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Earlier this month, in a radio interview on the subject of Christopher Andrew’s new history of MI5, Defence of the Realm, Dame Eliza Manningham Buller, head of the domestic security service from 2002 to 2007, was asked about the long-running BBC TV serial Spooks, in which the main characters are MI5 spies. “There are two things I regret about Spooks,” she said. “One is that it portrays intelligence as simplistic: everything can be solved in 40 minutes by a team of six people. The other is that it shows a complete disregard for the law: we are very careful about the law.”
As a judge of popular taste, Dame Eliza makes a good chief spy. Spooks, which returns for an eighth season later this year, has a huge fan base (the most recent series, in 2008, scored around 5.5m viewers, some 22-23 per cent of the available audience) and has become a cult television success. What is offputting for Dame Eliza is for many others clearly a reason to switch on.
One sign of its success is that it ignites controversies. For this reason, I was aware of Spooks before I saw it. One episode, early in the second series in 2003, featured a radical, indeed terrorist, imam. The protests from Muslim organisations were loud. As if to provide a kind of a kind of balance, a later episode, in which Mossad agents were portrayed as terrorists, outraged an Israeli friend of mine.
Since by this time I had begun to review TV for the FT, I overcame an unexamined prejudice that the programme would be little more than sub-Bond and watched. Despite my reservations I was drawn to the show – a common reaction, I discovered. Many seem to like it guiltily, as though they feel their taste should be more refined. They protest that they don’t believe a second of it but enjoy submitting to its many absurdities.
In part this is because the Spooks’ creator has constructed a world that works on the same emotional basis as successful soap operas: one in which viewers develop an attachment to the plights of the main characters. Therefore the mix is both demented – lurid, wildly improbable action, always routed through the same characters, who habitually perform feats of vast heroism; and narcotic, since, once a sinister plot of murderous ambitions has been foiled, the problem faced by the secret heroes reverts to how to meet a partner who won’t ask awkward questions, or how to placate a partner fed up with the hours you keep. The show’s giant leaps between the heroically absurd and the intimately mundane – from Casino Royale to the Rovers Return – seduce the attention with great skill.
Its characters are both reassuringly omnicompetent and, as reassuringly, all-too-human. Typically, an episode may pause to consider an affair turning sour or a friendship necessarily betrayed. And, as well as being recognisably human, characters frequently mimic doings and dilemmas of real world people. In the first series, a corrupt politician, let out of prison having found Christ inside, has obvious parallels to the former Tory minister Jonathan Aitken. In series five, the prime minister’s university-age son takes part in a march to stop the takeover of the state by a cabal of corporate leaders and the head of MI6 and appeals on TV to his father to repudiate the coup, in which he seems to be complicit. The fictional son’s name is Ruan, close to Euan, the name of Tony Blair’s eldest, then university-age son.
Perhaps most impressive of all, the drama occasionally foreshadows real events. In series one, a deal is discussed under which the Libyans would admit responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing and pay compensation to the US, though not the British – exactly what happened years later. This kind of informed guesswork may be what persuaded MI5 – which according to series creator David Wolstencroft had advised the programme-makers on the first series – to stop co-operation.
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| Ros under cover |
Yet that first series – an instant success, with an average of 7.5m viewers across its six episodes – only vestigially features Islamist terrorism. Instead, the villainous individuals and groups planning and executing terror include Northern Irish loyalists who smuggle weapons into the UK for the use of anti-abortion terrorists; a racist businessman plotting an outrage which will turn the British people against immigration; a rogue spook who uses the cover of Kurdish terrorists to steal a fortune. Only in the last of the series did an Islamist terrorist group appear.
Wolstencroft, who created the series and wrote most of its early episodes, remembers: “We had an early morning meeting after 9/11, and we sat round saying – ‘What are we to do?’ Not to mention 9/11 and al-Qaeda would be ridiculous but we realised we had to contextualise. MI5 didn’t stop dealing with other issues, after all. Irish terrorism, other forms of threat, all carried on. It would have been unreal to concentrate on the fallout from 9/11.”
