BBC1, Monday November 24
I always felt I had missed the boat with Spooks. The BBC is half-way through series seven and I had never watched a single episode.
Then I read in the Radio Times that this week's episode would depict high-level Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in London which, I realised with trepidation, meant I was contractually obliged to tune in.
I say "trepidation" because I have never really recovered from the trauma of watching Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy back in the 1970s. There was Alec Guinness, all taciturn and anachronistic as George Smiley; there was a mole; there was a Russian agent called Karla who was Smiley's nemesis; there was a lot of erudite, cynical dialogue and it was superb. The only thing was, I had no idea what was happening or whose side anyone was on. It was a little like watching Chelsea v Manchester United with half the Chelsea players playing in red , half the United players playing in blue and the managers working to sabotage their own defences, and then Sir Alex Ferguson turning out to have been with Liverpool all along.
At the start of Spooks, I got the same old sinking feeling. There were oblique references to "Sugarhorse" and double agents in Moscow. However, within a few minutes I realised with a sigh of relief that the spy genre had dumbed down sufficiently for me to understand what was going on.
It was simple - the Palestinians and Israelis were coming to London, but days ahead of the crucial peace talk, "the Grid" (which I think is the same as "the Circus" in Tinker Tailor) had discovered this, like, amazing gun which cuts out the electrics on vehicles and makes them crash.
A young lad, Dean (Jacob Anderson), was selling it on an auction site. The Grid's Lucas North (Richard Armitage) was sent to investigate. Turned out Dean had nicked the weapon from former MI6 agents now working for someone or other in the Middle East, who were trying to kill the chief UN negotiator (whom the Palestinians did not like) with the help of the Foreign Secretary, but then the grid guys killed the chauffeur who was trying to kill the negotiator and the former MI6 guys killed Dean even though they didn't need to because he was on his way to a new life in Spain with his mum. I never worked out who Sugarhorse was. Phew.
There were things I liked about Spooks. The fact that everyone involved in spying drove a large black car at all times and dressed in black made it easy to identify them.
I also liked the gritty locations and the sardonic dialogue. But some things were ridiculous and fanciful - such as the idea that the Israelis and Palestinians could, in present conditions, be holding high-level talks in London with any expectation of bringing peace to the region.
It was also daft to swallow the notion that the young boy who stole the amazing gun, and his mother, would have a public farewell with the Grid guys at the Champagne bar on the concourse at St Pancras Station on their way to Barcelona. The boy was shot by the former MI6 agents leaving the supposedly brilliant Rose Myers (Hermione Morris) and Lucas to speculate on why they hadn't given the lad a false moustache or something.
One of Spooks's biggest selling-points is that any of the characters can be killed at any time. Dean was the only character to die in this week's episode. But he did so knowing that he aided the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace. Then again, he was asking for trouble nicking that gun thing. And anyway, he was no Alec Guinness.