Spooked

After nine lovely Mondays spent anticipating the evening’s installment of Spooks, series 5, it’s all over. Monday is back to being plain old boring old Monday and Brussels seems even greyer than usual. Which isn’t to say this series was stellar. It was bigger and sexier, with more explosions and grander conspiracies. But the noisier Spooks gets, the less it seems to say. Spooks always had an eerie talent for anticipating world events – it started filming in the months before 9/11 – but fact is now so much stranger than fiction.

Two more of the few remaining characters from the first series have been dismissed. The only discernible character arc in the whole of series 5 was that of our hero, Adam, who spiralled further and further downward, with a quick stop off to bang his nanny. Actually, his story was a good one, and put the lie to most action-led tv series where characters bounce back from the deaths of loved ones within an episode or three. But the entry of a new female lead (Ros, played by Hermione Norris) flattened the entire series and crowded out two far more interesting and sympathetic characters, Zaf and Jo. Which is a pity, because Hermione Norris has the animation of a wooden cadaver. She’s no more credible doing hand to hand combat with Mossad agents than she is laying a glamorous honeytrap for a Saudi playboy.

The original strength of Spooks was the ordinariness of the spies and their struggles to reconcile their normal lives with the weird reality of their working world. Tom might have been an SAS-trained killer, but he had terrible taste in girlfriends and was never far from a nice cup of tea. The younger spies put their lives on the line every working day, but as junior civil servants they couldn’t really afford to live in London.

I know it’s dramatically useful for tv show characters to have no life outside of work, except for the occasional relative who can be placed in jeopardy. But it’s dull, dull, dull (not to mention deeply unquestioning of live-to-work capitalism). Life in the bubble suffocates the characters and makes them less believable. And that kills precisely what was so great about Spooks. Series five squeezed its characters into a smaller and less lifelike world, just as it inflated the scale of the threats a mere seven people face off. It’s now recycling stories – like the embassy hostages – from earlier series, but that only shows how much the Spooks has lost its own plot.