running themes is the constant involvement of the US president, who can be a good guy, a weak and ineffective bozo, or sometimes a downright baddie himself. Agent Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) is in a state of constant, mutinous heroism, going against his bosses at CTU and other security agencies; nevertheless the man always has access to the president with whom he often exchanges dialogue along the lines of “Jack! This country owes you!” and/or “Mr President, remember! You owe me!”

24 is supposed to have “lucked out”, in that it was well in production by the time September 11 happened, and the first series apparently rang a resonant bell with an American public supposedly desperate for revenge. Something about Bauer and his band of super-gadgeted CTU co-swatters hooked the American viewing swathes; since then the producers of the series and Fox, the channel that commissioned it, have never looked back.

The show has had an incredibly high casualty rate. Heads have rolled, of several presidents, chiefs of CTU, love partners and colleagues of Bauer’s. Only two characters have remained immovable: Jack Bauer and the mobile telephone. There have been some shifts across the six series that have been broadcast so far. Bauer’s supremely imbecilic, 20-something, blonditzette, disaster-magnet of a daughter seems to have finally gone down the casting flush. The other noticeable thing is that the marketing pollsters have obviously come back with feedback that says the torture scenes are playing really well. Perhaps as a result, scenes of interrogations with extreme prejudice have increased over the years.

Along with dirty nukes, weaponized viruses and suchlike, along with a lot of SUV motor-driving and some quite good shooting action, 24 also does a nice line in torture scenes. In the parade of slot-in situations, we either have Bauer himself being tortured or giving it a jolly good return of serve, finding ingeniously painful ways of eliciting nation-saving information from screaming miscreants. In these segments we get electric shocks, imaginary injections that cause huge pain, versions of waterboarding, knives being plunged into nerve-points and nails being ripped out. Just as the innovation in each series centres around different bits of action, so does each new edition of 24 bring us different delicacies in the form of sadistic interrogation techniques and torture.

Garry Trudeau has been acute about this, as usual: in one Doonesbury strip the President of Berzerkistan, an imaginary ex-Soviet republic, gives a radio interview in the US; when asked about the human rights violations in his country, the despot replies “Hey, we love Jack Bauer!” This was followed recently by a story in the Guardian magazine where it was reported that the torture scenes in the series actually “inspired” a lot of American soldiers and interrogators, both at Guantanamo and in prisons such as Abu Ghraib. In a weird infinity loop, the post 9/11 situation fed into 24 and this ‘entertainment’ then piped nourishment back into reality. The US staff at these ‘detention centers’ only had to watch an episode of the series to be convinced that they were at the ‘front-line’ of defending innocent Americans; thus pumped up, they returned to their tasks of humiliation, psychological degradation, sexual abuse and physical torture with renewed vigour.

There is a whole genealogy to this ‘torture-porn’, a time-line of sadism-detours that can be traced to the end of World War II. Just as the dying malevolences of Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo, followed by Stalin, left the world infected with fascism, modern militarism and organized genocide, so too did the torture techniques developed during the war leave markers, models and enticing suggestions. It’s not clear who first authored that phrase, “We have ways of making you talk!” but the words and the idea found great purchase world-wide.

After the war, the Nazi rocket technology comes West but the torture technology, apparently, goes East, disappears over the other side of the Iron Curtain. In Western propaganda, the Gestapo and SS seamlessly become KGB and Stasi, leaving no mark on the ‘good guys’, the Western agencies. In popular Western narrative, such as the James Bond books, the KGB develops sub-franchises in organizations like SMERSH, which are run by villains with names like Blofeld, Bunt and Largo. Ian Fleming’s fecund imagination gives us the first popularization of innovative, technology-led, 20th-century torture and execution: sleek chairs that tip you into shark pools, electric shocks, scopalamine injections, people with steel claws.

But while characters like Bond and Modesty Blaise organize the horrible deaths of deserving villains, to the best of my memory they only receive and overcome torture, they do not dispense it. Equally, there are more realistic sequences of torture and ‘mind-bending’, say in classics like The Ipcress File, where the foot-soldier of British espionage Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) has to cause himself gross pain in order to overcome high-tech, bloodless torture. No matter who the perpetrator and who the victim, the fact is torture and the pain do find centre stage in books and films from the Fifties to the Seventies. And, just as summary executions and general ruthlessness no longer remained the privilege of the villain, it was only a matter of time before the good guys were ‘forced to’, ‘left with no choice but to’ do a spot of torturing themselves.

Balanced against the constant shrilling of motorized instruments of agony, you do get a character like John Le Carré’s George Smiley, who fights the KGB with the silkiest of interrogation techniques. Smiley believes physical torture is a waste of time, that the information gleaned is unreliable. So he sits down the subjects of his questioning and offers them a cup of tea; he chats to them, spinning his soft-spoken web, teasing out information as if yarn off a silkworm. While Smiley may not be about to become a text-book model for dealing with your freshly captured Salafi-Jihadi, there must be a reason why the head of West Point, that most elite of US military colleges, reportedly met the producers of 24 to request them to show a situation in which torture backfires.

Meanwhile, as consumers of violent entertainment, we continue to witness and pay for torture; it’s a bit like a toxic, guilt-generating addiction, but we love it. Of course, we love it at a remove, on a two-dimensional page or screen, as long as it doesn’t happen to us or anyone we know, as long as we are on the side of the torturing party, or, better still, able to watch and berate the torturers without getting our hands dirty. Of course we have an ambivalence towards torture and this might even be shared by all the three people currently vying for the US presidency, but at least one of them has made a guest appearance on 24, acting as a minor functionary at the White House. Should Senator McCain make the leap from acting the flunky to becoming the major functionary at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he would do well to remember the reservations of the head honcho at West Point. And the rest of us would do well to guard against this toxic addiction. To paraphrase Robert Frost, something there is, that loves a thumbscrew.