Nicola Walker and Peter Firth star as Ruth Evershed and Sir Harry Pearce in the BBC spy drama Spooks. Photo: BBC
If you’ve ever watched an episode of Spooks (BBC One, Sunday) you could probably have plotted most of last night’s final ever episode yourself. A major attack on London in the next 24 hours? Tick. Dead-eyed extremists bent on nothing less than total destruction? Tick. A clock on a wall counting down to Armageddon? Tick, tock, tick. And of course Harry and Ruth (Peter Firth and Nicola Walker) doing their doleful soul mate pas de deux, firing off aphorisms that have become ever more existential as the series has gone on: “With every lie we tell, our true selves get buried that little bit deeper.”
True Ruth, all too true. But really, is this the time for it? There’s a shaven-headed Russian on a passenger plane winging its way to Heathrow who might as well have “zealot” tattoed on his pate; he’s fidgeting with an attaché case in the toilets and you want to come over all Le Carré?
To be fair, Ruth has earned her close-up. We should take a minute to salute Nicola Walker, an actress who has squeezed every drop out of TV’s greatest ever largely dumbstruck doormat for the best part of a decade. Her scenes with Peter Firth, another fine player, have become self-contained little bubbles of weltschmerz within every recent episode.
And last night, as befits a grand finale, there was a lot to be schmerz-ed about. At one point or another, nuclear war, mass murder, patricide, filicide and a few other cides besides were all on the cards. An almighty denouement in a secret MoD bunker revealed that absolutely everyone had been telling dirty great stinking lies to everyone else over a period of more than 40 years. Harry’s secret son was not, in fact, his son. Elena (Alice Krige) was not a double agent but one of the Russian extremists herself – she had been playing Harry, not the other way round.
There was so little solid ground to stand on that things started getting a little Electric Kool-Aid – was this actually the final series of Spooks? (We believe so.) Was that Matthew Macfadyen turning up right at the end for a valedictory cameo to whack a Russian? (It was.) Could Spooks now merge with Downton Abbey to create a cross-channel Sunday night behemoth about the origins of MI5? (No.)
You may sense from my tone that much of this final Spooks – and indeed all Spooks – was hokum. But it’s not that simple. Events of the last decade have reduced the distance between the laughably implausible and the horribly real to a very thin line. Spooks’s brilliance has been to tiptoe along that line from start to finish. It was first aired six months after 9/11, and ever since then a combination of actual events, political rhetoric and pandemic paranoia has lent it just enough credibility to perturb. Television for its time, you could say.
BBC America has acquired the rights to ITV's dark police drama Whitechapel which stars Rupert Penry-Jones, Steve Pemberton and Phil Davis. BBC America has picked up the rights to the first two seasons of Whitechapel - a third season has been ordered by UK broadcaster ITV for later this year.