Paranoid visions: Spies, conspiracies and the secret state in British television drama 9781526116130

Citation preview

Joseph Oldham is Associate Fellow in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick Cover: Based on image ‘The alley behind the Smith Tower’ © Visitor7, Creative Commons

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

S P I E S , C O N S P I R A C I E S A N D T H E S E C R E T S TAT E I N B R I T I S H T E L E V I S I O N D R A M A

Paranoid visions will be an invaluable resource for television scholars seeking a new perspective on the history of television drama and intelligence scholars seeking an analysis of the popular representation of espionage with a strong political focus, as well as fans of cult British television and general readers interested in British cultural history.

PARANOID VISIONS

The book incorporates close analyses of numerous classic series, including Callan, The Sandbaggers, Edge of Darkness, A Very British Coup, Spooks and the BBC adaptation of John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, supported by new archival research. It situates its account against the aesthetic, institutional and technological shifts that occurred in British television drama as it transitioned from its traditional public-service principles to the more commercial priorities of the multi-channel era. At the same time, it tracks the real history of British intelligence, examining how such programmes responded to high-profile scandals and exposés, as well as counterblast campaigns of transparency and openness.

JOSEPH OLDHAM

The spy and conspiracy genres are two of British television’s most enduring and memorable traditions. This book provides the most extensive historical account of both to date, tracing a lineage from 1960s Cold War series through 1980s conspiracy dramas to contemporary ‘war on terror’ thrillers. It argues that on-screen depictions of the intelligence services can be interpreted as metaphors for the production cultures that created the programmes, meditating on the roles and responsibilities of public institutions whose trade is information and ideas.

JOSEPH OLDHAM

PARANOID VISIONS SPIES, CONSPIRACIES AND THE SECRET STATE IN BRITISH TELEVISION DRAMA

Paranoid visions

Paranoid visions Spies, conspiracies and the secret state in British television drama Joseph Oldham

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Joseph Oldham 2017 The right of Joseph Oldham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN  978 1 7849 9415 0   hardback

First published 2017 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents



List of figures

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Introduction 1 ‘A balance of terror’: Callan (ITV, 1967–72) as an existential thriller for television

vi x xiii 1 16

2 ‘A professional’s contest’: procedure and bureaucracy in Special Branch (ITV, 1969–74) and The Sandbaggers (ITV, 1978–80)45 3 ‘Who killed Great Britain?’: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (BBC 2, 1979) as a modern classic serial

73

4 Conspiracy as a crisis of procedure in Bird of Prey (BBC 1, 1982) and Edge of Darkness (BBC 2, 1985)

102

5 Death of a master narrative: the battle for consensus in A Very British Coup (Channel 4, 1988)

131

6 The precinct is political: espionage as a public service in Spooks (BBC 1, 2002–11)

162

Conclusion

193

Bibliography

200

Index

210

List of figures

1.1 Callan (ITV, 1967–72), 1.1 ‘The Good Ones Are All Dead’ (8 July 1967), dir. Tony Robertson. David Callan (Edward Woodward) refuses to look Hunter (Ronald Radd) in the face as he receives his mission briefing.  1.2 Callan, 1.1 ‘The Good Ones Are All Dead’. Callan ­delivers two thoughtful asides on the left-hand side of the set; a gun plays a crucial role in both. 1.3 Callan, 1.1 ‘The Good Ones Are All Dead’. Hunter ­confronts Callan with his Red File in the centre of the set. 1.4 Callan, 1.1 ‘The Good Ones Are All Dead’. Callan ­reasserts his power in the space by leaning in ­threateningly towards Hunter. 1.5 Callan, 2.15 ‘Death of a Hunter’ (16 April 1969), prod. & dir. Reginald Collin. Callan kills Hunter #3 (Derek Bond) and is then shot by Toby Meres (Anthony Valentine) in the ground-breaking cliff-hanger at the end of the second series. 2.1 Special Branch (ITV, 1969–74), 3.6 ‘Red Herring’ (9 May 1973), dir. Mike Vardy. Radical anarchists wait in a gritty post-industrial landscape typical of the series. 2.2 Special Branch, 3.6 ‘Red Herring’. The Branch ­supervise the defusing of a car bomb in an ordinary ­suburban street. 2.3 Special Branch, 3.12 ‘Hostage’ (27 June 1973), dir. David Wickes. The Branch battle Black October in the evocative setting of an abandoned warehouse.

31 32 33 34

38 53 54 56



List of figures vii

2.4 The Sandbaggers (ITV, 1978–80), prod. Michael Ferguson. A drama of intrigue in enclosed office spaces. 61 2.5 The Sandbaggers. SIS Director of Operations Neil Burnside (Roy Marsden) in conference with his ­superiors ‘C’ (Richard Vernon) and Deputy Director Matthew Peele (Jerome Willis). 64 2.6 The Sandbaggers, 1.2 ‘A Proper Function of Government’ (25 September 1978), prod. & dir. Michael Ferguson. A tense confrontation between Burnside and Sir Geoffrey Wellingham (Alan MacNaughtan).65 3.1 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (BBC 2, 1979), Part Three (24 September 1979), prod. Jonathan Powell, dir. John Irvin. George Smiley (Alec Guinness) talks to his old colleague Connie Sachs (Beryl Reid). 89 3.2 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Part One (10 September 1979). The meeting of the Circus’ top personnel which opens the serial. 90 3.3 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Part One. Control’s suspect chart, presented at an early point in the serial, provides a visual motif for the whodunit narrative structure. 92 3.4 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Part Two (17 September 1979). Smiley and Oliver Lacon (Anthony Bate) converse amidst the autumn scenery of Lacon’s garden. 94 3.5 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Part One. The gentleman’s club in which Smiley dines with Roddy Martindale (Nigel Stock). 95 4.1 Bird of Prey (BBC 1, 1982), prod. Michael Wearing, dir. Michael Rolfe. The unlikely protagonist Henry Jay (Richard Griffiths), an unassuming civil servant. 109 4.2 Bird of Prey. Jay is characterised by his aptitude with the latest computing technology. 113 4.3 Bird of Prey 2 (BBC 1, 1984), episode 3 ‘Ducks in a Row’ (20 September 1984), prod. Bernard Krichefski, dir. Don Leaver. Jay’s flight from an assassin through a modern housing estate is intercut with metaphorical ­computer imagery in an innovative use of videographic ­techniques. 116

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4.4 Edge of Darkness (BBC 2, 1985), prod. Michael Wearing, dir. Martin Campbell. Examples of the film noir-style high-contrast lighting deployed by the serial. 124 5.1 A Very British Coup (Channel 4, 1988), episode 1 (19 June 1988), prod. Sally Hibbin & Ann Skinner, dir. Mick Jackson. Socialist Labour leader Harry Perkins (Ray McAnally) gives a victory speech upon winning the 1991 General Election. 132 5.2 A Very British Coup, episode 3 (3 July 1988). Perkins faces intelligence chief Sir Percy Browne (Alan MacNaughtan) in the final version of the ‘High Noon ­encounter’. 140 5.3 A Very British Coup, episode 1. The elevated view over the Houses of Parliament from the office of press baron George Fison (Philip Madoc). 141 5.4 A Very British Coup, episode 2 (26 June 1988). The diagram drawn by Fred Thompson (Keith Allen) showing how the conspirators are connected. 143 5.5 A Very British Coup, episode 1. Perkins first encounters the staff of 10 Downing Street. 146 5.6 A Very British Coup. The BBC reports on Perkins’ government, the serial providing views both inside the studio and behind-the-scenes in the control room. 148 5.7 A Very British Coup. Perkins is interrogated by the media in two press conference scenes. 148 5.8 A Very British Coup. Newspapers, usually displaying headlines hostile to Perkins, are prominently displayed in the mise-en-scène of many sequences. 149 5.9 A Very British Coup, episode 3. Perkins exposes the conspiracy and calls a General Election at the climax of the serial. 151 6.1 Spooks (BBC 1, 2002–11), prod. Simon Crawford Collins. A typical establishing shot of Thames House as used throughout the series. 170 6.2 Spooks. The Grid, the programme’s stylish open-plan precinct space, as it appears in the first series (2002).172 6.3 Spooks, 1.6 ‘Lesser of Two Evils’ (17 June 2002), dir. Andy Wilson. Head of Section D Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) stands next to the MI5 crest. 172



List of figures ix

6.4 Spooks, 1.5 ‘The Rose Bed Memoirs’ (10 June 2002), dir. Andy Wilson. Zoe Reynolds (Keeley Hawes) and Danny Hunter (David Oyelowo) at home in their shared flat. 176 6.5 Spooks, 1.1 ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ (13 May 2002), dir. Bharat Nalluri. The first use of the series’ distinctive split-screen graphics as Tom Quinn (Matthew Macfadyen) and Zoe enter the Grid. 179 6.6 Spooks, 1.1. ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’. A more extensive use of split-screen as MI5 officers tail a terrorist suspect.180 6.7 Spooks. The central characters discuss their response to a crisis in the Grid’s meeting room. 182

Acknowledgements

Many people have played a part in aiding the long development of this research project, and to all of them I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude. In particular, this book could not have been completed without the help of many members of the University of Warwick’s Department of Film and Television Studies. I am especially grateful to Charlotte Brunsdon whose encouragement, insightful advice and sharp judgement were indispensable throughout, as well as to Helen Wheatley whose feedback and advice were also hugely important for the shape that it ultimately took. My thanks also go to Tracey McVey, Anne Birchall, Heather Hares and Richard Perkins for all of their support over the years. I am indebted to colleagues and friends in the department’s postgraduate and early career researcher community who have given me invaluable intellectual support and a sense of community over the years: Hannah Andrews, Paul Cuff, Matthew Denny, Gregory Frame, Adam Gallimore, Ivan Girina, Claire Jesson, Nike Jung, Catherine Lester, Derilene Marco, Celia Nicholls, Barbara Ottmann, Santiago Oyarzabal, Michael Pigott, Patrick Pilkington, Nicolas Pillai, Anna Reynolds Cooper, Isabel Rhodes, Zoë Shacklock, E. Charlotte Stevens, James Taylor, Lauren Jade Thompson, Richard Wallace, Marta Wasik, Owen Weetch and Josette Wolthuis. I am also grateful to the members of the Midlands Television Research Group for providing a stimulating community for discussing television research during the timeframe of this project. My sincere thanks go to Jonathan Powell for kindly taking time to share his recollections of working in British television in the



Acknowledgements xi

1970s and 1980s, helping me to gain an invaluable new perspective on the internal cultures of drama production during this time. The staff at both the BBC Written Archives Centre and the BFI Special Collections were also hugely helpful in my research enquiries, and for this I am very grateful. I am further indebted to Lez Cooke for his comments and feedback, to Andrew Pixley and Ian Greaves for aiding me in exploring some of the dustier corners of British television history, and to Christopher Moran for advising me on my explorations in the field of Intelligence Studies, thereby helping to open up a fascinating new dimension for my research. Thanks are also due to my co-organiser Toby Manning and all of the participants of our international conference ‘Spying on Spies: Popular Representations of Spies and Espionage’ (3–5 September 2015, The Shard, London), through which I discovered a global community of researchers on the spy thriller and was able to gain a much wider perspective on the genre than I could have imagined when starting out. For three years my research was fully funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which I gratefully acknowledge, along with the subsequent Early Career Fellowship from Warwick’s Institute of Advanced Study that supported the further development of this project for another ten months. Without this generous assistance, this research would not have been possible. Thanks are also due to the team at Manchester University Press for their insight and guidance in developing the project into book form. I would also like to thank two friends who have kindly shared their constructive feedback on chapter drafts; Ruth Pearce, who as my housemate through much of the book’s development period has also been a constant source of support, and Andrew Rimmer, with whom I collaborated on a conspiracy thriller submitted to (and rejected by) the BBC in 2005, leading me to ponder whether we might be a tiny footnote in this history. I am also grateful to many other friends and musicians who have been such kind and supportive company over the years including Alexander Eley, Freja Sohn Frøkjær-Jensen, Daniel William Kerr, Jane Klyne, Zoë Kristensen, Kirsty Lohman, James Powell, Claire Sheridan, Helen Thomas and Tori Truslow. Finally, my enormous thanks to my parents Robin and David Oldham, firstly for letting me spend far too much time on university campuses from an early age and instilling within me a fascination

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with this mysterious academic world, and later for all of their support and encouragement in my own academic endeavours. Chapter 3 provides an expansion of arguments previously advanced in the author’s published article ‘“Disappointed Romantics”: Troubled Heritage in the BBC’s John le Carré Adaptations’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 10:4 (October 2013), pp. 727–745.

List of abbreviations

ABC Associated British Corporation (ITV franchise-holder, 1955–68) ABC-US American Broadcasting Company (US) ATV Associated Television (ITV franchise-holder, 1955–82) BAFTA British Academy of Film and Television Arts BBC British Broadcasting Corporation CIA Central Intelligence Agency (US) CND Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation (US) GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters Humint Human intelligence ITC Incorporated Television Company (subsidiary of ATV) ITV Independent Television MI5 British Security Service (Military Intelligence, Section 5) MI6 Secret Intelligence Service (Military Intelligence, Section 6) Sigint Signals intelligence SIS Secret Intelligence Service TUC Trades Union Congress YTV Yorkshire Television (ITV franchise-holder, 1968–2004)

Introduction

At the conclusion of John le Carré’s novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), the charismatic traitor at the heart of British intelligence articulates one of the key themes of le Carré’s work, declaring his belief that ‘secret services were the only real measure of a nation’s political health, the only real expression of its subconscious’.1 When five years later the novel was adapted for television by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), this metaphor would acquire an additional layer. Asked by director John Irvin how the interior spaces of the intelligence service should be depicted on-screen, le Carré was said to have replied that ‘the dusty offices, the corridors, the elderly office furniture and even the anxiously cranking lifts of MI5 felt like, looked like and had some of the same kinds of people – as the BBC.’2 In fact, this point of comparison was neither unique nor historically specific. Twenty-three years later writer David Wolstencroft was devising the format for a new original BBC spy series which depicted the activities of a counter-terror section within the British Security Service (MI5). In a later Radio Times interview he admitted to the impossibility of gaining access to the real MI5 as part of his research for Spooks (BBC 1, 2002–11), but noted that ‘having been in the BBC quite a lot, I wondered whether it wasn’t quite a good model.’3 Yet the BBC of the 2000s that Wolstencroft used as his inspiration was a very different place to that described by le Carré in the late 1970s. So too, for that matter, was the intelligence world that both programmes presented as their subject. Although both anecdotes are clearly presented with a degree of humour, this comparison is more revealing than it might first appear.

