Crossfire was a three-part drama in more ways than one. Running every night from Tuesday to Thursday, it brought together a Die Hard-style thriller, an exploration of the complexities of family life (with particular reference to middle-aged womanhood) and a meditation on the nature of time. Odder still, it worked pretty well on the whole – though it was not without moments of frank implausibility.

Keeley Hawes played Jo, whose decision to book a holiday in the Canary Islands for her family and two others seemed a good idea at the time. Granted, her marriage wasn’t in top shape, what with her habit of falling for any man who paid her more attention than her husband did (making it not her fault really). Nonetheless, give or take one public row and a spot of sexting with her latest attention-payer, the holiday began uneventfully enough. Until, that is, some gunmen started shooting people around the hotel pool while she was on her balcony.

Given the strange parallel world in which TV drama takes place, all that we could be sure about at this stage was that the gunmen wouldn’t be Jihadis. Whoever they were, though, Jo didn’t hesitate. Instead, in further proof that we were in TV-drama world, this fortysomething woman grabbed a shotgun from the manager’s office and ran around in search of the killers.

Once they’d invaded the hotel, the tension was cranked up with great effectiveness – mainly by having isolated individuals from the three central families fleeing terrified through empty corridors and pressing frantically on lift buttons. It also added to the genuine scariness that not all of them made it.

Meanwhile, the identity of the gunmen was revealed. They were, it turned out, two local teenage boys who’d been sacked from the hotel for stealing and opted to respond by slaughtering its guests. Had this been the actual Die Hard, then, it would have made for quite a short film, with Bruce Willis taking them out in seconds. Here it meant that both Jo and the programme saw them as confused youngsters deserving of some sympathy. For much of the time, in fact, she might as well have been carrying a banana as a shotgun, so reluctant was she to use it. But that was before one of the boys threatened her daughter…

And yet, whole-heartedly presented though it was, the hotel shooting seemed less like the show’s chief focus and more like a cunningly telegenic illustration of what it was most interested in: the way that trauma rewrites not just families’ ideas of the future but also how they come to see the past. Indeed, the final episode, set largely after the survivors had returned home, might well have been the strongest – not least because it gave dramatic form to the abstract thoughts on time standing still vs time rolling on that had up till now been restricted to Jo’s intermittent and somewhat portentous voice-over. She also received full forgiveness for her flirty ways from her teenage daughter – which, while perhaps as much a middle-aged female fantasy as being a kick-ass heroine, felt unmistakably and rather movingly like the programme’s real climax.

To its credit, Channel 5 has become the TV equivalent of old-school Radio 2: a place where venerable refugees from other channels – Michael Portillo, Pam Ayres, All Creatures Great and Small – are warmly welcomed into a new home without being obliged to change much. And sure enough, Michael Palin: Into Iraq sees our man still having bureaucratic trouble at border crossings, still tucking into the local food with relish and, above all, still exuding benevolent curiosity wherever he goes.

His plan for this three-parter is to follow the Tigris for 1,000 miles through the whole length of Iraq – which serves as a chastening reminder that our current pride in Britain’s long history wouldn’t cut much ice in Mesopotamia, where all the towns he’s visited so far are thousands of years old.

In Tuesday’s opening episode, one of them was Mosul – occupied by Isis for four years and liberated with extreme prejudice by the Allies – where, amid the ruins, he had to work hard to hang on to his trademark cheerfulness. (‘I’m feeling inspired by the people I met,’ he eventually managed.) Luckily, after that, he hung out in some luxury in Erbil, the capital of Kurdish Iraq, and as a big finish climbed a large mountain to witness the celebrations for the Kurdish new year, which combined a torchlight procession with a lot of happy gunfire. (‘Noise is important to Kurdish people,’ a local explained.)

At the beginning on Tuesday, Palin told us that since we last saw him he’s had a serious heart operation. The good news is that, judging from this warm and gently informative programme, he must have had a great surgeon.