As Spooks ends its nine-year run on TV, a spy writer reflects on the lure of the second oldest profession.

The Telegraph

 

What’s the secret of Britain's love affair with spies?

 

So that’s it, then. No more breathless meetings on the Grid, starch-dry quips from Harry Pearce or agents being plunged into deep-fat fryers. After 10 series, 86 episodes, three Baftas and some of the silliest plots on television, the BBC drama Spooks finally comes in from the cold tomorrow night, mission over. What to do? As a self-confessed espionage junkie, I haven’t missed an episode since the programme began back in the spring of 2002. That’s three and a half days of my life spent watching Section D, a team of improbably goodlooking MI5 officers, battle against Al-Qaeda, white supremacists, Russians, Chinese, Iranians, pro-lifers, Columbian drug cartels, Iraqis, Irish dissidents, Israelis and, of course, themselves.

Spooks was good on the enemy within, particularly when actors wanted out. It was one reason why the programme attracted more than 7 million viewers at the height of its popularity, and why it’s been exported around the world. (In America, it’s shown as MI5, in Slovenia as Tajni Agenti.) Who can forget when Tom Quinn, played by Matthew Macfadyen, shot Pearce, his boss, in the shoulder and walked off into the North Sea? Quinn returns tomorrow night for a fleeting appearance. Macfadyen was the best of the lead actors and audiences dropped below five million after he left in 2004. It took a while for his successor, Rupert Penry-Jones, to find his feet on the Grid, the office where they endlessly fretted in front of sleek computers.

His character, former MI6 officer Adam Carter, was an Arabic-speaking toff from south of the river. But he went on to provide some of the best Spooks moments when he was paired up with the steely Ros Myers, played by Hermione Norris, who waltzed onto the show in 2006 wearing her Belstaff black leather jacket. That year’s final episode ended on a typical cliffhanger, with us fearing that Myers and Carter had drowned while trying to save London from flooding (all in a day’s work).

Despite its high ratings, split screens and satellite graphics, Spooks has not been to everyone’s liking and there are those who won’t mourn its demise. David Cornwell, whose penname John le Carré is synonymous with the coolest espionage fiction, turned 80 this week. I doubt he will be on tenterhooks, waiting to see if Harry walks into the sunset with GCHQ linguist Ruth Evershed – surely the longest running on-off screen romance in television history.

“I don’t watch Spooks, it’s crap,” le Carré said last month. “I’m sorry. I have been in that world for almost half a century and once in it, you get a notion of what constrains you and what doesn’t. The idea that people just go around shooting and killing people and so on is crazy.” Ouch. Let’s hope he has never seen the US drama 24, that other seminal post-9/11 spy series, which had far more killings than Spooks.

 

The final episode of 'Spooks’ is at 9pm tomorrow on BBC1