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Paranoid visions

In the very broadest sense the worlds of intelligence and public service broadcasting are both part of the UK’s utility infrastructure, a key part of their function being to gather information and ideas from the nation and from overseas. Both, however, deploy this information for almost entirely opposing purposes. The intelligence services are tasked with supplying intelligence to their customers in other parts of the state apparatus, an interaction most commonly without a public dimension. Indeed, throughout most of the period covered by this book, they were officially unavowed by the British government, operating without statute or external regulation until the end of the Cold War, although by then their existence had long been an open secret. The BBC, by contrast, is fundamentally oriented towards the dissemination of information and ideas to an external public, having been established under its founding Director-General John Reith with a remit to create a responsible, informed and educated citizenry. As Paddy Scannell writes, the arrival of British broadcasting in its original public service model brought into being ‘a culture in common to whole populations and a shared public life of a quite new kind’.4 In providing an unprecedentedly equal access to the wide spectrum of public life, it fundamentally enhanced British democracy. A view that this public institution was (or should be) a social microcosm of the entire country was therefore not merely a literary device or matter for interpretation but in fact a central tenet of its mission and self-identity. This book provides a history of the spy genre in British television drama, alongside its cousin the conspiracy genre which also often focuses upon the world of intelligence but typically from an external and more critical perspective. The analysis is framed by the notion that the on-screen depiction of intelligence services in such programmes can be interpreted, to varying extents, as providing metaphors for the broadcasting institutions that create them. As such, it provides parallel and intersecting case studies through which it is possible to trace the changing roles of such large public institutions in British politics and society over the latter half of the twentieth century. The history of intelligence in Britain is arguably irreducible from its representation in popular media. The earliest generation of spy novels by authors such as William le Queux and E. Phillips Oppenheim grew out of paranoia about national security and



Introduction 3

imperial resilience in the run-up to the First World War, and had stoked popular paranoia about German espionage to such an extent that they helped to inspire the creation of the Secret Service Bureau, the foundational organisation of British intelligence.5 Later administrative changes brought about by the First World War saw the development of two major sections specialising in humint (human intelligence) that would endure through the twentieth century and beyond. The Security Service (MI5), responsible to the Home Office, was charged with domestic counter-espionage intelligence with a remit to cover only British territory, whilst the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, or more popularly MI6), responsible to the Foreign Office, was charged with supplying the British government with intelligence from overseas. The spy thriller would also develop during the war in the hands of writers such as John Buchan, forging one of the most ostensibly political of popular genres, described by Michael Denning as providing ‘cover stories’ which translated ‘the political and cultural transformations of the twentieth century into the intrigues of a shadow world of secret agents’.6 Although the fictional genre’s relationship to real intelligence activity would often be subject to criticism over the years, it nonetheless provides a point of interest to intelligence scholars through, as Wesley K. Wark writes, providing ‘a guide not to how things are, but to how things are perceived to happen’.7 The following decade saw the emergence of the BBC, initially as a radio broadcaster. Despite it originating during peacetime, the early interwar period was still a time when the government continued to accept an interventionist role. Thus, influenced by the massive centralisation of resources in the First World War, the BBC was established as a public corporation, its Royal Charter enshrining political independence from the government and a duty to political balance, founded as Jean Seaton writes ‘on a rejection of politics’.8 A limited television service commenced in 1936; however, it was the role of its radio broadcasts during the Second World War, by which time 75% of the British population possessed a radio set, which cemented the BBC’s position in the national psyche. Intelligence and broadcasting would both expand in the post-war period. Richard J. Aldrich describes how ‘a revolution in the nature of secret service, especially intelligence-collection, beginning with the outbreak of the Second World War, accelerated over the next

4

Paranoid visions

half-century. The end result was intelligence and security organisms on an unimaginable scale.’9 This came in response to the onset of the Cold War against Soviet Communism, a state of prolonged geopolitical tension which dominated the latter half of the twentieth century in which, as Peter Hennessy writes, ‘intelligence was the surrogate for hot war’.10 In parallel, television rapidly established itself as the mass medium of choice for the increasingly affluent post-war society. In 1955 the BBC gained a commercial rival in Independent Television (ITV), funded according to the advertising model established in American television, yet still enshrined with a public service remit enforced through regulation to address fears of trivilialisation. This established a duopoly which would endure for the next 27 years. The 1950s also saw a popular re-emergence of the spy novel. At the forefront of this was a series of novels by Ian Fleming featuring the glamorous super-spy James Bond, beginning with Casino Royale (1953). Responding to the mass professionalisation of society in the Second World War, these reworked the protagonist from the gentlemanly amateur of early twentieth-century spy thrillers to a licensed professional agent, and therefore stand as a crucial moment at which the secret state emerged as a popular topic for fiction. The Bond novels initially only achieved modest sales in their original hardback editions; however, they were dramatically propelled to huge commercial success with the publication of paperback editions by Pan later in the decade. Like the television medium, they can therefore be situated with the emergence of the post-war mass culture, as affordable popular media circulated more readily amongst middle- and working-class audiences. With Bond demonstrating an ostentatiously consumerist streak (albeit countered by a reassuring conservatism in attitudes to empire, patriotism, race and gender), both Bond himself and the secret agent more broadly became heroes for the affluent society.11 Whilst this may, in many regards, seem a peculiar response to the paranoid landscape of the nuclear stand-off, ultimately this was simply a reworking of the spy thriller’s established strategy of, as Michael Denning describes, using the spy to link ‘the actions of an individual – often an “ordinary person” – and the world historical fate of nations and empires’. Through this, ‘the secret agent returns human agency to a world which seems less and less the product of human action.’12 This was the fantasy at the heart of the genre’s most heroic incarnations.



Introduction 5

As the popularity of Bond grew, on several occasions Fleming entered into negotiations with US networks for a television series based on Bond or similar characters, evidently recognising the potential of the television medium (and particularly the commercial television series) for such heroic spy narratives.13 However, it would be Britain’s ITV who would pioneer the television spy series from the turn of the 1960s, having already given US-style actionadventure series a British twist in the form of costume swashbucklers such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (ITV, 1955–59). Thus the commercial broadcaster traded off the genre’s strongly British roots with a myriad of espionage-themed action series over the new decade. These were a key part of the new populist strain that ITV brought to British television, and many would achieve international popularity including sales to US networks. Some harkened back to the gentleman amateur tradition, particularly those derived from pre-war literary sources including The Saint (ITV, 1962–69) and The Baron (ITV, 1965–66), whilst others including Danger Man (ITV, 1960–68) and The Avengers (ITV, 1961–69) featured professional agents closer to the Fleming tradition. Indeed, it is the somewhat ambivalent relationship that these programmes have with professional espionage that leads James Chapman instead to argue for the alternative term ‘adventure series’ in order to prioritise the central ‘emphasis on action and suspense’.14 Despite being one of the best-known incarnations of the spy genre on British television, it may disappoint some readers that this book gives only passing attention to these 1960s adventure series. This is partly due to their highly exceptional status within British broadcasting history, produced more according to the institutional model of American television, as briefly explored in Chapter 1. It is also due to the fact that these have already been analysed by an extensive body of literature, most notably Chapman’s expansive study of the cycle, Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s, as well as Toby Miller’s short monograph on The Avengers and key chapters of David Buxton’s From The Avengers to Miami Vice and Miller’s Spyscreen: Espionage on Film and TV from the 1930s to the 1960s.15 Such studies typically consider the programmes in question as products of the popular culture and social changes of the 1960s, although Buxton further situates them within the broader development of action-adventure series on either side of the Atlantic.

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Paranoid visions

This book, by contrast, provides a full diachronic account of the spy and conspiracy genres across British television from the 1960s to the 2000s. In exploring the long-term evolution of a genre, it mirrors analyses of the evolution of the spy novel by writers such as Denning, John G. Cawelti, Bruce A. Rosenberg and Allan Hepburn,16 as well as studies of the development of the James Bond phenomenon across different media by scholars such as Chapman, Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott.17 It is also designed to complement more general diachronic histories of British television drama, most notably Lez Cooke’s expansive account,18 using this generic case study to providing a fresh perspective on the institutional and aesthetic development of the medium over a period of five decades. The omission of the adventure series is also partly due to the comparatively minimal narrative focus given to the world of the secret state, with even those series featuring professional agents giving comparatively little attention to the intelligence agencies who license their missions. Instead, this book primarily focuses on programmes which examine the secret state itself as a site of drama and intrigue, a counter-movement which would begin to emerge by the end of the 1960s. Indeed, even as the adventure series, along with the successful James Bond film series (beginning with Dr. No, Terence Young, 1962), emphasised the spy as a hero of consumerism and modernity, their real-life counterparts were experiencing a substantial image problem. For intelligence services on both sides of the Atlantic, high-profile scandals such as the US Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) sponsorship of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, and the UK’s Profumo Affair in 1963, marked the onset of what Aldrich terms the ‘era of exposure’, as ‘public curiosity about secret service matters grew exponentially and the previous readiness by newspapers to practise deliberate self-censorship was being swept aside by a new conviction that these were matters of public interest.’19 Fascination with the CIA particularly tended to centre on the issue of covert action or ‘special operations’, by which the agency sought not merely to gather intelligence but to alter world events through the ‘hidden hand’. Whilst the potential of the spy to exercise agency over large-scale historical forces lay at the root of the fictional spy thriller’s appeal, for many observers in the real-world context of the ‘era of exposure’ such interventions seemed less a sign of heroic individual agency and more the sinister machinations



Introduction 7

of secretive and unaccountable bureaucracies. Subsequently, the early 1970s saw the emergence of a new Hollywood genre which reworked the conventions of the spy story to show a more paranoid view of intelligence. The conspiracy thriller, as Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner write, reversed ‘the polarities of earlier political thrillers, which generally affirmed American institutions, by suggesting that the source of evil was those very institutions’.20 This was also a period which saw the power of broadcasting to intervene on matters of public perception and opinion come into question. In a 1959 collection of polemics against the entrenched British power elite, journalist Henry Fairlie argued that the BBC ‘has done more than any other body to buttress the most conservative institutions in the country, to create and perpetuate reverence for the orders, the privileges and the mysteries of a conservative society’.21 Yet in the 1960s a contrasting line of criticism centred on a tradition of ‘progressive realism’ developed within the BBC’s most prestigious drama strand, The Wednesday Play (BBC 1, 1965–70), and associated with figures such as producer Tony Garnett and director Ken Loach. Plays such as Cathy Come Home (BBC 1, 1966) and The Big Flame (BBC 1, 1969) were self-consciously ‘radical’ productions, seeking to focus on the marginalised, expose social injustice, and critique the status quo. Their existence was often championed as a testimony to the BBC’s political independence and support for challenging and original art, yet conservative critics argued that The Wednesday Play had been colonised by the political left. Yet conversely, on the inside the BBC had been regularly consulting MI5 over its internal vetting since 1933 in order to prevent potential communist infiltration, a practice which over time came to serve a parallel function as a shield from government accusations of left-wing bias.22 A parallel can therefore be drawn between the intelligence’s ‘era of exposure’ and controversy surrounding the BBC’s radical currents, both arising over the 1960s and 1970s. Both centred on the potential for these institutions to exceed their ostensibly apolitical gathering and dissemination of information and instead more actively influence events, whether according to the partisan agenda of the government of the day or the unaccountable internal political culture of the institution itself. This book considers how both of these concerns came to intersect with the British television spy series and its later offshoot, the conspiracy drama, examining how

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Paranoid visions

they adapted generic conventions of action and suspense in order to engage with the revelations, rumours and suspicions surrounding the increasingly ‘known’ (but no less secretive) intelligence world, whilst deploying aesthetic innovations and sometimes radical politics from the progressive realist tradition. John Corner identifies several different aspects of television which might receive differing levels of emphasis in a historical study, and this book aims to explore numerous points of intersection between them. As a study centring on a popular dramatic genre, much of its analysis is focused on the aspect that Corner terms ‘television as representation and form, an aesthetic framing drawing on the vocabularies of arts criticism’.23 This is accomplished through the close analysis of a number of key case study texts, with one or two programmes considered in-depth in each chapter. This book does not aim to provide a comprehensive account of every single espionage-related drama produced for British television. Studies ­ which have sought to do this, such as Wesley Britton’s Spy Television, which provides a comprehensive overview of Anglophone television spy dramas (albeit from a largely American perspective), encounter the problem that the amount of relevant material is so extensive that they are unable to provide a satisfying depth of analysis.24 Although the case study approach is necessarily selective and poses problems of unrepresentativeness, I have aimed to address this by focusing on the programmes in question not as ‘typical’ but instead as crucial historical turning points, an approach suggested by Jason Mittell as a potential means of negotiating specificity and generality in genre studies.25 As such, programmes are analysed as moments of intervention in the history of television drama and its representations, building and innovating upon prior works in areas such as narrative form, themes and aesthetics, and demonstrably influencing subsequent texts. Indeed, with several of the long-running programmes covered, my analysis deliberately focuses not on the entire run but on a shorter period in which the programme’s generic or cultural intervention was at its most potent or interesting. Analysis of the spy thriller has historically tended to operate around the basic opposition between ‘romance’ (as typically epitomised by Fleming) and ‘realism’ (as typically epitomised by le Carré). Whilst the 1960s adventure series generally correspond to the former category, the spy dramas considered in this book more often fall into the latter. Yet Denning advocates deemphasising



Introduction 9

question of ‘realism’, arguing that ‘those distinctions are rooted less in any fidelity to the “real” than in divergent attitudes to games, to established codes, to ethical structures, and to work and leisure.’ Rather than rejecting the ‘realist’ descriptor entirely, I will instead trace how the devices used to suggest the real have shifted over time. I adopt Denning’s argument that ‘realist’ spy fiction from the 1960s can generally be productively characterised instead as ‘existential thrillers which play on a dialectic of good and evil overdetermined by moral dilemmas, by moves from innocence to experience, and by identity crises’.26 However, in response to the increasing public visibility of the intelligence services, I argue that later ‘realist’ spy dramas on television have been characterised by a partial drift away from the existential tone and towards evoking authenticity through a new emphasis on documentary detail and procedure. On British television, this intersects with a contrasting set of medium-specific debates over ‘realism’ where it has often evoked the aforementioned progressive realist tradition. Yet television’s ‘realism’ is also far from stable, John Caughie arguing that it ‘has been an extremely broad church, able to change colour to blend with its background, seldom binding itself with a programmatic manifesto, happy to transform to the new currents it encounters on its way – naturalism, surrealism, the Absurd, Brecht – and equally happy to be transformed by them’.27 This book will also explore how changing conventions of ‘realism’ in British television have crossed with the concerns of ‘realist’ spy fiction, most notably through a thematic interest in class politics and the deployment of a 16mm film documentary aesthetic. My aesthetic analysis is enhanced by an exploration of ‘television as making’, by which I make use of a diverse and rich array of archival and interview material to explore the specific production of individual programmes. This provides a microcosmic portrait of the broader aspect of ‘television as institution’, whereby I situate such programming within the cultures of their broadcasters and production companies, structuring the organisation of the chapters around this.28 The first two chapters are primarily focused on espionagethemed programmes produced by regional franchise-holders for ITV in the late 1960s and 1970s, as with ITV being by far the most prolific broadcaster of spy series during this period it is important to consider this commercial television context in order to explore how

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Paranoid visions

many standard generic conventions were innovated and popularised. This provides crucial context for understanding the BBC more fully in later chapters, as it increasingly adopted populist genre strategies previously associated more with ITV. Chapter 5 also examines the arrival of Channel 4, Britain’s third and final broadcaster to be enshrined with a public service remit. This pioneered a new, decentralised model of publisher-broadcaster, and Chapter  6 will explore how this impacted upon the BBC. This will enable a wider exploration of how what began as one of the most commercial genres on British television increasingly became embraced by the BBC with dramas as varied as Tinker Tailor and Spooks as the corporation struggled to maintain an appropriate balance in its programming between ‘popular’, ‘serious’ and ‘quality’ in the competitive multi-channel age against the decline of public service values in British culture and the growing importance of the international television market. Finally, I consider the issue of ‘television as a sociocultural phenomenon, deeply interconnected with high politics, with the shifting circumstances of the public sphere and civil society, with popular culture and with the changing character of the home and of domestic values’.29 This account is particularly concerned with the unusually wide social reach of television by comparison to other media, possessing the same national scope as the typical narratives of spy dramas. So whilst Wark discusses the appeal of spy fiction to ‘its market niche and loyal readership’,30 this book explores instead how broadcasting enabled the television spy genre to frequently reach far beyond the niche audience of the spy novel and connect with a more general public, particularly during the years when British television consisted of a very limited number of channels. On a single night’s network transmission, television spy dramas could often reach a larger audience than more culturallyrespected spy novels could achieve in years of book sales. These dramas of national security are therefore, more than anywhere else, addressed to the nation in the form of broadcasting’s general public. It should be noted that although there is a vein running throughout the book concerning intersections between UK and US dramas in terms of production, aesthetics and institutions, this is not a central focus of the book, nor are the relations between spy films and television dramas. Furthermore, whilst the main case study