In fact, viewing the early programmes seven years on is itself a rather unreal experience, as contextualising the Islamist terrorist threat comes across more like changing the subject. Since Islamist mass murders everywhere, including in the UK, have ratcheted up since the events of September 2001, the focus on the relatively rare anti-state terrorism carried out by anti-abortionists, anarchists and (as far as we know) former MI5 agents seems obtuse. But for all its contemporary references, Spooks isn’t interested in being any kind of documentary on what MI5 actually does, or how it does it. A working knowledge of international relations and geopolitical tensions has never been the main reason for its continued success.
“Geopolitics doesn’t particularly interest me,” Wolstencroft says. “I wanted to do a show about secrecy. That’s what the core of Spooks is; how do you separate your private life from a professional one like that? How do you live when you can tell no one, not those closest to you, what it is you do?”
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| Angst: Emotionally bruised Tom |
Quinn limps, increasingly dysfunctionally, into series three, in which someone asks him how he copes: he replies that he and his colleagues must put their emotions in a box, and set it aside from their work. But what, they ask, if the box cannot hold? The question is, for one as emotionally bruised as Quinn, an existential one.
Eventually he leaves, but the theme runs on. Agent Zoe Reynolds (Keeley Hawes), wavers continually between desire and distrust towards men. Quinn’s replacement, Adam Carter (Rupert Penry-Jones) sees his wife, another agent, killed in front of him and thereafter cannot form attachments. Section chief Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) is pursued by shadowy and messily terminated emotional tangles, always with fellow agents or others in the murk swirling between government and agencies.
Only inside “the Grid” – the section’s workspace – are relationships real: and even here, there is the constant suspicion of deviousness or treachery. In the seventh and most recent series, senior case officer Ros Myers (played by Hermione Norris, whose gauntly expressive face expresses a mix of disciplined stoicism and suppressed tension) is asked by a colleague who she can form relationships with. After discarding a list of possibles, she concludes, with bitterness: “Colleagues are OK.”
All this is a world away from the serene marriage of Buchan’s gentleman spy, Richard Hannay, and from Ian Fleming’s James Bond, whose emotional life is also kept in a box but, in the books and early films at least, without much angst. In this respect le Carré’s George Smiley novels shift closer to Spooks: the main private relationship – between George Smiley and wife Anne – is, on her side, faithless and on his, doggedly miserable. Indeed it’s now close to a cliché that TV detectives, from Rebus to Wallander to Peter Boyd of Waking the Dead, carry varying loads of bleakness about their private lives – the bleakest thing of all being that they hardly have a private life.
Spooks, however, operates on the assumption that the boxes available to Buchan and Fleming – the wife in the country house, waiting for the hero to return; the sardonic couplings – are no longer fit for use. The times do not permit it. Instead, it shows us a world with which, in differing ways, many of us are familiar: a world in which the messiness of the private has slopped into the tidiness of the professional, demanding to be accommodated. In this sense, MI5 is among the last fortresses of professionalism to continue to deny it space – exactly the core tension that Wolstencroft and Garrett saw when they began imagining the series.
Christopher Andrew, professor of contemporary and modern history at Cambridge University, has, with his history of MI5, Defence of the Realm, produced at once a piece of dedicated scholarship and a series of spy stories. He believes that fiction has always helped define the activities of secret services – often by affecting public-cum-political opinion. Most successful, he says, was the now largely forgotten William Le Queux, whose Spies of the Kaiser (1909) warned of the German threat, a theme also explored by Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands (1903) and John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) . Indeed, so potent were Le Queux and Childers that citizens spent nights following “suspicious characters”, at least one newspaper appointed a “spy editor” and, in 1909, the fledgling secret services were carried into existence on a wave of fear, with a staff of two – to be split into a foreign (MI6) and domestic (MI5) service during the war.
