Telly Talk: They’re at the shop window. Hundreds of them lined up and banging on the glass. Moaning. Blank-eyed. Staring. Desperate to get inside.

But that’s enough about the Next clothing sale, did you see the second instalment of The Walking Dead?

Last week’s opener ended with poor Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) trapped inside a tank surrounded by hundreds of zombies. This week, thanks to a teenager and a CB radio, he was just about able to escape so he could meet a group of fellow survivors holed up inside a department store.

They were a politically correct multi-ethnic group, but the programme didn’t labour the “hey-guys,-we’re-all-y’know-like-people” point too much. “We’re just white meat and dark meat,” Grimes told a nasty white supremicist, and then it was on to the main theme of the programme: survival.

Well, make that survival and gore. Plenty of gore. When our heroes worked out that the zombies can ‘smell’ the living, and therefore the best form of disguise is to smell dead, there followed a gleefully revolting scene in which a corpse was hacked to pieces and then painted on to Grimes and a young accomplice. The humour was pitched just right as they stepped out on to the street covered in blood and wearing necklaces of feet, hands and entrails.

The disguise worked well, the zombies merely sniffed as they shuffled past. And then it began to rain and the disguise was washed away…

This really is shaping up to be one of the year’s best TV series. It’s intelligent, very well made and  manages to be scary and terrifically exciting.

The survivors have escaped, but one man’s been left behind, and next week the sub-plot about Rick’s search for his family is about to be resolved, but not in a good way.

I know all this because some idiot insists in destroying any build-up by showing most of the good bits from the next episode before the present one has finished.

Come on, guys, what are you? Zombies?