Introduction 11

analyses of Chapters 3 and 5, Tinker Tailor and A Very British Coup respectively, are both novel adaptations, and although some consideration is given to their relationship with the source material, again adaptation is not the primary focus. Chapter 1 analyses Callan (ITV, 1967–72), an early attempt to rework the literary existential spy thriller into an ongoing television series. This converged the genre with another area in which ITV had specialised, that of class, with protagonist David Callan (Edward Woodward) positioned as a lower-middle-class assassin coerced into doing the dirty work of an elite Establishment. I examine how it overcame the limitations of its predominantly studio-based production, using the expressive close-up to generate a more psychological drama. I also explore how, freed from the standardisation required for the international television market during this period, it pioneered techniques of serialised television which would later become standard in ‘quality’ television on the global market. Finally, I chart how, against the economic downturn at the end of the 1960s, the cynical, pessimistic tone of Callan matched the times and enabled it to become a significant popular success in its home country, where audiences became keenly invested in the fate of its anti-hero protagonist. Chapter 2 considers two ITV series from the 1970s which asserted new claims to ‘realism’, through their focus on real, ­specifically identified intelligence sections within the state apparatus. Firstly, I look at Special Branch (ITV, 1969–74), which focused on the titular section of the Metropolitan Police. Although not one of the primary intelligence agencies, I argue that this was a means by which television drama sought to explore concerns surrounding national security at a time when little information about MI5 was publically available. In particular, I examine its innovative use of extensive 16mm filming on location on its 1973–74 series, drawing substantially from recent developments in progressive realist drama, which enabled it to site new anxieties surrounding the rise of terrorist violence within a vivid social context. Secondly, I look at The Sandbaggers (ITV, 1978–80) which focused on a fictional Special Operations section within SIS. As a studio-based drama, I examine how it instead sited its ‘realism’ in a complex portrayal of intelligence bureaucracy, focusing strongly on conflicts and rivalries in Whitehall in counterpoint to dangerous missions into Cold War landscapes.

12

Paranoid visions

Chapter 3 examines the 1979 dramatisation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, positioning this as an early instance of spy drama on the BBC surpassing ITV’s work. This was in fact produced within the classic serial strand, a long-standing public service tradition that was increasingly serving a double function as British television’s most profitable export. I examine how Tinker Tailor utilised the classic serial’s long-form serial narrative to present a self-­consciously challenging, complex text, yet was able to appeal to a mass audience through striking a careful balance between the underlying simplicity of its whodunit narrative and the pleasures of incomprehensibility. I also explore how Tinker Tailor further built upon trends for increased location filming to set le Carré’s world against evocative landscapes and architecture, using these spaces to vividly chart the journey of protagonist George Smiley (Alec Guinness) into an institutional ‘heart of darkness’ as he searches for the traitor. Chapter 4 explores the emergence of the British television conspiracy drama during the 1980s, from a new trend towards original ‘authored’ drama serials, arguing that this form provided an effective vehicle for subversive genre deconstructionist narratives. Firstly, I look at Ron Hutchinson’s Bird of Prey (BBC 1, 1982), an innovative techno-thriller which examined the rise of the computer and the free market economy, and its sequel, Bird of Prey 2 (BBC 1, 1984), which expanded this with new graphic design techniques to dramatise computer and surveillance themes. I then examine a more prestigious serial, Troy Kennedy Martin’s Edge of Darkness (BBC 2, 1985), which mounted a sombre allegory of the nuclear state, situating both the on-screen narrative and production circumstances against the transformative politics of Margaret Thatcher’s government. Andrew Gamble characterises the political philosophy of this administration in terms of ‘a fierce commitment to the ideal of a more limited government and freer markets, and a readiness to use the powers of the state to confront those groups that resisted’.31 Whilst the ideology of the free market economy placed the BBC in jeopardy, the fierce adherence to state secrecy provided much material for paranoid thrillers. Yet I also explore how the production of a ‘controversial’ state-of-the-nation drama as prestige piece was part of a bold strategy by which the BBC aimed to prove the continuing worth of public service broadcasting. Chapter 5 examines A Very British Coup (Channel 4, 1988), a conspiracy serial produced by the independent company Skreba



Introduction 13

Films and transmitted by the UK’s new publisher-broadcaster Channel 4. Depicting a socialist Labour Prime Minister becoming the victim of a plot running across the Establishment, this was a far more overtly radical drama than concurrent BBC serials, which I argue was a result of the leftist culture of its production and the decentralised model of Channel 4. I explore how it pushed aesthetic experimentation with 16mm to new extremes, creating a fragmented paranoid visual style emphasising mediation and surveillance in public life in a manner that would prove highly influential. Finally, I focus on the conclusion, when the drama self-reflexively sites its hope for overturning conspiracy in using the television medium to restore a utopian notion of a unified culture defined by common goals. I juxtapose this with the reality of the 1990 Broadcasting Act which remodelled British television into an ever more fragmented landscape of atomised consumers. Chapter 6 analyses Spooks (BBC 1, 2001–11) as a product of both the ascendant ‘super-indie’ culture in the deregulated age and attempts to make BBC 1 more competitive in the new multi-channel environment. I explore how it drew upon the increasingly visible world of post-Cold War intelligence, presenting MI5 in the workplace family terms of the precinct drama. I also consider how it simultaneously developed a glamorous, stylish identity to compete with the highest-end US television, whilst also demonstrating public service seriousness in its willingness to take on big topical and often controversial issues. Production of its first series coincided with the onset of the ‘war on terror’, a new narrative of geopolitical tension which restored the intelligence services to the forefront of the popular consciousness and provided a new element of credibility that Spooks would increasingly seize upon. Through this complex balance, I explore how it was successful in appealing to a broad audience, contributing to the wider BBC 1 renaissance and helping to renew the potential for a public service broadcaster to reach a wide general public. Corner suggests that the aspects of television historiography discussed above ‘give television quite a distinctive character as being about artefacts, people, practices and institutions, and concerning both “internal” issues (about matters of development and relationship inside “television”) and “external” matters too (important questions about how “television” relates to larger social and cultural questions)’.32 A similar characterisation could be made for

14

Paranoid visions

intelligence history, also with a sharp divide between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ issues. What is at stake is therefore questions of representation, in the case of intelligence agencies relating to how they are depicted on-screen, and for broadcasting institutions providing a way to examine how they have sought to represent themselves. Georgina Born describes how ‘drama output is critical for the popularity of the BBC as well as for its cultural aspirations’ as in an increasingly hostile climate it ‘frequently bears the burden of justifying the British system of public service broadcasting as a whole’.33 The following account of television drama’s changing representation of intelligence institutions provides a compelling opportunity to examine not just ‘how things are perceived to happen’ in intelligence but also how broadcasting institutions have conceived their own role within society. Notes  1 John le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (London: Pan Books, 1975 [1974]), p. 306.  2 Jean Seaton, ‘Pinkoes and Traitors’: The BBC and the Nation, 1974– 1987 (London: Profile Books, 2015), pp. 402–403.  3 David Wolstencroft; quoted in Jeff Dawson, ‘The Spies have it’, Radio Times (31 May – 6 June 2003), p. 19.  4 Paddy Scannell, ‘Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Public Life’, Media, Culture and Society 11:2 (April 1989), p. 138.  5 Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Penguin, 2010; updated ed.), pp. 3–28.  6 Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 2.  7 Wesley K. Wark, ‘Introduction: Fictions of History’, Intelligence and National Security 5:4 (1990), p. 13.  8 Jean Seaton, ‘Reith and the Denial of Politics’; in James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power without Responsibility: The Press, Broadcasting and the Internet in Britain (London: New York: Routledge, 2010; 7th ed.), p. 107.  9 Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America, and Cold War Secret Intelligence (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2002), p. 637. 10 Peter Hennessy, The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945–2010 (London: Penguin, 2010; 2nd ed.), p. 2. 11 Tony Bennett and Janet Woollacott, Bond and Beyond: The Political Career of a Popular Hero (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1987), pp. 22–29.



Introduction 15

12 Denning, Cover Stories, p. 14. 13 James Chapman, Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), pp. 44–45. 14 James Chapman, Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s (London: I.B. Tauris, 2002), p. 13. 15 David Buxton, From The Avengers to Miami Vice: Form and Ideology in Television Series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 72–119; Chapman, Saints and Avengers; Toby Miller, The Avengers (London: BFI, 1997); and Toby Miller, Spyscreen: Espionage on Film and TV from the 1930s to the 1960s (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 88–121. 16 John G. Cawelti and Bruce A. Rosenberg, The Spy Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Denning, Cover Stories; and Allan Hepburn, Intrigue: Espionage and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 17 Bennett and Woollacott, Bond and Beyond; and Chapman, Licence to Thrill. 18 Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London: BFI Publishing, 2003). 19 Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, pp. 607–608. 20 Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1988), p. 95. 21 Henry Fairlie, ‘The BBC’; in Hugh Thomas (ed.), The Establishment: A Symposium (London: Blond, 1959), p. 191. 22 Seaton, ‘Pinkoes and Traitors’, pp. 291–299. 23 John Corner, ‘Finding Data, Reading Patterns, Telling Stories: Issues in the Historiography of Television’, Media, Culture & Society 25:2 (March 2003), p. 275. 24 Wesley Britton, Spy Television (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004). 25 Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (New York; London: Routledge, 2004), p. 24. 26 Denning, Cover Stories, pp. 34–36. 27 John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 69. 28 Corner, ‘Issues in the Historiography of Television’, pp. 275–276. 29 Ibid. 30 Wark, ‘Fictions of History’, p. 8. 31 Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994; 2nd ed.), p. 7. 32 Corner, ‘Issues in the Historiography of Television’, p. 276. 33 Georgina Born, Uncertain Vision: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (London: Vintage, 2005), p. 15.

1

‘A balance of terror’: Callan (ITV, 1967–72) as an existential thriller for television

Introduction The arrival of the spy genre on British television came initially in the form of a cycle of adventure series focused loosely on themes of international intrigue which occupied a prominent place in the schedules of the 1960s. For the most part, this strand was overwhelmingly associated with the commercial ITV as product of its popular appeal to the growing working-class viewership and embrace of a mass public beyond that of the more paternalistic BBC. Guided by trends on American television (which served as both a model and a crucial ancillary market) such series tended towards an up-beat and aspirational tone. Yet at the same time ITV’s engagement with the new mass public also instigated a tradition of ‘progressive realist’ drama associated in particular with the single play series Armchair Theatre (ITV, 1956–74). Seeking to provide a closer engagement with the realities of working-class life than had hitherto been provided by the BBC, this tradition contrasted strongly with the optimistic qualities of adventure series, instead focusing firmly on social problems and inequalities. Thus, although the introduction of ITV marked a key turning point for British television in terms of both genre programming and class representation, prior histories of British television drama have generally characterised these two sites of innovation as essentially unconnected. This chapter, however, will trace how these two areas later converged into the cynical, anti-heroic spy series Callan (ITV, 1967–72). This reworked the existential spy thriller tradition associated with novelists such as John le Carré and Len Deighton into



‘A balance of terror’ 17

an ongoing television format, adopting their tone of institutional alienation and moral ambiguity in the face of the Cold War. As such, it was one of the first television spy series to extensively site its drama within the conspiratorial workings of the secret state, here used as an allegorical device to dramatise the class tensions of British society. On an aesthetic level, a style of studio-based recording derived from Armchair Theatre, in particular using mobile cameras and expressive close-ups, enabled the series to provide an unusually psychological focus for a spy drama of the period. Combined with the specifically televisual form of the ongoing series and early innovations in serialised storytelling, this allowed the existential subgenre to transcend its literary roots, with a growing audience becoming invested in the struggles of its titular protagonist as the cultural optimism of the 1960s gave way to the more anxious climate of the 1970s. ITV, class and genre: Armchair Theatre and the adventure series A foundational aim of ITV was to counter the perceived Londoncentric bias of the BBC, and as a result it was established with a regional structure, gradually rolled out from 1955 to 1962. Licences were issued by the regulatory Independent Television Authority (ITA) to 15 separate companies in order to run regional franchises and provide programming designed specifically for that locality. Yet with the prospect of producing their entire output independently proving a huge economic burden, the regional companies agreed to share programmes, forming what would transpire to be a more cohesive national network. The companies who were awarded the franchises for the most profitable metropolitan areas, Associated-Rediffusion, Associated Television (ATV), Associated British Corporation (ABC) and Granada Television, were able to establish an effective oligopoly on nationally networked programmes, particularly in costly areas such as drama production, becoming known as the network companies or ‘Big Four’.1 Although the continuing series had already been established as a form for popular drama when ITV commenced broadcasting, during this period the single play with an entirely self-contained narrative was widely considered to be the vehicle for television’s most prestigious dramatic production, connecting most directly

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Paranoid visions

with the cultural-enrichment ideals of public service culture. Of the ‘Big Four’, ABC, the franchise-holder for weekend broadcasting in the Midlands and the North, emerged at the forefront of such programming with its Armchair Theatre strand which, over the late 1950s, came to focus on original, contemporary drama and develop the first school of television writers, including Alun Owen, Clive Exton and Ray Rigby. Despite producing plays in many genres, Armchair Theatre became best known for providing television drama’s first substantial engagement with the concurrent New Wave (or ‘kitchen sink realism’) in British literature, theatre and film. Introducing a new focus on working-class life, John Caughie describes how the strand shook loose ‘the metropolitan, theatrical, and patrician codes which had defined the role of television drama in a public service system’.2 During this time most British television drama was still broadcast live from studios that had been specially constructed or converted for electronic transmission, and Caughie argues that this established ‘the assertion of immediacy, liveness and the direct transmission of live action as both an opportunity and an aesthetic virtue of the medium rather than as a mere technological constraint’.3 Even within the limitations of live broadcasting, Armchair Theatre was also aesthetically innovative, developing a ‘house style’ based on shooting in depth with highly mobile cameras and the use of highly expressive lighting, creating drama that was more dynamic and three-dimensional than concurrent BBC productions.4 These innovations placed ABC at the cutting-edge of original, contemporary television drama. By the turn of the 1960s there was a growing interest in prerecording such productions on Ampex videotape. This offered the obvious advantages of removing mistakes and creating greater flexibility with scheduling, whilst enabling television companies to retain the same studios and equipment as live television. More fundamentally, as Caughie writes, it brought to an end television’s ‘essential ephemerality, and transformed immediacy and liveness from technological necessities into residual aesthetic aims’.5 Yet videotape was lacking in versatility, with no process for physical editing invented until 1959, and even then this was strongly discouraged as it prevented the widely adopted practice of reusing the expensive tapes. As a result, the practice of as-if-live recording continued, retaining from live drama the multi-camera set-up, live



