If you saw lots of tweets about "spoons" and the question "Where is Jessica Hyde?" last night and didn't understand why, you clearly weren't watching Channel 4's new dark drama series Utopia.
A mixture of conspiracies, comic book geekery and gruesomeness on a sick scale (it involves a spoon, I'll say no more), the show was thoroughly confusing, but utterly hypnotic.
Like forum geeks and central protagonists Ian (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), Wilson Wilson (Adeel Akhtar) and Becky (Alexandra Roach), it feels like we're caught up in a dark, unimaginable and impenetrable new world.
Alongside scallywag youth Grant, the oddball characters are drawn together by a shared interest in The Utopia Experiments, a mysterious graphic novel. When comic collector Bejan claims to have found a rare manuscript of the second part of Utopia, the foursome's lives begin spiralling.
A gloomy-faced and lurid Neil Maskell and the chillingly cold Paul Ready were the cartoonish villains of the piece, gassing staff in a comic shop, hunting down the Utopia manuscript and dealing in eye-twitchingly horrific punishments to anyone who couldn't answer their one simple query, "Where is Jessica Hyde?"
Nobody has a clue who the hell Jessica Hyde is, but she did reveal herself in the episode's closing scenes. Her significance and importance? We'll have to wait a week to find out. Maybe she just hasn't paid her library fines.
Behind the spoon-bending, menacing heavies, there is a shady group known only as The Network (featuring James Fox and Stephen Rea) who are up to no good with Russian flu vaccines. The scale of The Network and their sinister aims, for now, remain unclear.
If you've got the stomach for it - trust me, this is no Midsomer Murders - Utopia is the first Must-Watch British TV show of 2013. This first episode was utterly compelling and original, shot with style and will have you hooked from the opening scene.
However, I will be eating my breakfast cereal with a fork from now on.
