Was Spooks Any Good?
Tony Horne reflects on the success of Spooks but wonders if it went on too long.
25 Oct 2011, 09:14
By next Sunday night at nine when you aren’t sitting down to watch Da Vinci - The Lost Treasure with Fiona Bruce, the answer will undoubtedly be yes, whether or not you have followed any of the last decade of the show.
I loved it, but I also hung onto it like a lover you were still trying to make the relationship work with years after it had expired. For me, the reality is that it was fading after Adam’s death, and never really picked up after the original three Tom, Zoe and Danny were split. Opinions vary – many people think Adam was the golden era. These tend to be sexually frustrated women who like that Rupert Penry-Jones fellow. Once the swooning had stopped, Lucas North just about kept the thing on track.
You can’t not argue that Spooks’s brilliance and legacy to drama is their absolute determination to kill off characters just as they were getting going – they saw them all off, with the exception of Sir Harry of course, and if you watched last night’s ending, I don’t think even then they had the bottle to bury the true star of this show – perhaps just leaving the door a tiny bit ajar for a return a few years from now.
Where did it fail, if indeed it did?
Well, I think the BBC didn’t know what to do with it – do we schedule on a Monday, do we run the opening episodes on a Monday and Tuesday, do we air it Monday on BBC1 and show you next week’s straight after on BBC3, or do we put it against Downton Abbey after a surge of reality TV hype on ITV1? They never really knew.
Furthermore, the writers could argue they varied their own technique to keep it interesting but I wasn’t sure if they knew deep down that the best way to script was individual episodes or an ongoing story for an entire series – I often found the latter slightly duller. Nightingale, for example, was something I didn’t really believe in.
Equally, when this show started less than a year after 9/11, we were entering a completely different era – one, which we now accept as the norm – and who wasn’t blown away by everything from Malcolm’s gadgets to the importance of disused tube stations or abandoned bunkers still fully-equipped and ready to go.
It was almost James Bond-esque in the modern era without all the fairy tale bollocks at a time when Bin Laden was on the run, and home grown terrorism was on the increase. I used to love the little BT engineer’s tent going up outside someone’s house preparing bugs and the white Transit van parked innocently in the street ready to storm – that innocent detail was always king.
The whiff that this was always in real time too – note, the references to the Coalition – certainly kept you on your toes, and every time it looked real, you asked yourself if it could be.
Specifically, I recall a couple of series ago, asking ex-SAS hero Chris Ryan if it were true that M15 could play with the currents in the Thames to prevent under water missile attack. He assured me it was!
I loved the Home Secretaries but felt Ros Myers was a shocking casting – she will always be that drunk woman in Cold Feet to me. Her return from the dead, dull as dishwater Connie and Ruth’s mystery family abroad left me wondering whether all this really does happen or is this just Bobby Ewing stepping out of the shower fantasyland all over again?
Believe it all and put it in the real world and you really do think that someone created a legend for Maxine Carr and she probably is in New Zealand.
The new additions to this series served little purpose – Erin had potential but Callum just never really got going. Diehard fans will have cheered their socks off at Tom’s cameo in the final episode. That really was an artistic nod and a wink to those who had stayed the course. In the same moment, you realise too how the weak Dimitri could never fill his shoes, let alone Lucas’s or Adam’s.
I’ll stand back now and prepared to be slaughtered on how I’ve got it all so horribly wrong.
Hey look, I loved this show but I wanted it to be even more amazing than it was when it peaked. I doubt, just like with those other series that we’ve all watched over the years like Dallas, Dynasty, ‘Allo ‘Allo, Little House on the Prarie, that after all those episodes you sat through, you will actually be able to remember in time how it ended. That’s one of the strange emotional experiences with television that you can follow something so passionately for years but don’t quite remember often how they wrapped it up, which tells me that any such show was probably past its peak.
I’ll remember Spooks very very fondly – I don’t watch much TV at all anymore – but I think it was time to go.
I loved it, but I also hung onto it like a lover you were still trying to make the relationship work with years after it had expired. For me, the reality is that it was fading after Adam’s death, and never really picked up after the original three Tom, Zoe and Danny were split. Opinions vary – many people think Adam was the golden era. These tend to be sexually frustrated women who like that Rupert Penry-Jones fellow. Once the swooning had stopped, Lucas North just about kept the thing on track.