‘A balance of terror’ 19

vision mixing and largely studio-bound style. Thus the practice developed over the 1960s was to record largely in order in a stop/ start manner with only the most serious mistakes removed. Yet it also became increasingly common to provide an expanded canvas through the use of pre-filmed telecine inserts on 35mm film for location sequences, which would be played in during the main studio recording. ABC’s drama output was, however, more diverse than its success with Armchair Theatre and the single play. In the early 1960s, responding to the popular re-emergence of the spy thriller, it developed The Avengers (ITV, 1961–69), a series which centred on the gentleman spy John Steed (Patrick MacNee) and his associates. This progressed through various styles of production; for some of its earliest episodes in 1961 it was broadcast live to only selected regions, and only later did it graduate to being a videotaped production networked to the entire country. When Catherine Gale (Honor Blackman) joined as Steed’s partner for the second series in 1962, The Avengers grew to become a popular national hit. During this phase it worked to overcome its production limitations through an increasing self-awareness in the scripts, which would often adopt outlandish and fantastical premises and parody the conventions of more conventional spy series and other genres. In 1965, with the arrival of Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) as replacement co-lead, ABC took advantage of The Avengers’ growing popularity and redeveloped it into a much more polished production based at Elstree Studios. By this point Elstree, a long-standing production base for the British film industry, had become the home of a mini-­industry of adventure series generally located in the vague terrain of ­international intrigue and espionage, including Danger Man  (ITV,  ­1960–66), The Saint (ITV, 1962–69), Man of the World (ITV, 1962–63), and  The  Baron (ITV, 1965–66), building upon the international success of the James Bond film series beginning with Dr.  No (Terence Young, 1962). The production of such programmes was dominated by the Incorporated Television Company (ITC), a fullyowned subsidiary company of ATV, the ITV franchise-holder for the Midlands weekday and London weekend services. ITC’s adventure series occupy an awkward place in British television history, sitting anomalously in accounts that otherwise typically emphasise progress through live broadcasting and videotaping. Instead, this

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Paranoid visions

was essentially a bubble in the British television industry that functioned more in accordance with American aesthetic and commercial practices. Like American genre series such as Westerns and cop shows, these were glossy productions shot on expensive 35mm film and in studios designed for feature film production rather than live television. In contrast to the multi-camera shooting of live and videotaped drama, these series used the single-camera set-up that had been the default mode of feature film production since the 1910s, with one camera used to individually record all of the shots required for a different scene from all required angles, which were then assembled through post-production editing. This enabled more control over individual shots and a greater focus on exterior locations, elaborate action sequences and tight editing. However, it was a costly mode of production which could only be made economically viable through ITC’s entrepreneurial pursuit of international sales, particularly to the American networks. In adapting The Avengers to this model, ABC therefore also targeted it at the international market, embracing a further drift from the ephemerality inherent in live television towards a notion of television programmes as an enduring and marketable product. Whilst many Armchair Theatre plays had strongly emphasised class divides and social inequalities as part of their claim to realism, the adventure series worked to eliminate such concerns. A key factor was the prevailing conditions in the more commercial American television landscape, where networks sought to maximise audiences with programmes that offended the lowest number of people and advertising pressure encouraged a more up-beat and aspirational tone. Many ITC series, including Man of the World, The Baron and the first series of Danger Man, even adopted American protagonists in order to appeal to this market, sidestepping class divides in favour of a more exotic sense of classless modernity. Yet as the 1960s progressed, such aspirational qualities increasingly corresponded with shifts in British culture. In 1964 the Labour Party won its first General Election in 13 years under the leadership of Harold Wilson, who had styled himself as a moderniser in tune with meritocratic and scientific ideas for managing British society in contrast to perceptions of the Conservative Party as class-bound and anachronistic. Significantly, the following year Danger Man revamped its protagonist John Drake (Patrick McGoohan) into a



‘A balance of terror’ 21

British agent of ambiguous class, demonstrating his modern sensibility through designer clothes and sleek gadgets. As David Buxton writes, the emergence of pop culture ‘seemed to confirm the utopian possibility of a transcendence of social class in a new society in which relations of consumption were replacing relations of production as the centre of existence’.6 Elsewhere the long-standing tradition of the British gentleman hero was retained with some knowing irony, as in The Saint. The Avengers was able to merge both traditions through its central alliance between the gentlemanly Steed and the modern, liberated Mrs Peel, providing ‘the proof that traditional and modern values can coexist in pure complicity’.7 In the context of the mid-1960s British invasion of the US through popular culture, this combination proved potent, securing The Avengers a prime-time slot with the American Broadcasting Company (ABC-US) and enabling it to become the most popular British drama export of the decade. During this period filmed series generally adopted a strictly formulaic model with a near-total lack of narrative continuity, ongoing storylines or character development across episodes. In part, this was due to the expense of 35mm film and the wide circulation of such programmes, with a limited number of prints being swapped between different territories, functioning, as critic David Bianculli later wrote, ‘like cards in a deck that could be shuffled and dealt in any order’.8 This is nonetheless indicative of commercial television’s Fordist philosophy towards television series at the time. For the increasingly parodic Avengers, however, this effectively became part of the joke, and Buxton characterises it as the high-point of the ‘pop series’, which abandoned ‘all pretence to psychological realism’ in favour of ‘prefabricated characters and decors’.9 At the instigation of ABC-US, the series went into colour from 1967, enhancing its fantastical narratives with a bright, and colourful Pop Art aesthetic. Thus by the mid-1960s the British ABC had, between Armchair Theatre and The Avengers, two of the most notable successes in British television drama, which nonetheless had almost entirely opposing identities. ‘No victory and no virtue’: the existential spy thriller The same period, however, saw the emergence of a different, more self-consciously literary tradition of the spy novel which reacted against the escapism of Bond and other adventure fiction. One

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Paranoid visions

successful writer in this lineage was Len Deighton, whose series of spy novels beginning with The Ipcress File (1962) were told in the first person by an unnamed agent from a northern workingclass background. Whilst Ian Fleming’s Bond novels had mixed the British spy novel tradition and the American hardboiled tradition of Mickey Spillane in his transgressive, uninhibited treatment of sex and violence, Deighton’s drew upon more sophisticated hardboiled writers such as Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett who had used the genre to explore character psychology and social problems. The object of Deighton’s critique, however, was something much more specific to British culture. Since the mid-1950s, a growing discourse had argued that the mismanagement of Britain, particularly after the Suez Crisis, could be attributed to such a snobbish, aristocratic and complacent ‘old school tie’ network. The ‘Establishment’, as this became popularly known, allegedly ran across public and political life, consisting of persons of privilege following a pre-set path through public school and Oxford and Cambridge Universities and then into positions of influence in public life, resisting any potential for modernisation and professionalisation.10 From the outset this was connected to espionage concerns, in particular the 1955 revelation that two diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had been exposed as Soviet agents four years previously but had successfully fled to Moscow before they could be captured. Burgess and Maclean were the first two known members of the Cambridge Five spy ring, a group of men from privileged backgrounds who had been recruited by Soviet Intelligence whilst attending Cambridge University in the 1930s. Over the subsequent decades, they had come to occupy key roles in the pillars of the Establishment, including the intelligence services, allegedly remaining undetected due to the unwillingness of their peers to question the loyalty of anyone who wore the old school tie.11 This was again a point of reference when Kim Philby was unmasked as the third Cambridge spy in 1963, also escaping to Moscow. This vision of the Establishment was therefore somewhat two-sided. On the one hand, it was an anachronistic culture, incompetent in its submission to imperial decline and possessing an unfortunate tendency to foster traitors within its inner circle. Yet on the other, it remained highly conspiratorial and all-too-competent at ensuring that key positions in society remained closed doors to those outside of its ranks.



‘A balance of terror’ 23

Critiques of the Establishment were, in a way, a counterpart to the concurrent growth in cultural representations of the workingclass. Deighton’s novels drew upon both of these traditions, using the terrain of espionage to explore contemporary class tensions. With his regional, working-class background, the protagonist is an unusual figure in a genre which had until then been dominated by gentleman heroes or, more recently, classless, aspirational figures. He is continually insubordinate to his upper-crust superiors, who in turn cynically manipulate him for their own ends. Notably, at one point in The Ipcress File he muses, ‘what chance did I stand between the Communists on the one side and the Establishment on the other.’12 This new sense of uncertainty and alienation was developed further by Deighton’s contemporary, John le Carré. His debut novel, Call for the Dead (1961), introduced the protagonist with whom he would become most strongly associated in later decades, the mildmannered, middle-aged spymaster George Smiley, and a fictionalised version of SIS known as the Circus. Yet le Carré only broke through to huge international success with his third novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), which pushed Smiley to the margins of the narrative and worked to articulate a much more sweeping existential anxiety concerning the underlying politics of the Cold War. This is highlighted early in the novel when Control, the head of the Circus, states to the lower-middle-class agent Alec Leamas, ‘I would say that since the war, our methods – ours and those of the opposition – have become much the same. I mean, you can’t be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government’s policy is benevolent, can you now? … That would never do.’13 True to this sentiment, the Circus then proceeds to embroil Leamas as an unwitting pawn in a complex intelligence operation in East Germany, the ethics of which he comes to find highly objectionable when he eventually learns the truth. This vividly illustrated le Carré’s stated belief at the time that ‘there is no victory and no virtue in the Cold War, only a condition of human illness and a political misery.’14 Lacking the fantastical elements of Bond and seeming to resonate against the intelligence scandals of the early 1960s, which also included the Profumo Affair and the revelation of George Blake’s treachery, Deighton’s and le Carré’s novels were commonly characterised as a more ‘realist’ strand of the genre. Yet, as I noted in

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the Introduction, Michael Denning instead suggests the useful term ‘existential thriller’, arguing that ‘against the highly coded, gamelike structures of the romantic thriller, the codes of realism still appear to be a demystifying decoding operation … breaking out of the highly coded – and thus “unrealistic” – worlds of the early thriller.’15 Nowhere is this sense of ‘breaking the rules’ of the genre more evident than the bleak conclusion of The Spy, when a disillusioned Leamas allows himself to be shot whilst trying to escape over the Berlin Wall. The willingness to kill the protagonist marks this as a particularly shocking intervention in a genre which, in generally adopting the continuing series form, had usually been predicated on the hero’s survival. Film adaptations of both The Ipcress File (Sidney J. Furie, 1965) and The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Martin Ritt, 1965) would appear soon afterwards, the former initiating a trilogy of Deighton adaptations in which his unnamed protagonist was redeveloped into the working-class Cockney agent Harry Palmer (Michael Caine). Reacting against the colourful exoticism of the Bond films and harkening back to the hardboiled roots of the novels, these employed a shadowy, expressive visual style derived from film noir, with The Ipcress File making use of stylish canted camera angles and The Spy shot in stark monochrome. Yet the question of whether the existential thriller could be adapted for television has been curiously underexplored. James Chapman argues that Danger Man can be positioned within a ‘realist’ lineage due to the Cold War-oriented scenarios of many episodes and an underlying sense of moral ambiguity.16 However, this judgement only really stands relative to other adventure series. The protagonist Drake is characterised as a more morally upstanding hero than even Bond, rising above any ethically compromising situation he faces and maintaining a strict adherence to an honourable code, thereby lacking the sense of implication or entrapment typical of the existential thriller’s hardboiled roots. Ultimately the requirements of the US networks likely worked against any television company fully embracing the cynical and deconstructionist tendencies of the existential tradition for the international market. In the 1960s, only a more economical production targeted at a primarily domestic audience could fully deploy the narrative techniques associated with Deighton and le Carré.



‘A balance of terror’ 25 A Magnum for Schneider (ITV, 1967) and the first series of Callan

One writer whose career navigated many of the shifts described above was James Mitchell. Having already written several thriller novels under a variety of pseudonyms, in the early 1960s he authored two espionage-themed single plays for Armchair Theatre under his own name, Flight from Treason (10 July 1960) and its sequel The Omega Mystery (10 September 1961), which in turn led to him writing five early episodes of The Avengers for ABC over 1961–63. Soon afterwards Mitchell, however, would break away to embrace the emerging trend towards hardboiled existential spy novels. Beginning with The Man Who Sold Death (1964) he authored a series of books under the pen-name of ‘James Munro’ which centred on John Craig, an anti-hero spy who is manipulated into carrying out dirty work by the mysterious Department K. In early 1967 Mitchell returned to Armchair Theatre, contributing a new single play entitled A Magnum for Schneider (4 February 1967). Loosely reworking the scenario of his John Craig novels, this introduced the character of David Callan (Edward Woodward), a former operative of a mysterious British intelligence service known only as ‘the Section’ and a specialist in clandestine assassination. At the outset, Callan has been dismissed due to his growing qualms about the killings that he has carried out. Now, however, he is pressed back into action by Colonel Hunter (Ronald Radd), the head of the Section, to assassinate German businessman Rudolph Schneider (Joseph Furst) and thereby prove his worthiness to return to his old job. Although Callan succeeds in carrying out the killing, he finds himself betrayed by Hunter who attempts to have the police capture him in the act. When Callan outwits his former boss and escapes, his records are placed in a ‘Red File’, the colourcoding system for the most dangerous people in the Section’s sights, marked for potential elimination. A Magnum for Schneider conforms to the tradition of the existential spy thriller much more clearly than Danger Man through its presentation of a protagonist entrapped within a sinister intelligence bureaucracy and continually struggling with his own moral agency. The opening scenes show Callan as a broken man, torn between his failure to find a satisfying purpose in civilian life yet plagued with a troubled conscience about the people he has killed. When tempted

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with the prospect of reenlistment in the Section, Callan aspires to find a moral meaning in his work, asking Hunter what crimes Schneider has committed and why he deserves to die, but Hunter simply replies, ‘Never mind what he’s done, you’re always asking for reasons. That’s what makes you weak.’ Ultimately it is Callan’s personal discovery that Schneider has been conducting illegal gunrunning activities which compels him to complete the assassination. The play therefore locates a source of drama in Callan’s unwillingness to unquestioningly accept orders from his unaccountable deskbound superior, subverting the assumed paternalistic authority of figures such as M in the Bond stories. The unusual moral complexity of A Magnum for Schneider can be illustrated through a comparison with the Danger Man episode, 1.2 ‘Time to Kill’ (18 September 1960), in which Drake is similarly dispatched to eliminate Eastern European assassin Hans Vogeler (Derren Nesbitt). In his initial briefing, Drake voices distaste for the possibility of murdering Vogeler, telling his superior, ‘I won’t do your dirty work for you. I’ll bring him out alive if I possibly can.’ The point is ultimately moot as, during the climactic fight, Vogeler accidentally shoots himself with his own gun. Thus the narrative contrives to utterly absolve the protagonist from any moral responsibility, allowing him to maintain his principles in the face of a complicated world. Callan has no such alibi in A Magnum for Schneider, although he still refrains from carrying out the mission until Schneider is holding him at gunpoint, allowing the situation to progress from a cold-blooded assassination to a more honourable self-defence killing. Although written as a standalone piece, the play’s story editor Terence Feely saw potential for it to be developed into an ongoing series. On the basis of a pitch document drawn up by Feely and Mitchell, a continuation series entitled Callan was commissioned for a short six-episode run before A Magnum for Schneider had been transmitted. Part of the impetus for this commission may have been the success that ABC had already achieved with a more traditional hardboiled detective series, Public Eye (ITV, 1965–75), with Callan therefore serving as a hybrid of two successful genres. Five of the original six episodes of Callan were written by Mitchell, giving this initial phase of the series an unusually clear sense of authorship in comparison to the large teams of writers usually employed on genre series.17



