So it's the finale of 24 (Sky One, 9pm) tomorrow night, and - wait! Come back! I know, I know, it bores you senseless now. I agree. This season has been so dreadful, I'm not going to watch the climax. I don't have to. I've saved myself the time by reading the episode synopsis on Wikipedia. That's how bad this once-unmissable show has become: I'm willingly seeking out spoilers just to get it over with.

And I'm not alone. 24's ratings have plunged in the US. The producers are promising to make changes in time for season 7 - possibly a complete reboot. With this in mind, and in an attempt to revive a show I used to love, I humbly present 12 sure-fire ways to save 24. Free of charge. I'm good like that.

1. Introduce plausible enemies. At present, 24's bad guys are such humourless, hard-arsed drones, they might as well be replaced by shop window dummies with "BAD GUY" scribbled on the forehead. If they must be one-dimensional cartoon villains, go the whole hog. Make them Terminators. This would be far more exciting, and probably only about 3% less realistic than the show is anyway.

2. Think small. You don't need mushroom clouds to hold our attention. Give Jack a compact-yet-urgent threat to handle - a lone serial killer perhaps - and we'll be just as entertained.

3. Enough of CTU's teenage office politics. Things reached a new nadir this season, where the moronic Chloe/Morris, Milo/Nadia storylines resembled a soap opera aimed at people recovering from head injuries. Either make them bang each other over the desks, or don't let their love lives intrude at all.

4. Make the next season a blatant Fantastic Voyage rip-off, in which Jack is miniaturised and injected into Lindsay Lohan's body. He has 24 hours to save her liver from permanent damage by fighting off invading "alcohol cells" with his bare hands. Not only is this a superb cautionary tale for younger viewers, it means the finale will culminate in an eye-popping sequence in which Jack, midway through transforming back to his original dimensions, squeezes out of Lohan's bottom and flops triumphantly into an aluminium medical tray, where he thrashes around, covered in mucus, the same size as a rat. Don't tell me you wouldn't remember THAT for the rest of your life.

5. Rest Home 24: recast the show with 85-year-olds who take an entire episode to stagger from one side of a room to the other, and half a season to make a cup of tea with their brittle, quaking fingers. It'd have true morbid appeal. Will Jack make it to the front door before the postman stops ringing the bell? Can Chloe climb into the bath unassisted before the water goes cold? The clock is ticking! (Literally - you'd replace the iconic digital timer with an Edwardian grandfather clock).

6. The Chinese have created 240 identical clones of Dick Cheney! One has an essential microchip hidden in its balls, and the only way for Jack to retrieve it is to suck it out through the end of its winky. That's 240 clones - in order to save the world, Jack must perform 10 blowjobs an hour, for 24 hours. On Dick Cheney. Brilliant.

7. Jack travels back to 1963 and must race against time to stop Lee Harvey Oswald shooting John F Kennedy.

8. Jack travels back to 1990 and must race against time to stop himself making Young Guns II.

9. Jack wants to buy a hen, but all the hen shops are closed (hey, it COULD work).

10. Make each episode cover a year instead of an hour; instead of playing a government agent fighting terrorists, Kiefer plays a glacier fighting the effects of climate change. You'll need to play loads of dramatic uptempo music to keep the pace jaunty.

11. Do a Memento season, in which each episode takes place an hour before the previous one (NOTE: instead of "Previously on 24..." the pre-credits summary would have to say "Consequently on 24...")

12. Don't do any of the above. Apart from the first three.