It was with huge trepidation and gleeful anticipation that I awaited the start of new Charlie Brooker show, Dead Set (E4, Monday, 27 October, 10pm). The anticipation came from knowing how much I like Brooker's work in print and on screen, and the trepidation came from willing it to be good, but worried that it might not live up to the high standards he'd set previously. Thankfully, the latter didn't end up coming to fruition at all as I think I've got a new fave thing on TV.

For those that didn't watch, haven't been following our (and everyone else's) build-up to the show, Dead Set, in short, was a zombie-prog set in and around the Big Brother house. While the vacuous TV turds went through the motions, the living dead took over Britain being gruesomely grim. This obviously means eating up us humans. However, where most zombie related goodness uses suggestion to make us puke, Brooker was seemingly more keen on the Silent Hill video game route, mixing up the creep-out with the dry-heave, slowly building with half sightings before letting someone's throat get torn out with manky teeth. Right up my street.

Of course, the whole Big Brother thing needs looking into. On one hand, Dead Set is clearly using Big Brother as a vehicle for a gut-gnawing gorefest in a way we've perhaps all envisioned at some point (just me who has wished for a death on one of these shows?), but as Charlie Brooker is clearly one of the smartest people on the planet, you have to think that there is something of an allegory here. Being a poncey writer type, I can't help but think that this is Brooker's way of showing just how bubble headed 90% of the people in media are, caught up in their little stupid world that indeed, could get replaced by zombies and they wouldn't know until someone knocked over the coke bowl, shat in their soyaccino and chomped out lungs up through their gak clogged throats, all soundtracked by fucking Mika.

It obvious that reality TV is the clear choice for some kind of 'justice'. I know that I feel, irrationally, that I'm somehow owed something for the injustice of having to 'put up' with Big Brother and its many cretinous spawn, and it was great to see those 'responsible' getting royally twatted. In a one-dimensional level, the show was great and grisly fun. However, it's so much more than that. TV, and in fact all forms of media, is caught in such a shallow little back-slapping pond, that this show is a piss-take of blinkered and self-important the whole thing is that it would take something of the magnitude of a plague of zombies, to realise and redeem.

Another thing that clicked away in my synapses was the fact that I've long held the view that toe-headed TV producers have looked at the TV viewing public as something like a zombie nation, ready to lap up and gurgle at just about anything in the box. As for the makers of Big Brother, it's hardly surprising when you consider their only immediate contact with 'normal' people is on eviction night when we see people baying and booing for the blood of various contestants.

With all these angles rattling around my brain, the whole show took on both levels... notably that of some weird satire and at base-level, something rather disgusting and funny (which, for my money, is a marriage made in heaven). However, it's worth pointing out that this isn't really a funny-funny show. It's a grade-A horrorfest. The ebbs and flows of great creep out films were all in Dead Set... but forget tat like Phantasm and the second Blair Witch flick. This was in the ball park of ace Japanese slasher films like The Ring. In the intelligence lay something far more frightening than the bogeyman.

It kinda goes without saying that the assembled cast need to up their game to make this any good, and it gave me great pleasure that everyone on screen last night played a blinder, including Davina McCall, who I've been immensely irritated by over the past few years. Jamie Winstone, everyone's new fave (as seen in Phoo Action, Kidulthood) acted her Chuck's off in some wonderful scenes, which involved jamming some scissors in a zombie neck, stoving a zombie head in with a fire extinguisher... as well as less bloody moments, getting pissed off with various TV types and the realisation of the horror of what was going down.

What was also great about this show is that Brooker's ire and cock-jokes was all over the script. One delivered line was straight outta screenburn; "It smells of fingering in here", as well as the various rants of the producer. You could almost hear Brooker yelling them in mock fury. However, what still surprises me about this wonderful and scintillating show is that it's stuck in the barren wasteland of E4. I mean, what's normally on E4? A million repeats of Friends and Scrubs? This was a show that should have surely been given time on Channel 4. It's fresh, exciting, as clever or dumb as you want it to be. It demands a bigger audience... as testament to the fact that the overnight viewing figures show that it pulled in more viewers that the same timeslot on Channel 4 and Five.

Anyway, you'd be advised to get into this. It's bloody and brilliant.