‘A balance of terror’ 27

The format adopted for the series was somewhat unusual, with Callan remaining outside of the Section’s official employment. Instead he is recruited for individual missions on a ‘freelance’ basis, a position which amounts to either being threatened with the Red File (i.e. death) or manipulated into taking an interest through baroque schemes plotted by Hunter. Usually Hunter’s requirements and Callan’s ethics ultimately coincide on the same goal, with villains such as Schneider proving far more cold-blooded and irredeemable. However, Callan is still prone to going off-script and making his own moral judgements, as in the first episode, 1.1 ‘The Good Ones Are All Dead’ (8 July 1967), when he is assigned to capture the Nazi war criminal Strauss (Powys Thomas) as a favour from Hunter to Israeli intelligence. At the conclusion, however, he allows Stavros to take a cyanide capsule rather than be taken to Israel for trial as per his instructions. Overall, the series can be read as a sustained examination of the concept of the state-issued licence to kill, the rarely examined basis of Bond’s legitimacy. As in Deighton’s intelligence service, the hierarchy of the Section is explicitly framed in class terms. Callan himself is positioned as lower-middle class with a pronounced London accent and a criminal past, traits he shares with the cinematic Harry Palmer. His modest income is demonstrated by the variety of down-at-heel flats he occupies over the course of the series. His closest associate is Lonely (Russell Hunter), a working-class Cockney crook who serves as informer, supplier of goods and general dogsbody, whom Callan trusts due to their shared background as former prison cellmates and Lonely’s distance from the world of the Section. The odd relationship between these characters would emerge as an emotional core of the programme as it progressed. The Section itself is dominated by privileged Establishment insiders, with Colonel Hunter described in Feely’s format document has having ‘a typical staff-officer background: Public School and Sandhurst’. This theme is even more pronounced in the case of the Section agent Toby Meres, described by Feely as being ‘from a wealthy public-school background, and in dress, mannerisms and habits is a handsome Chelsea layabout’.18 First introduced in A Magnum for Schneider (played by Peter Bowles) as one of Hunter’s ‘bright young men’, he has assumed the position of Hunter’s top agent in Callan’s absence with an implication of privileged favouritism. In the original play he occupies an essentially antagonistic role,

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spying on Callan and working to facilitate Hunter’s plan to frame him. Instead Callan, however, outwits Meres and leaves him unconscious with the corpse of Schneider, describing him disparagingly as ‘that public school Capone’. Meres then reappears as a regular character in the series (recast as Anthony Valentine), serving as a recurrent rival for Callan, despite their ostensibly being on the same side, and displaying unsettlingly sadistic tendencies. For Michael Denning, the espionage world of the existential thriller is one ‘where the crisis in the ideology of good sports and honourable schoolboys is played out’, and Meres gives this a darkly ironic rendering, most memorably in 2.14 ‘Nice People Die at Home’ (9 April 1969) when he adapts his golf practice into a means of brutally interrogating an enemy agent.19 The relationship between Callan and Meres is particularly unique even within the existential tradition, creating an extra layer of conflict beyond the intelligence scenarios of individual episodes. In stark contrast to The Avengers, in which the central partnership had epitomised a utopian transcendence of class and gender divides, Callan instead presents a pessimistic counterbalance in which class backgrounds seem an unsurmountable source of rivalry and tension. Callan therefore develops a transatlantic generic hybrid, derived from the novels of Deighton, which takes the American hardboiled tradition and reapplies it to interrogate specifically British class tensions. Ironically, this American influence was undoubtedly a key factor undermining the possibility of exporting the series to the US during the network era. The spy who came in to the studio: the production and aesthetics of Callan Unlike The Avengers or the ITC adventure series, Callan was recorded on videotape, retaining the as-if-live production style developed at the turn of the 1960s. Indeed, with the exception of productions designed with an eye on sales to US networks, British television drama as a whole maintained a considerable resistance to moving onto 35mm film production. This was partly due to the cheaper cost of videotape and partly due to the BBC and the ITV network companies’ significant investment in electronic studios over the previous decade, leading to insistence that programme-makers continue to maximise use of these facilities. More fundamentally,



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the shift to filmed drama in the US had come about as Hollywood moved into series production in order to dominate the new rival medium. The public service culture of British television, however, cultivated a much stronger desire to establish an independent identity for the new medium rather than subordinating it to the cinema. Indeed, for some time this independent identity remained rooted in lingering ideas of liveness and immediacy, even when drama productions were no longer strictly broadcast live. Production of a single episode of Callan typically lasted for a period of ten working days. This encompassed around eight days of rehearsal outside of the studio which, as Lez Cooke writes, ‘replicated how a cast might prepare for a play in the theatre’, putting ‘an emphasis on growing into a part, as the actors become more familiar with their roles, with the material and with each other’.20 Whilst A Magnum for Schneider was entirely studio-bound and featured no location shooting at all, for the first full series the rehearsal period would typically also encompass one day’s location filming on 16mm film, a lower-quality but more economical film stock that was growing in popularity by the late 1960s. Thereafter the process of creating a single episode would culminate in two days in ABC’s Teddington Studios. The first day would encompass camera rehearsals and sometimes the pre-recording of certain more complex sequences on videotape. Camera rehearsals would then continue across the second day, culminating in the final recording, a process confined to just a few hours and kept largely continuous. This utilised a multi-camera set-up, with several cameras positioned around the set and transitions between them achieved through live electronic vision mixing rather than film editing. All sets utilised in a given episode had to be constructed and erected simultaneously in the single studio, limiting the possible number of locations and possibilities for camera movement. Nonetheless, pre-filmed exterior sequences and pre-recorded interior scenes were played in to be captured on the main episode recording, this helping expand the scope of the drama beyond the confines of the main studio sets. Clearly descended from the techniques of live television, this mode of production inevitably had a tendency to privilege the spoken word. Camera angles were restricted by the need to keep other cameras out of shot, whilst camera movement was restricted by bulky cables. The small, poor resolution black-and-white television

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sets of the era, meanwhile, encouraged the heavy use of the close-up as a dramatic device, with wider views being generally less effective. With much of the subsequent history of British television drama characterised by an irrevocable drive away from the studio towards greater location shooting and more mobile or stylish direction, it is easy to accept the elimination of such styling as natural or inevitable progress. Yet the style of the studio can alternatively be read as an engaging contrast to the 35mm film adventure series of the period, proving more suitable for an existential spy drama bound up in a psychological focus on its lead character. Here the confined space of the studio creates an atmosphere of claustrophobia, with the focus placed less on stylish presentation and more on compelling central performances. A highly effective example of this can be found in the pre-titles sequence at the beginning of 1.1 ‘The Good Ones Are All Dead’.21 This is a single scene taking place entirely in Hunter’s office, in which the Colonel attempts to enlist Callan for the job of capturing Strauss. It also has a clear secondary purpose of quickly establishing the series premise for any viewers who missed the original play and succinctly establishing the tense relationship between the two characters, described by Hunter as ‘a balance of terror’. The spy chief’s office is a standard location for the genre, made particularly iconic by M’s briefings in the Bond films. Yet whilst M’s office is characterised by rich décor evoking imperial and nautical history, Hunter’s office is dark and gloomy with only basic furnishings. The most striking feature of the set is a portrait of the Queen behind Hunter’s desk, an ironic evocation of patriotism for such a sinister department. There are no visible windows and the only entrance is from a flight of stairs leading upwards, giving a sense of subterranean entrapment. The scene in question lasts for approximately 4 minutes, 20 seconds and was recorded continuously with no interruption, and as a result it is very much the acting of Woodward and Radd which dominates the scene. Much as with the direction of a stage play, different narrative and character beats are communicated by positioning the actors in different parts of the set at different moments, shifting their physical relations to one another. This is further enhanced by ABC’s specialism in highly mobile and three-­ dimensional camerawork, and so much of the scene’s intensity comes from shifts between medium shots and close-ups to accentuate the mood. Teddington Studios also possessed a telescopic



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lighting system, which enabled scenes such as this to display shadowy, expressive lighting in the film noir tradition that echoed the Deighton and le Carré film adaptations of the period (although the as-if-live production style prevented cinematic levels of precise shot composition).22 Several set-ups recur throughout the scene. In some moments, Callan is seated in front of Hunter’s desk in the far right corner of the set, with Hunter seated behind it at the rear. This staging is used for the most expositional moments, to some extent resembling the conventional Bond-style briefing. This is, however, undermined by Callan’s continual refusal to look at Hunter in the face, often holding his head in his hand, showing his troubled state and resistance to becoming involved (see Figure 1.1). By contrast, two other key moments show Callan crossing to the front left of the set and facing away from Hunter. In the first of these, he responds to Hunter’s question about what the Section is for, replying bluntly, ‘Eliminating people, framing, extortion, death. All the jobs that are too dirty for Her Majesty’s other security services to touch.’ The second occurs as he begins to take a more serious interest in the case, asking Hunter questions about

Figure 1.1  Callan, 1.1 ‘The Good Ones Are All Dead’. David Callan (Edward Woodward) refuses to look Hunter (Ronald Radd) in the face as he receives his mission briefing.

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Figure 1.2  Callan, 1.1 ‘The Good Ones Are All Dead’. Callan delivers two thoughtful asides on the left-hand side of the set; a gun plays a crucial role in both.

the specifics of the mission. These moments seem the most staged, resembling a theatrical aside delivered to one particular camera on the far left of the set. Simultaneously, they constitute particularly contemplative moments for Callan, whilst also emphasising his steely professional qualities as an assassin. Crucially a gun plays a key role in both. Although holding a gun is a fairly common pose associated with agents such as Bond, here the small screen image and the predominance of the close-up forces Callan to have a more intimate relationship with this prop, making it more of a focus of psychological intensity. In the first instance, Callan picks up the gun and points it almost directly at the camera when describing the Section, a moment which implicates the viewer in the threatening  immediacy of the scene. In the second he pushes the gun against  his lips thoughtfully as he considers the mission (see Figure 1.2). Two other set-ups are used for key moments in which the power dynamics shift. One is a tense confrontation in the middle of the set at the scene’s mid-point, as Callan attempts to assert that he is ‘finished’ with the Section. This is essentially the only moment when the two characters face each other and make clear eye-contact, conveyed through an alternating series of tight close-ups between their two faces. Hunter responds by revealing that Callan has been put into a Red File, threatening, ‘You do this for me or I’ll have you destroyed.’ This is therefore a moment where the dynamic shifts to afford a dominant role to Hunter (see Figure 1.3). However, at



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Figure 1.3  Callan, 1.1 ‘The Good Ones Are All Dead’. Hunter confronts Callan with his Red File in the centre of the set; most of this exchange is communicated in tight, alternating close-ups.

the scene’s conclusion Callan is able to reclaim some of the power. Having accepted the mission, Callan returns to the desk, but rather than sitting in front as before, he instead moves around the back of Hunter and leans threateningly in towards his superior from the right-hand side. Raising the gun between them, he states warningly, ‘Don’t you push me too far, will you? Because I might just let myself be killed, only you won’t be there to see it, because mate, I’ll get you first.’ Again, tension is conveyed by cutting between two close-up shots, but this time the much closer proximity between the characters means that both faces are often visible in the same shot, creating a more claustrophobic intensity to the exchange (see Figure 1.4). This approach is largely sustained across the episodes, which typically derive their drama from a slow-burning tension as Callan infiltrates the life of his target, discovers more about them, plots their assassination and tries to avoid being discovered. Due to production limitations, the series largely avoids the extended, choreographed fight scenes found in filmed adventure series, keeping its violence short and brief, and dramatic tension more often comes instead

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Figure 1.4  Callan, 1.1 ‘The Good Ones Are All Dead’. Callan reasserts his power in the space by leaning in threateningly towards Hunter.

from conversational exchange. A particularly effective device in A Magnum for Schneider sees Callan and Schneider exercise their shared passion for model soldiers by playing a war game as each sizes the other up, providing a visual metaphor for the battle of wits. The play and first series make distinctive use of library music tracks composed by Jack Trombey which bear some stylistic resemblance to John Barry’s low-key, moody jazz score for The Ipcress File, particularly the theme tune, which is dominated by reverberated bass guitar and flute. Another expressive device used on early episodes is voice-over narration by Woodward, providing Callan’s interior ‘thoughts’. This intensely subjective alignment mirrors the common use of first person narration in hardboiled detective novels, part of what Jerry Palmer describes as the thriller’s individualist emphasis where ‘excitement depends on seeing everything through the eyes of the hero, on believing in and fearing for him, to the exclusion of the others.’23 Yet whilst the hardboiled novel typically relates events in the past tense, providing the memoir of closed case, the voice-over narration in Callan is in the present tense, providing the viewer with access to Callan’s streamof-­consciousness in moments of dramatic tension, conveying his



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doubts and insecurities and creating a much more uncertain and unresolved tone. This is therefore a hardboiled style reworked according to the characteristics of immediacy ingrained within videotaped television drama. ‘Callan lives!’: Breakout success and experiments with seriality Screened over summer 1967, the first short run of Callan achieved unremarkable ratings ranging between 4 and 6 million viewers. Its cynical, paranoid mood was perhaps an odd fit for the optimistic cultural moment of Swinging London, yet it would ultimately prove prescient. As an economic downturn took root, journalist Christopher Booker described how ‘as the particular collective fantasy which had so dominated English life between 1955 and 1966 continued to subside, the climate was one of aftermath, disillusionment, exhaustion, even of reaction.’24 That autumn, one of the key intelligence scandals of the early 1960s returned to the headlines when the Sunday Times published a serialised exposé on the career and treachery of Philby, revealing his rise to much higher and more sensitive levels within SIS than had previously been known to the public.25 This revived perceptions of SIS as a hopelessly outmoded organisation still governed by the old school tie, and in a foreword to the book edition of the exposé the following year, le Carré himself declared ‘let anyone who derides the notion of the Establishment read this book’.26 Autumn 1967 also saw the debut of two new ITC adventure series which demonstrated a new interest in the existential strand, both of which also dealt pessimistically with the impossibility of resigning from the intelligence world. Man in a Suitcase (ITV, 1967– 68) followed the adventures of an ex-CIA agent turned freelance trouble-shooter, whilst the more experimental The Prisoner (ITV, 1967–68) featured a former secret agent who is imprisoned within a sinister resort-like location where mysterious forces attempt to ascertain why he resigned from his job. Both series were short-lived, lasting a single season each, and for the remainder of the 1960s, ITC would favour lighter and more fantastical spy-fi series such as The Champions (ITV, 1968–69) and Department S (ITV, 1969–70). Callan, however, was recommissioned by ABC for a longer second series, the length of which eventually settled on 15 episodes. The production and broadcast of this series would straddle a moment of