You can’t not argue that Spooks’s brilliance and legacy to drama is their absolute determination to kill off characters just as they were getting going – they saw them all off, with the exception of Sir Harry of course, and if you watched last night’s ending, I don’t think even then they had the bottle to bury the true star of this show – perhaps just leaving the door a tiny bit ajar for a return a few years from now.
Where did it fail, if indeed it did?
Well, I think the BBC didn’t know what to do with it – do we schedule on a Monday, do we run the opening episodes on a Monday and Tuesday, do we air it Monday on BBC1 and show you next week’s straight after on BBC3, or do we put it against Downton Abbey after a surge of reality TV hype on ITV1? They never really knew.
Furthermore, the writers could argue they varied their own technique to keep it interesting but I wasn’t sure if they knew deep down that the best way to script was individual episodes or an ongoing story for an entire series – I often found the latter slightly duller. Nightingale, for example, was something I didn’t really believe in.
Equally, when this show started less than a year after 9/11, we were entering a completely different era – one, which we now accept as the norm – and who wasn’t blown away by everything from Malcolm’s gadgets to the importance of disused tube stations or abandoned bunkers still fully-equipped and ready to go.
It was almost James Bond-esque in the modern era without all the fairy tale bollocks at a time when Bin Laden was on the run, and home grown terrorism was on the increase. I used to love the little BT engineer’s tent going up outside someone’s house preparing bugs and the white Transit van parked innocently in the street ready to storm – that innocent detail was always king.
The whiff that this was always in real time too – note, the references to the Coalition – certainly kept you on your toes, and every time it looked real, you asked yourself if it could be.
Specifically, I recall a couple of series ago, asking ex-SAS hero Chris Ryan if it were true that M15 could play with the currents in the Thames to prevent under water missile attack. He assured me it was!
I loved the Home Secretaries but felt Ros Myers was a shocking casting – she will always be that drunk woman in Cold Feet to me. Her return from the dead, dull as dishwater Connie and Ruth’s mystery family abroad left me wondering whether all this really does happen or is this just Bobby Ewing stepping out of the shower fantasyland all over again?
Believe it all and put it in the real world and you really do think that someone created a legend for Maxine Carr and she probably is in New Zealand.
The new additions to this series served little purpose – Erin had potential but Callum just never really got going. Diehard fans will have cheered their socks off at Tom’s cameo in the final episode. That really was an artistic nod and a wink to those who had stayed the course. In the same moment, you realise too how the weak Dimitri could never fill his shoes, let alone Lucas’s or Adam’s.
I’ll stand back now and prepared to be slaughtered on how I’ve got it all so horribly wrong.
Hey look, I loved this show but I wanted it to be even more amazing than it was when it peaked. I doubt, just like with those other series that we’ve all watched over the years like Dallas, Dynasty, ‘Allo ‘Allo, Little House on the Prarie, that after all those episodes you sat through, you will actually be able to remember in time how it ended. That’s one of the strange emotional experiences with television that you can follow something so passionately for years but don’t quite remember often how they wrapped it up, which tells me that any such show was probably past its peak.
I’ll remember Spooks very very fondly – I don’t watch much TV at all anymore – but I think it was time to go.
The author
Tony Horne
Network Broadcaster for UTV Media, Ghostwriter of “Bodyguard – My Life on the Front Line” with Craig Summers and “Tango 190” with PC David Rathband.
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Comments (2)
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I disagree - but I'm not going to tear you to shreds because I only *just* disagree with you.
I did enjoy this final series and I thought the story-arc was pretty well done, but you're right in that the new characters in the show were not really a patch on those who came before. I think they'd have done better (and I remarked at the time that I wished they would) to recall Malcolm from retirement when Tariq was bumped off, which would have been a really nice nod to the fans and they could still have had the cameo from Tom at the end for that final 'squee' moment.
But I do think the story was good, and I think the plot was well wrapped up in the end. This series was certainly a lot better than the last: I doubt the real MI5 would have had any difficulty in identifying that 'Lucas North' was an fake and the last season's writers stretched the audience's credulity just a little too far. That being said, if you are blessed with a charitable willingness to suspend disbelief, [Spooks] has always been good fun to watch.
25/10/2011 13:13Great comments there. I love your opening line. Thanks for taking the time to read the site.
31/10/2011 18:59