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The Best...spy drama

Peter Firth, Rupert Penry-Jones and Hermione Norris in Spooks
  • Posted at 5:13am
  • 15 March 2007
  • by DavidBrown-RT

We've come a long way since Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Back at the height of the Cold War, the espionage game was conducted over grey filing cabinets or through the slats of Venetian blinds. Usually by people wearing very thick glasses.

Nowadays, secret agents are younger, sexier and contracted to walk three abreast while making witty asides at the same time as saving Blighty from disaster. This is the explosive world of Spooks - an arena where renewed national anxieties in the post-9/11 world has taken the place of Soviet double agents.

Slick, controversial and never one to pull its punches, Spooks first made an impact with its second ever episode when Lisa Faulkner's Helen (a seemingly regular character) was dunked in a deep-fat fryer. Poor Lisa - coming to the series after being knifed to death in Holby City, only to be left crisply battered on a warehouse floor. She must be in two minds as to whether she should bother reading scripts through to the last page these days.

Autumn 2006, and the team's main player is the sharp-suited Adam Carter (Rupert Penry-Jones), a man who's defused more bombs than 007, tortured more ne'er-do-wells than Jack Bauer and removed his shirt more times than Sawyer in Lost. To begin with, this GQ magazine/MI5 hybrid was saddled with elfin wife Fiona, but she was dispatched in typically brutal Spooks style before they became the spy world's version of Hart to Hart.

The one thing I don't understand is that characters often comment on what a good father Adam is - yet he never spends any time with his son and probably wouldn't even recognise him if he passed him in the street. Good job he employed that nanny, whose extra-curricular work includes taking the boss to bed to help him get through some post-traumatic stress. Seems we've also come a long way since Mary Poppins.

Because the one thing Spooks doesn't do is deference. Politicians are as spineless as the Americans are venal. Even MI5 isn't above bending the rulebook for the sake of the greater good. Sure, the plots stretch credibility, but there are enough flashes of spine-tingling realism alongside the fever-pitch heroics and impossibly glamorous line-up to keep the edge of our sofas frayed. And who'd want to see someone like David Shayler saving us all from calamity week after week anyway?

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