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major structural change in the ITV network, as regional franchise contracts came up for renewal in mid-1968. The ITA was converting the Midlands and northern franchises into full seven-day operations, making the weekend-only contracts for both areas, which ABC had held since ITV’s inception, no longer tenable. With ABC’s programming having been both profitable and admired, however, it was considered important that the company should retain a role in the restructured ITV. The ITA’s solution was to enforce a merger between ABC and Rediffusion London, the weekday contractor for London, forming a new broadcaster known as Thames Television. Thames took over the weekday London franchise from 30 July 1968, absorbing much of the management, personnel and facilities of ABC, including Teddington Studios. Thames also briefly inherited The Avengers, yet soon declining ratings in the US caused the ABC-US to cancel its broadcasts. With production values having escalated beyond what was economically feasible without US sales, The Avengers was then cancelled altogether shortly into Thames’ franchise. With its parallel inheritance of the Public Eye and Armchair Theatre, however, Thames was instead encouraged to pursue a more grounded, ‘realist’ identity aimed at a more domestic audience. The second series of Callan was recorded by ABC in early 1968 with the expectation that it would be transmitted later in the year by Thames. Feely had departed the series, to be replaced by a new production team of Producer Reginald Collin and Associate Producer John Kershaw, who instigated a minor revamp of the series. Ronald Radd was unavailable to return to the role of Hunter, and thus a new Section chief was introduced, also called ‘Hunter’ (Michael Goodliffe) through the retroactive establishment that this had simply been a codename all along. Although less threatening than his predecessor, the new Hunter (hereafter Hunter #2) was designed as another privileged Establishment figure, described in a new format document as ‘typical in his unhesitating loyalty to the crown, the Tory party and the established church’.27 Coinciding with this, Callan was restored to being a fully-fledged operative of the Section, perhaps in acknowledgement that the ad hoc nature of his assignments over the initial run would be unsustainable in what now looked to be a potentially longer-running series. Episodes thus more commonly begin with Callan receiving an assignment from Hunter #2 according to a more conventional spy series model. Whilst Mitchell remained the primary writer, a number of new



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writers would be recruited in order to meet the expanded episode count, eroding the programme’s strongly authored status and bringing it more in line with common genre series practice. In this incarnation, the series became subtly more focused on Cold War counter-intelligence, with the Section’s original sinister remit of carrying out assassinations and other dark arts slightly displaced by a greater emphasis on more conventional espionage activities such as thwarting subversive operations, breaking spy rings and preventing assassinations (as in the series opener 2.1 ‘Red Knight, White Knight’, 8 January 1969). Yet there remains a strong emphasis on the Section’s business as dirty work that causes Callan considerable moral anxiety, such as in 2.4 ‘The Little Bits and Pieces of Love’ (29 January 1969) when he is forced to drive an innocent woman to a mental breakdown in order to gain information on a Soviet super-weapon. The series also underwent some small but significant aesthetic shifts. Within a few episodes Callan’s inner ‘thought’ monologues were largely discarded, shifting the depiction of events from a close subjectivity with Callan to a comparatively more objective presentation with more focus on the dynamics between characters. All incidental music was eliminated, giving a less stylised and more understated tone. Finally, the programme was further ‘opened up’ through increasing the typical allocation of location filming for each episode from one to two days, reducing the studio-based claustrophobia and siting the drama more visibly in the real world. A complication arose when Goodliffe developed a serious discomfort with the violence of the series and requested to leave, and so a rapid rewrite saw Hunter #2 assassinated by a freelance group of international mercenaries after just five episodes in the shock conclusion to 2.5 ‘Let’s Kill Everybody’ (5 February 1969). During this period the practice of killing off a major character would have been be unthinkable for a filmed adventure series, due to the need for an affirmative tone and largely interchangeable running orders for the US market. However, videotaped dramas such as Callan were designed to be broadcast simultaneously across the UK network, and hence were able to break the formulaic conventions of genre series. A third ‘Hunter’ (Derek Bond) then assumed the role for the remainder of the second series. Introduced in 2.6 ‘Heir Apparent’ (12 February), Hunter #3 is already known to Callan, who refers to him as ‘John Public School Ramsay’ (at which Meres visibly rolls his eyes), recalling with some bitterness how, during

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training exercises they had previously undergone together, Ramsay ‘knew that one day he was going to get the plum job’. The series’ class tensions are here therefore pushed into a more personal area, with Hunter #3 apparently promoted ahead of Callan through privilege rather than acquired skill. Yet as the second series was in production, the originally planned autumn transmission date was postponed indefinitely, apparently due to a loss of interest in the programme by the management of Thames. As a result, feeling that the series was almost certainly over, Collin and Kershaw made plans to give it an unusually spectacular conclusion. A final episode, 2.15 ‘Death of a Hunter’, was recorded in July 1968 in which Callan is kidnapped and brainwashed by enemy agents into believing Hunter #3 himself is an enemy agent. Allowed to ‘escape’, he returns to the Section and shoots Hunter #3, only to be shot dead himself by Meres immediately afterwards (see Figure 1.5). This provided a highly unusual instance of a television

Figure 1.5  Callan, 2.15 ‘Death of a Hunter’. Callan kills Hunter #3 (Derek Bond) and is then shot by Toby Meres (Anthony Valentine) in the ground-breaking cliff-hanger at the end of the second series.



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series ‘breaking the rules’ in the most extreme manner, akin to Leamas’ fate in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. Several months after this wrap, the second series finally began transmitting under Thames Television from 8 January 1969 with only relatively modest publicity. However, as the 15-week run unfolded, the high quality of the episodes attracted considerable praise from critics and it became an unexpected success, with ratings ultimately rising from 6 to 13 million viewers over the course of its run. This sparked a new interest from Thames in the possibility of continuing the series and so, just over a week before ‘Death of a Hunter’s broadcast (16 April 1969), a replacement final shot was recorded and added to the tape which left the fate of the wounded Callan more ambiguous. As a result, ‘Death of a Hunter’ came to serve as a very early instance of an end-of-series cliff-hanger. Whilst the episodic cliffhanger was a well-established device in soap operas such as Coronation Street (ITV, 1960–) and cliff-hanger serials such as Doctor Who (BBC 1, 1963–89), the device of leaving viewers in suspense over an indeterminate number of months was a much rarer prospect, although the previous year’s Public Eye series had pioneered this with detective protagonist Frank Marker (Alfred Burke) framed for a crime he had not committed and sent to prison. Furthermore, the broadcast of ‘Death of a Hunter’ provided a grand climax to the unexpectedly widespread press attention which Callan had garnered in early 1969, and the subsequent fevered speculation as to Callan’s fate was encapsulated in the widely adopted tabloid slogan ‘Callan lives’. This is a striking example of television drama’s potential as a common cultural resource. As Paddy Scannell writes, ‘gossip in broadcasting, gossip about broadcasting in the tabloid press and in ordinary conversation … is the very stuff of broadcasting’s interconnection with … ordinary daily life.’28 This wide yet simultaneous reach was very much a specific characteristic of the television medium during this period, when a limited number of channels had the potential to reach larger audiences than would subsequently be the case. Indeed, it is notable that the bestselling and most criticallyrespected existential spy novel of the period, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, had sold around a million copies in its UK Pan paperback edition by the end of the 1960s, after over half a decade in print.29 Whilst an impressive figure, this was dwarfed by the

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13  million viewers who watched ‘Death of a Hunter’ on a single evening’s ITV network transmission. Later the end-of-series cliffhanger would become a ubiquitous device for television drama, popularised internationally in 1980 by the American super-soap Dallas (CBS, 1978–91), whose point of suspense was similarly encapsulated in a memorable tabloid slogan, ‘Who Shot J.R.?’ But in an earlier era when US prime-time television avoided such uncertainty and irresolution as a matter of policy, British television dramas aimed at a more domestic audience were able to pioneer cliff-hanger forms long before their more widespread popularity on the international television market. Thames duly commissioned a nine-episode third series of Callan for 1970, the promotional material encouraging comparison to the resurrection of Sherlock Holmes, whose iconic death in ‘The Final Problem’ (1893) had famously been overturned by Arthur Conan Doyle in response to popular demand. With several  ITV regions commencing colour broadcasting in November 1969, Callan too moved into colour. Furthermore, the advent of new electronic editing techniques afforded new possibilities for retakes and flexible recording, although with the main taping session still limited to a few hours in the studio per episode, the multi-camera style remained and too much perfectionism remained impractical. Building upon the serendipitous circumstances of the second series, elements of serialisation increasingly came to play an important role in the narrative mix, and the third series was the first to feature a running storyline. This focused on Lonely’s attempts to juggle his work for Callan against being on bail for criminal offences. That viewers cared about Callan’s fate can be sited in his compulsiveness as a character, arising from the psychological focus of the series and the strength of Woodward’s performance. In 1970 the actor won the Best Actor award from the Society of Film and Television Arts (SFTA, the precursor to BAFTA) for his ­performance in the second series, an unprecedented achievement for the lead actor of a British spy series. The title character and Woodward attracted consistent praise in reviews for the third series, even amongst critics who were less keen on the programme as a whole.30 Such was his cultural capital by this time that on 7 April, the day before the third series’ debut, Woodward was invited to attend a party held by Harold Wilson at 10 Downing Street



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in honour of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme. The following month, at the midpoint of the third series’ broadcast, Wilson celebrated the programme in an Evening News article entitled ‘Callan lives’, writing: All of us mourned for long weeks the death of Callan and rejoiced in his recall to life … Like so many of those who made The Sun charts last Monday, Edward Woodward has recently joined me at Number  10, Downing Street in showing distinguished statesmen from abroad what really makes life tick in Britain.31

Four days away from his calling of the 1970 General Election, this demonstration of Wilson’s populist touch can perhaps be paralleled with his famous posing with the Beatles in 1964, although this time the endorsement of television’s Callan was unable to secure him a victory over Edward Heath’s Conservatives. By 1970 Callan had become one of Thames’ major exports with sales to Australia, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Nigeria, Pakistan and Zambia. Still it remained essentially unmarketable to the lucrative US market where videotape was largely consigned to disparaged daytime soap operas with their connotations of cheapness. Yet in the UK, the lack of accommodation to American tastes was used to frame the series as possessing a defiantly local identity, with Woodward proudly remarking in the Daily Express that ‘if the Americans or anyone else ever suggested that we should glamorise Callan in any way, it will be over my dead body.’32 A fourth and final series followed in 1972, featuring even more ambitious serialisation. One key storyline depicts Callan’s own illfated tenure in the role of ‘Hunter’, whilst another depicts a series of encounters between Callan and top KGB agent Richmond (T.P. McKenna). The early 1970s was a period in which ITC’s filmed adventure series entered a period of decline, with Chapman suggesting that ‘the glossy, sophisticated, consumerist lifestyle portrayed … was no longer appropriate in the context of galloping inflation and the three-day week.’33 By contrast, in the early 1970s Callan cemented its position as ‘the favourite thriller series of its time’, with ratings for the final series averaging at 11.5 million viewers and readers of the TV Times voting the protagonist ‘Most Compulsive TV Character’.34 In more troubled times, Callan emerged as a drama of the moment, its pessimistic, cynical tone and beaten-down protagonist proving resonant for a broad domestic audience.

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Paranoid visions Conclusion

Although retrospectively somewhat overshadowed by the adventure series, in its original context Callan provided a hugely ­innovative take on the television spy series. Whilst initially developed from the  subgenre of existential spy novels, many of the reasons for its eventual huge success were highly specific to the television medium and its circumstances of production. Its engagement with the class politics of the era enabled it to draw upon more challenging currents of contemporary drama elided by the exportable adventure series, whilst the ostensibly limited studio setting enhanced its psychological focus and atmosphere of claustrophobia. By the turn of the 1960s, its innovation in strategies of serialisation attracted an audience of millions to become invested in the struggles and anxieties of its anti-hero character as they unfolded through its famous 1969 cliff-hanger and later ongoing storylines. As implied by the ‘Callan lives’ slogan, much of the acclaim and fascination that the series came to attract was focused on the titular character, and a key part of his popularity undoubtedly lay in his ability to grow and respond to situations, unlike the more thinly defined and programmatic characters of the adventure series. This was a specifically televisual appeal that overturned the formulaic narrative and characterisation strategies of the adventure series, and reworked the style of le Carré’s and Deighton’s early novels for a long-form storytelling medium more accessible to a broader audience. Glen Creeber argues that the development of serialisation can be seen as a ‘coming of age’ for television drama, playing more effectively to the strengths and possibilities of the medium than either the single play or episodic series. In particular, he argues that serialisation is well suited ‘to explore and dramatise the complexity of character psychology’ and ‘to reflect and respond to the increasing uncertainties and social ambiguities of the contemporary world’.35 In this regard Callan can be positioned as a highly innovative series, with its protagonist positioned in a constant and unresolved point of tension. Whilst usually able to resolve episodic cases, he remains trapped in variants of the ‘balance of terror’ established at the outset as, unlike the adventure series heroes, he is unable to find virtue in his work for the Section yet simultaneously unable to escape its alienating and threatening world. Over



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subsequent chapters I will trace how many of the series’ inventive features, including its anti-hero protagonist, ongoing character development, serialised narratives and shock twists would eventually become standard features of international high-end television drama. Its more immediate influence, however, was in laying the foundations for a specialism in ‘gritty’ genre series that Thames would develop over the 1970s. Notes  1 Catherine Johnson and Rob Turnock, ‘From Start-up to Consolidation: Institutions, Regions and Regulation over the History of ITV’; in Johnson and Turnock (eds), ITV Cultures: Independent Television over Fifty Years (Maidenhead; New York: Open University Press, 2005), pp. 19–20.  2 John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 74.  3 Ibid., p. 31.  4 Ben Lamb, ‘Narrative Form and the British Studio 1955–63’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 34:3 (2014), pp. 357–368.  5 Caughie, Television Drama, p. 52.  6 David Buxton, From The Avengers to Miami Vice: Form and Ideology in Television Series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 76.  7 Ibid., p. 101.  8 David Bianculli, ‘Quality TV; A US TV Critic’s Perspective’; in Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007), p. 36.  9 Buxton, From The Avengers to Miami Vice, p. 118. 10 Hugh Thomas, ‘The Establishment and Society’; in Hugh Thomas (ed.), The Establishment: A Symposium (London: Blond, 1959), pp. 9–20. 11 For an influential use of the term ‘Establishment’ to articulate concerns surrounding the Burgess and Maclean scandal, see Henry Fairlie, ‘Political Commentary’, The Spectator (22 September 1955), p. 6. 12 Len Deighton, The Ipcress File (London: Harper, 2015 [1962]), p. 89. 13 John le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (London: Sceptre, 1999 [1963]), p. 25. 14 John le Carré, ‘To Russia, with Greetings’, Encounter (May 1966), p. 6. 15 Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (London; New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 34. 16 James Chapman, Saints and Avengers: British Adventure Series of the 1960s (London: I.B Tauris, 2002), p. 13.

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17 For a more detailed history of the production of Callan to which this account is indebted, see Andrew Pixley, Callan: Under the Red File (London: Network, 2014), pp. 7–138. 18 Terence Feely, ‘Callan – Format for a Series Specially Written by James Mitchell’ (28 November 1966); quoted in Pixley, Callan: Under the Red File, pp. 24–25. 19 Denning, Cover Stories, p. 34. 20 Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London: BFI, 2015; 2nd ed.), pp. 47–48. 21 At time of writing, this scene is available for viewing in its entirety at www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8kQyZ76mCk. This has been uploaded to promote the release of ‘Callan – The Monochrome Years’ (DVD, Network Distributing, UK, 2010) which contains the first and second series. 22 Lamb, ‘Narrative Form and the British Studio 1955–63’, pp. 357–368. 23 Jerry Palmer, Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre (London: Edward Arnold, 1978), p. 68. 24 Christopher Booker, The Neophiliacs: A Study of the Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties (London: Collins, 1969), p. 292. 25 For a historical account of the Sunday Times investigation, see Christopher Moran, Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 165–174. 26 John le Carré, ‘Introduction’; in Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightly, Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation (London: Andre Deutsch, 1968), p. 9. 27 Reginald Collin and John Kershaw, ‘Callan – Second Series’ (14 November 1967); quoted in Pixley, Callan: Under the Red File, p. 57. 28 Paddy Scannell, ‘Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Public Life’, in Media, Culture and Society, 11:2 (April 1989), p. 156. 29 Adam Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography (London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 341. 30 See, for example, Nancy Banks-Smith, ‘The return of Callan’, The Guardian (9 April 1970); Sylvia Clayton, ‘Precise style in sombre spy series’, Daily Telegraph (9 April 1970); and John Dodd, ‘What makes Callan tick’, The Sun (9 April 1970). 31 Harold Wilson, ‘Callan lives’, Evening News (14 May 1970). 32 Martin Jackson, ‘Callan, the killer for hire …’, The Daily Express (11 July 1970). 33 Chapman, Saints and Avengers, pp. 244–245. 34 Jeremy Potter, Independent Television in Britain. Vol. 4, Companies and Programmes, 1968–80 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 61. 35 Glen Creeber, Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen (London: BFI, 2004), pp. 6–7.