In these early fictions Britain is either unquestionably Top Nation, or co-equal with the United States. Later, Len Deighton and John le Carré helped define the period that became known as “managed decline”: characters in le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy constantly profess contempt for the reduced status of the country they have sworn to protect. “We used to be such a classy bunch,” says Bill Haydon, head of the Soviet section in “the Circus”, le Carré’s rendering of MI6. “We’re so vulgar these days.”
Spooks also chafes against British decline but does not use it as a major trope: instead, it works from the currently popular position of distrust and even disgust for government and official authority. As a watching experience, this manages to be engrossing and infuriating at once: engrossing because of the roller-coaster plots and emotional buttons ruthlessly pressed; infuriating because the worlds it professes to explore – the secret services and contemporary Britain – are so lightly traduced, so cavalierly misrepresented, leading, perhaps, to some viewers believing that the series contains some kind of truth about the way we are protected now.
In today’s world there is no communist ideal, no opposite pole to provide an ideological attraction. Instead, the new threat to the secret world is an emotional one which is as – if not more – destructive of this secret world as the KGB or al-Qaeda could ever hope to be. Near the end of Tom Quinn’s unequal struggle to keep his private life in a box, he has a last brief affair, with the CIA’s London station chief Christine Dale (Megan Dodds). Realising she has fallen in love, she does the decent thing and resigns the service; while Quinn staggers on, he is emotionally destroyed. What the plot tells us is that the best and the brightest cannot take it: implicitly, only the emotionally crippled or foolish can stay.
And it is this conundrum that lurks at the heart of Spooks: are our fabled services, having survived Nazis, communists and Islamists, to be brought down by the “what about me” generation?
‘Spooks’ returns later this year
John Lloyd: Just what TV genres need – new blood
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Fact v fantasy: How farfetched is it?
“If you believe in spooks, clap your hands.” JM Barrie’s plea for suspended disbelief in a fantasy world is unconsciously updated every time BBC TV announces another series of Spooks, writes Martin Hoyle. Adventure, pain, ambiguity and unashamed gung-ho are still there, but Neverland is Thames House, the Mermaids’ Lagoon is approached via the Embankment, and Tinker Bell and Peter Pan are devastatingly attractive young operators exuding cool as they protect us against threats both internal and foreign. Among the outstanding qualities of the intelligence services are cool, toughness and, judging by internet fan bases, Rupert Penry-Jones’s bottom.
The show has hip fashions and permissible sex but the ambivalence concerning authority figures, even in hotshot Section B, is entirely traditional. Did boss Harry really betray agent Lucas into Russian captivity, echoing the customary theatrical double-casting of paterfamilias Mr Darling and villainous Captain Hook? Peter Pan’s Wendy renounces her motherly role, abandoning the lost boys when she opts for her own reality – as shockingly as veteran spook Connie being revealed as a traitor and killer. You feel that generational tensions, as much as political, add to the edginess of Spooks. The gravitas of Peter Firth – as a boss not too inconceivable as a pipe-smoking clubman out of John Buchan – or Hugh Simon’s obligatory cosy boffin, whose American counterparts throng every morgue, lab and computer HQ of CSI, NCIS and Criminal Minds, are the old guard. Like every old guard, they can be regarded sentimentally, patronisingly, or with mistrust and fear.
Harry was last seen, bound and gagged, shoved into a car boot, the victim of Russkie treachery. It would be nice to think that with one bound he would be free, but Spooks has an uncomfortable way of pulling you up short. A plucky female agent was tortured to death with a deep fat fryer (Helen Flynn’s demise in series one jammed the BBC switchboard and led to a flood of complaints to the Broadcasting Standards Commission). A terror bombing of London, coincidentally filmed in advance, was transmitted two months after July 7. On the other hand, some characters have survived the impossible, returned from the near dead ... If you believe they can, clap your hands.
