TV reviews: Utopia | Girls | Locomotion: Dan Snow’s History of Railways

I USED to collect comics, Americans ones, and have never forgotten the crushing moment when I tried to send away for some of their spin-off toys, asked my mother for our all-important zipcode and found out we didn’t have one.

Utopia

Channel 4, Tuesday, 10pm

Girls

Sky Atlantic, Monday, 10pm

Locomotion: Dan Snow’s History Of Railways

BBC2, Tuesday, 9pm

Still, I couldn’t have loved these comics more and the character to whom I related the most was junior newshound Jimmy Olsen. The eureka moment of discovering that he, too, had a five-letter Christian name and a five-letter surname is also burned in the memory.

But we didn’t use words like “related” back then. It was a long time ago and I was seven. We didn’t use “downsized” ­either but that was what happened to my comic collection. Do I regret that? No. I don’t want to still be collecting them in long trousers. The people who do are Sad Sacks (another strip cartoon character from the 1960s). Just look at that lot in the new conspiracy thriller Utopia.

They don’t get out much. When a handful – all fans of a comic called The Utopia Experiments – finally met in a pub after long, pasty hours dweebing with each other ­online, Becky stunned the guys. “I didn’t expect you to be... pretty,” said Wilson Wilson (his real name). Ian didn’t expect to get on so well with Becky, possibly because he was still a virgin, and back at Wilson Wilson’s back-garden nuclear shelter, couldn’t unhook her bra. A hilarious moment before a horrific one, this. Two bad guys are also comic-obsessed, doubtless for different and dastardly reasons. One is like Frankenstein in tracky bottoms and only says three words (“Where’s Jessica Hyde?”). His zoot-suited accomplice deals with the negative responses and poor Wilson Wilson got chillies rubbed in his eyes, then sand and bleach and finally the psycho grabbed a spoon. Everything went black for Wilson Wilson and probably at that moment for you too.

But hopefully you resumed watching because Utopia, written by Dennis Kelly, has all the makings of a creepy cult classic. I qualify my praise because this kind of show has the irritating habit of running out of chillies, sand, bleach and spoons (sorry, I mean verve, suspense, credibility and the feeling you should care about the characters). But this was a terrific opener, unsettling in its stillness, with shades of Quentin Tarantino, David Lynch and also The Shadow Line. Stephen Rea from that great drama spoon-gouged my ears with his only line: “Do you f*****g understand your mission?” Our own Paul Higgins, much missed in the finale of The Thick of It, is causing ­political mayhem here too.

Just when I thought I couldn’t love Girls any more, I’ve found out that Jemima Kirke (Jessa) is the daughter of Simon Kirke who some of you may know as the drummer in Bad Company but who I remember for his fine and steady stick-work in Free. Free at Edinburgh’s Empire was one of my great gigs, Free Live! is one of the great live albums (Vic Reeves once told me his copy would be the first thing he’d rescue from a house fire), and with everyone mourning ­vinyl records right now, the sleeve was one of the best.

That said, Jessa is the most annoying of the Girls, the wafty boho Brit who gives the impression of being indulged all her life and who no one could pin down until the end of the first series when – shockeroonee – she got married to Chris O’Dowd’s ludicrous venture capitalist. Still, we can’t love them all to the same degree. I think I probably love Marnie (Allison Williams, daughter of US news anchor Brian Williams) more than my copy of Free Live!, although she can be annoying, too, and as the comedy returned, baring Golden Globes, she was fleeing a drunken fumble with a gay pal, straight into the bed of her cold-fish ex-boyfriend. Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet, daughter of playwright David Mamet) also went back, to a man who excused his ­ungallant behaviour thus: “When you love someone, you don’t have to be nice all the time.” So that’s it: all of the Girls are annoying. But if I was a female in show creator Lena Durham’s world, confronted by blokes she classifies as “dementos, slugs and weirdos”, I’d probably be, OMG, super-annoying. Oh, and just so you know: Girls is a thousand times better than Sex And The City.

What a strapping fellow Dan Snow is. And what a fine series Locomotion: Dan Snow’s History Of The Railways looks like being, as he strides around manfully shouting “Innovative, energetic, bullish, brilliant... ” (his description of George Stephenson), wades though the peat bog conquered for the pioneering Manchester-Liverpool line, impersonates a tunnel-digging navvy and – go on, man! – outruns a steam-train prototype.

Twitter: @aidansmith07