2

‘A professional’s contest’: procedure and bureaucracy in Special Branch (ITV, 1969–74) and The Sandbaggers (ITV, 1978–80) Of the roles held by the real-life intelligence services, it was the overseas remit of SIS which had exercised by far the strongest allure for espionage fiction over the early years of the Cold War. For the romantic tradition of the James Bond stories, this provided an opportunity for glamorous narratives of international travel. This was a model which most of ITC’s adventure series imitated, although due to limited production resources such ‘exotic’ locations were usually simulated through creative use of studio backlots around Elstree. In the ‘existential’ tradition of John le Carré, meanwhile, the culture of SIS, which tended more towards the Oxbridgeeducated elite than that of MI5, provided a better opportunity for exploring the insularities of the Establishment. Nonetheless, it was rare for SIS to be specified by name in fiction prior to the 1970s. Le Carré’s version of SIS was fictionalised as the Circus (after the location of its headquarters at Cambridge Circus), whilst adventure series typically showed characters working for invented organisations with functions apparently similar to those of SIS, such as M9 in Danger Man (ITV, 1960–66) (if indeed the protagonist was even a professional agent). Reflecting on the Cold War atmosphere of the 1970s, le Carré later remarked that ‘there was such self-censorship about intelligence gathering, it was so shrouded in mystique and absurdity’, and as a result ‘there was a great appetite to establish something that was the “real thing”.’1 In fact, the 1970s would see a shift towards new possibilities for ‘realist’ spy fiction defined less by existential anxiety and more by a focus on methods and procedures. This chapter will examine two key programmes from the 1970s which

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were among the first to discard the thinly defined fictional agencies  of the 1960s and make more serious claims towards representations of an ostensible ‘real thing’. Firstly, I examine Special Branch (ITV, 1969–74), a series focused on the Metropolitan Police unit of the same name whose brief was focused on maintaining national security, gathering intelligence and protecting the state against threats of subversion. As a police unit, Special Branch was not strictly one of the intelligence services, and as a result this programme has understandably been marginalised in accounts of the British television spy genre, instead usually classified as a police series. However, at a time when information about MI5 was less readily available to the public and programme-makers, this premise provided an alternative opportunity to explore themes of national security in a more ‘authentic’ manner. Secondly, I examine The Sandbaggers (ITV, 1978–80), a series which focused on a fictional Special Operations section within SIS, which was notable for its unprecedented drive to demystify the bureaucracies of the intelligence world. (In fact, the fourth and final series of Callan (ITV, 1967–72) in 1972 had shifted to identify its intelligence service, the  Section, as being SIS itself, although the real service’s overseas remit sits rather oddly with the British setting of most Callan episodes.) Collectively, these two series can be characterised as representing a move away from the alienation and moral anxieties of a series such as Callan, and instead towards an engagement with the Cold War as, in Peter Hennessy’s words, ‘a professional’s contest’ conducted by ‘specialists’ and ‘insiders’.2 This impulse takes two different forms, however, as whilst Special Branch is concerned with dramatising the maintenance of national security in terms of procedure, The Sandbaggers mounts a closer examination of the bureaucratic structures which underpin this procedure. The former series also has a particular significance in the institutional and technological history of British television drama as, following a revamp in 1973, it emerged at the forefront of new drives towards extensive location shooting using 16mm film, in this regard standing as a precursor to the most iconic British police series of the 1970s, The Sweeney (ITV, 1975–78). Initially, therefore, this chapter will provide some background information regarding shifts in the aesthetics of television drama over the late 1960s and early 1970s, arguing that this too had a key impact on changing conceptions of ‘realism’.



‘A professional’s contest’ 47 Reinventing ‘realism’ for the 1970s

The late 1960s had seen a drive by many leading practitioners within British television drama to break free from the dominant practices of videotaping within the studio. Prior to the mid-1960s, the only serious interest in making British television drama on film had been focused on superior-quality 35mm, but due to the greater expense of this stock the possibility of shooting in this way was limited to series designed with an eye on the international market, as with ITC’s adventure series. Yet during this time the lower-cost 16mm film gauge was widely deployed for exterior shooting on news and current affairs programmes such World in Action (ITV, 1963–98). Here the use of mobile equipment and hand-held cameras together with the rougher, grainier look of 16mm developed a distinctively raw quality that would thereafter connote a documentary association. Initially, however, the use of 16mm film was strongly discouraged for drama due an orthodoxy within the industry that it was not of acceptable broadcast standard for this purpose. However, from 1965 an innovative use of 16mm in drama emerged from The Wednesday Play (BBC 1, 1964–70), the BBC’s flagship single play series which, from its inception, was widely perceived as having overtaken Armchair Theatre at the cutting edge of ‘serious’ drama. Whilst most plays in this strand were traditional studio productions, on a select number of drama documentaries director Ken Loach and producer Tony Garnett made the unprecedented move of utilising 16mm hand-held cameras, seeking to capture the rawness of the news and documentary for a dramatic effect.3 This style was pioneered by Up the Junction (3 November 1965), which presented a portrait of life in a working-class community in Clapham, and Cathy Come Home (16 November 1966), which explored the social issue of homelessness. John Caughie argues that, in contrast to the ‘dramatic look’ of more ­conventionally-shot drama which ‘creates its “reality effect” by a process of mediation so conventionalized as to become invisible, the documentary gaze depends on systems of mediation (hand-held camera, loss of focus, awkward framing) so visible as to become immediate, apparently unrehearsed, and hence authentic.’4 Thus whilst studio-based dramas such as Callan developed an aesthetic of immediacy descended from live television through performance and the use of close-ups, the Loach-Garnett drama documentaries

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developed an alternative aesthetics of immediacy rooted in a ‘raw’ documentary style. These continued the line of progressive realism from early Armchair Theatre, moving from the studio to being filmed almost entirely on location in real houses and streets using cinéma vérité techniques with the aim to set working-class representation in a more authentic context. The earliest Loach-Garnett works had combined this style with experimental montage editing, but this had been substantially diminished by the time of later productions such as The Big Flame (19 February 1969) (although see Chapter 5 for discussion of a later revival of the montage style). Shortly following its formation, Thames Television also began to move into the area of 16mm film in a bid to establish itself at the cutting edge of drama production. In doing so, the company embraced the notion that drama could be shot entirely on location for greater authenticity whilst keeping costs broadly equivalent to studio productions. This was pioneered by director Mike Hodges, firstly with the children’s serial The Tyrant King (ITV, 1968), and then with two filmed thrillers broadcast as part of the ITV Playhouse (ITV, 1967–83) single play series, Suspect (17 November 1969) and Rumour (2 March 1970). These productions derived their aesthetic approach from the Loach-Garnett Wednesday Plays, taking advantage of the more lightweight equipment to shoot entirely on location in urban spaces. Following the switch of some ITV regions to colour broadcasting in late 1969, these were filmed in colour, where the washed-out tones of 16mm compounded the gritty quality. Suspect and Rumour, however, departed from the Loach-Garnett productions in their adoption of more conventional thriller narratives, reworking the drama documentary approach for more generic programming. Proving highly influential, these plays would enable Hodges to progress to the cinema and direct the gangster film Get Carter (1971), a key text in establishing the 1970s British gritty aesthetic.5 Concurrently, Thames also began recording a new videotaped series at Teddington Studios entitled Special Branch (ITV, 1969–70), with Reginald Collin producing the first nine episodes between his work on the second and third series of Callan. The real Metropolitan Special Branch had been prominently featured in headlines over the 1960s, associated with many of the security scandals of the early 1960s, their roles including carrying out the arrest of George Blake in 1961 and investigating the Profumo Affair



‘A professional’s contest’ 49

in 1963. As a result, despite the relative dullness of much of their work, historian Rupert Allason describes how the press had ‘turned them into masters of international espionage’.6 In addition, one year prior to the series’ debut the Branch had been involved in policing the student and anti-Vietnam protests of 1968, an echo of the more tumultuous protest movements erupting in France and the USA. With images of protesters featuring prominently in the original title sequence, the series could perhaps be interpreted as a reactionary response to the counter-cultural movements of the late 1960s. However, such dissidence would be the subject of just one first series episode, 1.6 ‘A New Face’ (22 October 1969). Instead most of its episodes focus on Cold War intrigue in a manner not so dissimilar from Callan, this being perhaps the optimum source of drama for a series focused on national security whilst largely confined to studio sets. Yet the effect of placing police officers as the central characters in a programme which otherwise largely functions as a spy series creates some interesting generic variations. The focus is much more strongly on procedure, deduction and teamwork, with the officers as simple professionals lacking either the glamour of adventure series protagonists or the existential anxiety of Callan, although the role played by aristocratic intelligence chief Charles Moxon (Morris Perry), who regularly manipulates the officers of the Branch for his own ends, provides something of a glimpse into the Establishment world. In this original incarnation, Special Branch would only last for two series. In 1970 The Wednesday Play was scheduled opposite the third series of Callan only to be defeated in the ratings, providing an early harbinger of the eventual decline of the single play in favour of more popular series and serials (see Chapter 4).7 In the short-term, however, the main BBC 1 single play strand was moved to Thursday and revamped as Play for Today (BBC 1, 1970–84), where it continued to present many acclaimed dramas over the next 14 years. Over the 1970s a growing number of directors such as Alan Clarke, Richard Eyre, Stephen Frears and Mike Leigh came to film some of their most notable productions entirely on 16mm in order to, as Lez Cooke writes, locate their plays ‘in the real world and to achieve an aesthetic of realism which has always been critically valued in British culture’.8 Thames, meanwhile, further asserted its lead in the new 16mm production model by establishing Euston Films, a fully-owned

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subsidiary specifically for the production of such programming. In contrast to conventional electronic television studios, Euston was designed such that it had only a small nucleus of permanent staff and no resident studio facility; instead most production staff were employed on a freelance basis, with equipment and premises hired as needed, creating highly flexible production arrangements. This more economical production method freed the new generation of filmed drama from dependence on the American market, and Euston strongly reacted against ITC’s mid-Atlantic style, continuing the tendency of Thames’ videotaped dramas to be aimed primarily at the domestic market and more local in content. Following the example set by Hodges’ thrillers, Euston Films initially worked to establish its reputation in the police and crime genres, with the grainy quality and washed-out colours of 16mm film coinciding with a new trend towards grittiness in the genre. Required to get a series into production at short notice, Euston Films elected to revive a ‘known quantity’ Thames format with proven public appeal. As a result, less than three years after the original studio production ended, a new 16mm filmed version of Special Branch would make its debut in 1973.9 ‘I’m a policeman, I’m not paid to have personal opinions’: the ‘rejection of politics’ in Euston Films’ Special Branch (ITV, 1973–74) Despite retaining the same title, the new Special Branch was essentially an entirely different programme from its studio-based predecessor in almost every way. Made by a different production team, it featured an entirely new cast of characters headed by Chief Inspector Alan Craven (George Sewell) and featured no reference to any on-screen event in the original production at all. (As a result, Euston’s two-year run of Special Branch is sometimes described as the first and second series of a different programme. However, to avoid confusion I will refer to these as the third and fourth series.) Most fundamentally, the practice of filming entirely on 16mm and on location completely transformed the style and pace of the programme. The new Special Branch pioneered what would become standard practice for Euston productions. A short-term lease was taken on a premises to provide a shooting base, in this case the disused Colet



‘A professional’s contest’ 51

Court School whose offices provided locations such as the Branch’s headquarters. Scenes set here, however, would be kept to a minimum in order to focus more on exterior locations. The working routine differed sharply from that employed by videotaped series such as Callan and the original Special Branch, where a long rehearsal period built up to a concentrated recording session in the television studio. Instead, a typical episode of the new Special Branch would be filmed continuously over ten working days, capturing around five minutes per day in locations around London with relatively minimal ad hoc rehearsal. With the filming order guided by location practicalities rather than the largely in-order recording of the studio, actors would have to adapt to moments at different points in the script without having the opportunity to develop their performance continuously through the piece.10 This would become known as the ‘kick, bollock and scramble’ production technique. Ted Childs, who joined as producer for the fourth series, described how ‘there were things we were very good at in comparison with a tape production in the TV studio – they were action and two-handed dialogue on the run. What we weren’t good at were courtroom scenes and massive dinner parties because we had no rehearsal time.’11 Even as the new production style facilitated more extensive use of locations and action sequences, therefore, it worked somewhat against the dialogue-driven psychological style of many earlier Thames productions. Yet with the episodes assembled through post-production editing rather than live vision-mixing, there was a new opportunity to create a more refined end product. The increased opportunity for action and spectacle in exterior spaces dovetailed neatly with the emergence of a new set of headline anxieties around the issue of international terrorism. Around the turn of the 1970s, groups such as the Red Army Faction and the Palestine Liberation Organization had become increasingly disengaged from established political processes and sought more radical solutions through political violence. Much of this was designed specifically to attract the attention of the world’s media. For example, when the Palestinian Black September Organization (BSO) kidnapped eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, this was extensively reported on television, prompting Raymond Williams to ask darkly, ‘is terrorism becoming a spectator sport?’12 John Ellis describes a phenomenon termed ‘witness’ whereby the growth of visual media such as television has

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‘brought us face to face with the great events, the banal happenings, the horrors and the incidental cruelties of our times’.13 Such acts of terrorism deliberately played up to this, deliberately seeking to harness ‘witness’ for political ends. Concurrently, the real Metropolitan Special Branch was becoming increasingly involved in policing terrorism on domestic soil, including a series of bomb attacks carried out by the anarchist group the Angry Brigade from 1970 to 1972. However, by far the UK’s most serious internal security problem was the eruption of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s, beginning a protracted conflict known as the ‘Troubles’ which would continue over the next few decades. Less than a month before the debut of the revamped Special Branch, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) expanded their bombing campaign onto the British mainland from 8 March 1973 through the use of car bombs and incendiary devices through the mail. With MI5 prioritising Cold War counter-intelligence during this period, the lead role against Irish Republican terrorism on the British mainland was held by Special Branch.14 Euston’s Special Branch loosely acknowledges this context in its opening episode, 3.1 ‘A Copper Called Craven’ (4 April 1973), which establishes Craven as having previously served in Northern Ireland and sees him framed by an Irish republican gun-runner seeking revenge. However, after offering this as a guarantor of its protagonist’s capabilities and moral seriousness, the series thereafter studiously avoids centring any subsequent episode directly on the Troubles, barely mentioning PIRA at all despite the mainland bombing campaign being well established by the time of the fourth series’ production. This is typical of how, as Edward Braun notes, few television dramas of any kind approached the Troubles directly in the 1970s, which he attributes to fears of censorship and editorial intervention, and widespread perception of it as ‘switch-off subject’.15 Nonetheless, other terrorist anxieties routinely featured in Special Branch, serving perhaps as a proximate way of engaging with such issues. In contrast to the insurmountable networked threat of Soviet intelligence as favoured by Callan and the original Special Branch, terrorism instead provides an isolated and aberrant threat in the form of individuals or small group of fanatics motivated by extreme ideology or simple, incoherent rage, which can be swiftly (and often spectacularly) eliminated over the course of an episode.



