For all this talk of change, one thing must remain the same – the humourless blonde men who torture foreigners and never pee.

That’s right, we’re talking about Jack Bauer. And fortunately our prayers have been heeded – Fox has announced the exact airdate that the new season of 24 will return to our screens. Following the Africa-set TV movie prequel being broadcast on November 23, the two-day, four-hour 24 season premiere has been scheduled for January 11 and 12.

That genuinely can’t come fast enough for us – 24 has been off our screens for so long now that, and we’re slightly ashamed to admit this, last time we saw a man of Middle Eastern descent, we weren’t immediately gripped by a kneejerk urge to tie him to a chair, submerge his feet into a bucket of water and then electrocute him while screaming at him to tell us the nuclear disarmament codes. Jack Bauer would be so ashamed of us.

24 stands at something of a crossroads ahead of its seventh season. Thanks to the writer’s strike and Kiefer Sutherland’s decision to go on a drunken joyride to jail, there have been no new episodes of 24 since the middle of 2007.

Since then the world has become a slightly different place – and not for the better as far as 24 is concerned. Not only does the trailer for the new 24 prequel movie look slightly rubbish, but 24‘s stock in trade – torture – has become so passe that even Christopher Hitchens is happy to have a go at it.

That means that if 24 wants to reverse its slow slide into silly self-parody and still remain the edge-of-your-seat thriller that its capable of being, it really needs to knock its four-hour season premiere out of the park. Will it? We’ll find out on January 11, as E! Online reports:

[Fox] today announced that Kiefer Sutherland and his terrorism-fighting costars will return to kick off their new run with a two-night, four-hour premiere Jan. 11 and 12. The fourth hour of the premiere will mark the series’ milestone 150th episode. The season will run without interruption through to May.

It’s no secret that season seven of 24 will revolve around Jack Bauer’s old colleague Tony Almeida coming back from the dead seeking revenge. Hopefully that’ll be a theme of the new season, because that way we can also bring back Nina, George Mason, the funny fat bloke who got gassed in CTU during season five and Frodo Baggins‘ chum Sam.

But even if 24 did suddenly become a weird zombie nostalgia show, it’d still face two insurmountable challenges. Firstly, since 24 was in its heyday, people aren’t as scared of terrorism as they were. These days it’s the economy that gives everyone nightmares.

Secondly, it looks as if Barack Obama will be less of a hardline president that George Bush was, and as such the ‘shoot first, ask questions later’ interrogation style of Jack Bauer runs the risk of looking extremely outdated incredibly soon.

There’s only one way around this – in the seventh season of 24, Jack Bauer will have to abandon fighting threats to national security in order to stand in line at a bank waiting to reapply for a mortgage. But it’d be OK if he did that, because the newly-reengaged UN would be happy to handle terrorist threats in an open, friendly and bureaucratic manner by itself.

Admit it, you’d watch that.