‘A professional’s contest’ 53

A productive comparison can be made between the original Special Branch episode dealing with the topic of student radicals, 1.6 ‘A New Face’, and the Euston series’ episode 3.6 ‘Red Herring’ (9 May 1973), in which Craven goes on the trail of a group of anarchists in the mould of the Angry Brigade who are responsible for a series of bomb attacks carried out around London. The dialoguedriven style of the earlier episode had enabled considerable articulation of the students’ radical anti-authoritarian beliefs, albeit framed by the condescending judgement of the Special Branch officers. In ‘Red Herring’, however, the anarchists seem almost feral, prone to lurking on urban wastelands and giggling incoherently without ever being given a space in the episode to articulate a belief or position, instead seeming almost to personify a sense of social decay (see Figure 2.1). Elsewhere, an extended portion of the episode shows Craven leading the evacuation of an ordinary suburban street where one of the explosive devices has been located, followed by a suspenseful sequence showing a bomb disposal unit working to disarm it. Here location filming on the streets of London enables a vivid demonstration of the threat of terrorism to public safety in contrast

Figure 2.1  Special Branch, 3.6 ‘Red Herring’. Radical anarchists wait in a gritty post-industrial landscape typical of the series.

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Figure 2.2  Special Branch, 3.6 ‘Red Herring’. The Branch supervise the defusing of a car bomb in an ordinary suburban street.

to the more abstracted intrigue of the Cold War (see Figure  2.2). Whilst the Loach-Garnett drama documentary tradition had been driven by a desire to situate working-class realism in its proper context, here terrorism (and in a way, genre) are shown to intrude threateningly upon that context. Elsewhere a tendency towards explosive violence seems like a particularly 1970s form of madness that can seize potentially anybody. In 3.8 ‘All the King’s Men’ (23 May 1973), Douglas Sumner (Geoffrey Bayldon), an ordinary white-collar computer scientist, has a nervous breakdown, takes a hostage and wires up the Millbank office block in which he works with explosives. Styling himself as a ‘casualty of the system’, he threatens to detonate unless he secures the release of an imprisoned Black Power activist whom he read about in the newspaper but whose politics he barely understands. In 4.4 ‘Stand and Deliver’ (7 March 1974), two farm-food delivery men, frustrated by the council’s neglect of the urban slums in which their families reside, steal an experimental anti-tank weapon from the army and attempt to hold the country to ransom for a fairer housing policy. Outspoken left-wing activist Jean Gosling (Stephanie Turner), the sister of one of the men, is not directly involved but nonetheless passionately advocates her  ­brother’s cause, dismissing Craven as having ‘Gestapo stamped all over him’. ‘You can’t beat the system’, Craven tells her matter-of-factly later on, following the arrest of the delivery men, although privately he is willing to admit his own frustrations with the status quo. Indeed a striking characteristic of Craven is his tendency towards moral abdication as part of his professional adherence to procedure.



‘A professional’s contest’ 55

In 3.13 ‘Blueprint for Murder’ (4 July 1973) he is assigned to protect Coetzee (Kenneth J. Warren), an unethical South African businessman with close ties to the Apartheid government, from a potential assassination attempt. When challenged on his evident discomfort with the role by Coetzee’s deputy, he responds, ‘I’m a policeman, I’m not paid to have personal opinions.’ (He then conceals his face by taking a stiff drink.) In 3.12 ‘Hostage’ (27 June 1973) Arab terrorists identifying themselves as ‘Black October’ (in an obvious reference to the BSO) kidnap a German diplomat’s daughter and hold her to ransom for $¼ million, with which they intend to buy weapons and fight for the liberation of their unnamed country. Aside from an anonymous voice issuing demands over the telephone, they are denied any opportunity to state their moral case, instead only appearing for a dramatic gun-battle at the end in the evocative space of some abandoned warehouses (see Figure 2.3). They do, however, have an advocate in the form of Professor Munro (Brian Wilde) whom Craven consults for his expertise on their home region. Munro tries to argue for a more nuanced, sympathetic understanding of their plight from the international community, but Craven is unmoved, simply responding ‘Well that’s politics … I’m a policeman, Mr Munro.’ Thus whilst Special Branch regularly engages with radical political movements, and some space is even allowed to suggest potential legitimacy to the antagonists’ grievances, this is continually closed off through their unacceptable pursuit of violent means. In a 1983 study of television’s representation of political violence, Philip Schlesinger, Graham Murdock and Philip Elliott suggest that actionadventure series engaging with terrorism tend towards a ‘closed’ structure, in that ‘they operate mainly or wholly within the terms of reference set by the official perspective.’16 Possibilities of dissent, often with a valid moral case, are flattened into the strict execution of legal procedure. This is perhaps an inevitable aspect of the episodic series form, with threats needing to be defeated on a weekly basis, yet notably Callan had found a certain degree of ‘openness’ in this form, with the titular character often vocally critical of the morality of the Section’s work, even if usually compelled to carry it out regardless. Any such dissent from Craven tends to be far more muted. Such policing, despite occurring in highly politicised areas, is therefore predicated on (to appropriate Jean Seaton’s description of the BBC’s founding principle) ‘a rejection of politics’.17

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Figure 2.3  Special Branch, 3.12 ‘Hostage’. The Branch battle Black October in the evocative setting of an abandoned warehouse.

Nonetheless, the fourth and final series works to restore some of the political intrigue of the original Special Branch, particularly with the addition of the aloof, aristocratic intelligence agent Strand (Paul Eddington) who revives the role previously filled by Moxon. Whilst broadly placed in the role of a chief assigning cases to the Branch, he is frequently shown to entangle the officers in Machiavellian schemes which they only become fully aware of by the episode’s



‘A professional’s contest’ 57

conclusion. For example, in Strand’s introductory episode 4.1 ‘Double Exposure’ (14 February 1974), Craven’s partner Chief Inspector Tom Haggerty (Patrick Mower) is sent to investigate maverick press photographer Steven Gill (Stuart Wilson), whose work has revealed embarrassing secrets about government figures. However, when Gill is eventually arrested, Strand offers to drop the charges if he puts his name to a series of forged photographs made for the cynical purpose of discrediting a delegate at a forthcoming international conference, much to Haggerty’s disgust. Strand thus complicates the series’ ‘closed’ structure, raising the anxiety that there may be politicised objectives in play above the neutral execution of procedure, and he is regarded with considerable suspicion by Craven and Haggerty. In the end, Special Branch’s generic hybridity of the spy and police series proved unsatisfying for both newspaper critics and indeed the programme’s own production team, a prevalent feeling being that it struggled to forge a clear identity between the two.18 In particular, Euston’s fascination with run-down, post-industrial locations such as ruined warehouses or car-wreckers’ yards seemed in many ways far removed from the world of international intrigue that many of its narratives attempted to evoke. Thus, following the fourth series, Thames elected to cancel the series and replace it with The Sweeney. This new format traded Special Branch for another elite unit in the Metropolitan Police, the Flying Squad, whose remit of covering serious armed crime proved better suited for Euston’s gritty approach. Eliminating overtly political and espionage-related themes, The Sweeney further honed the ‘kick, bollock and scramble’ 16mm production technique, and against a decade marked by crisis in which the country was beset by widespread unemployment and industrial unrest, it would emerge as Euston’s most defining early success. In the long-term, the success of Euston’s production model marked a decisive moment in the slow decline of the studio era of British television drama. Over the 1970s, gritty crime programmes came to supplant the lighter adventure series as the dominant form of action series. This was particularly evident in the trajectory followed by Brian Clemens and Albert Fennell, former producers of the Elstree era of The Avengers. A short-lived 35mm filmed revival, The New Avengers (ITV, 1976–77), had proven unsatisfying, caught between conflicting demands of its French and Canadian backers

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and unable to either recapture the playful tone and Pop Art style of the original or update the series to capture a new zeitgeist. However, for their next project, Clemens and Fennell adopted an approach inspired by the work of Euston, switching to a 16mm gritty aesthetic. The result was The Professionals (ITV, 1977–83), made for the ITV regional contractor London Weekend Television, which became a huge popular success over five series. This focused on two agents of the fictional clandestine organisation CI5, whose remit is to combat ‘anarchy, acts of terror, [and] crimes against the public’. This is, however, a lighter treatment of the counter-terror theme than Special Branch, with Bodie (Lewis Collins) and Doyle (Martin Shaw) characterised as a ‘buddy’ duo in the vein of US police series Starsky and Hutch (ABC-US, 1975–79), possessing a more casual, laddish masculinity. Unlike Special Branch’s gesture towards ‘realism’ in depicting a real police unit, the fictional CI5 is very much a conservative fantasy of cutting through the ‘red tape’, providing a vaguely defined official carte blanche for rule-bending cops. As Clemens later remarked, ‘I think that a lot of people would welcome a CI5 organisation which was not so hidebound by red tape – it did the job, it caught the villains, it stopped the person murdering, it defused the bomb, and without having to get a search warrant and things like that. Which is probably indefensible, but made for damn good entertainment.’19 This is essentially the trait which leads Schlesinger et al.’s study to cite The Professionals as the epitome of the ‘closed’ text engaging with political violence.20 British television did not, however, immediately transition to producing all of its drama entirely on film, with television companies still inclined to maximise their earlier investment in studio facilities. Thus over much of the 1970s and 1980s, there existed in parallel two different styles of drama production with substantially differing aesthetics, largely location-based 16mm filmed drama and largely studio-bound videotaped drama. In the same timeframe as The Professionals, a new series from a different ITV company was exploring the ethics of espionage in a much more challenging manner than had been previously achieved. As a studio drama, this employed many of the virtues of the style I identified in my analysis of Callan, but rather than projecting a sense of existential alienation would instead work to demystify the bureaucracy and procedures of intelligence work.



‘A professional’s contest’ 59 ‘The men who make the decisions’: demystifying intelligence bureaucracy in The Sandbaggers (ITV, 1978–80)

The Sandbaggers (ITV, 1978–80) was produced by Yorkshire Television, holder of the north-eastern franchise since the 1968 reallocation, which had emerged as a new network company with particular pride placed in its production of drama.21 The series was created by Ian Mackintosh, a writer who had got his start writing crime novels whilst serving in the Royal Navy and had subsequently moved into television, drawing upon his own experiences to create the BBC naval drama series Warship (BBC 1, 1973–77). After retiring from the Navy in 1976, he had been hired as a staff writer for YTV for whom he developed light-hearted detective series Wilde Alliance (ITV, 1978). In Spring 1977 YTV Controller of Drama David Cunliffe was faced with the sudden abandonment of a major series planned for Autumn 1978 and asked Mackintosh for a replacement ‘filler’ for the schedule.22 Mackintosh proposed a series focusing directly on the SIS, writing in an early outline that: SIS has been the subject of many series and many plays; but never has it been portrayed in real documentary terms. Never has there been an examination of its methods, priorities, internal struggles and powers within the Whitehall structure. Never has the spotlight been turned on the men who make the decisions, who control the agents, who gamble with the precarious peace of cold war.23

From the outset, therefore, the series prioritised a claim to ‘realism’ sited specifically in the demystification of intelligence bureaucracy. A possible impetus for this can be found in how, over the 1970s, Whitehall had increasingly sought to mitigate reputational damage from the ‘era of exposure’ by relaxing its secrecy policy concerning deception and codebreaking activities during the Second World War.24 Whilst this did not translate into any substantial change in the highly secretive nature of the intelligence services in the present, the expanded public knowledge of such historical activity provided a new impression of espionage as a more professional and technical activity which could be mapped onto the contemporary world of intelligence through fiction. Retrospectively, it is now widely accepted that Mackintosh’s naval career had included elements of intelligence work. Whilst the precise nature of this remains unclear, his biographer Robert G. Folsom

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suggests that it was most likely with the Defence Intelligence Staff, a part of the Ministry of Defence.25 It is therefore tempting to position him alongside the long lineage of British spy novelists with authentic intelligence experience, including figures as diverse as Ian Fleming, le Carré, W. Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene. Yet as the son of a naval family from the Scottish Highlands, Mackintosh lacked the privileged elite background of many such respected novelists, which may partially account for how he found his natural home on the new, less respectable mass medium of television. That his intelligence background was located in a military context may have had a number of specific effects on the approach taken by The Sandbaggers. Mackintosh’s outline sketches a modernised and professionalised vision of SIS which has moved beyond the ‘gentlemanly club’ of Oxbridge graduates and instead recruits its officers ‘from various strata of society’ and most of its field agents from the Armed Forces.26 In particular, the titular ‘sandbaggers’ are an elite team of highly skilled agents who constitute a Special Operations Section within SIS, their remit to undertake missions of exceptional political sensitivity. With the programme firmly situated within the politics of the Cold War, their missions usually take place overseas and often in the perilous spaces behind the Iron Curtain. The focus on a specialist team who regularly work behind enemy lines invests the series with a military sensibility, perhaps drawing upon popular memory of the work of the Special Operations Executive in occupied Europe during the Second World War. The series was initially commissioned for a short run of seven episodes with no further extension guaranteed. Whilst Mackintosh had shared writing duties with others on his earlier television creations, he would be employed as sole writer on The Sandbaggers, giving it a strong sense of authorship. Due to its last-minute ‘filler’ status, it was produced on a very limited budget, and although its narratives regularly took place in a variety of overseas locations all over the world, these settings were largely created through sets in YTV’s Leeds Studio and 16mm telecine sequences filmed in the surrounding area. In particular, the series regularly made creative use of the Yorkshire Moors to represent the forbidding landscapes of the Cold War front. However, what is especially unusual about The Sandbaggers is its tendency to marginalise such espionage missions in order to focus more on drama taking place within the corridors of power



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Figure 2.4  The Sandbaggers. A drama of intrigue in enclosed office spaces.

back in London. Here the office spaces which had typically only served as the starting point for narratives in prior spy series are instead transformed into a central site of conflict and intrigue (see Figure 2.4). The series’ leading character is the Director of Special Operations Neil Burnside (Roy Marsden), a figure who is uniquely able to bridge the gap between the office and field spaces. He seems to epitomise Mackintosh’s modernised image of SIS, with a background in the Special Boat Service of the Royal Marines and prior work as a sandbagger before his promotion to D.Ops. Folsom suggests Burnside to be the character whom Mackintosh created in his own image, using ‘his voice to detail in exquisitely blunt fashion how the dictates of politics can interfere with success in the spy game’.27 The series’ unusual approach is clearly demonstrated in its opening episode, 1.1 ‘First Principles’ (18 September 1978). The core storyline concerns a special operation to rescue the crew of a Norwegian spy plane which has crashed undetected on the Kola Peninsula, a highly militarised area within Soviet territory. Much of the opening ten minutes are taken up by introducing the regular characters against a more general backdrop of tension and rivalry between British and Norwegian intelligence before the main crisis is even presented to Burnside by Norwegian spy chief Lars Torvik (Olaf Pooley). Even once the scenario has been established, a further ten minutes are taken up with office politicking, as Burnside refuses to take on the operation and endanger his agents to rectify the failures of another intelligence service, although he is ultimately forced to comply by pressure from the government. Another substantial portion of the episode is devoted to planning the mission

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in conjunction with the RAF. As a result, the operation itself only truly gets underway at around 33 minutes into the 50-minute episode, the overwhelming majority of the drama up until that point having taken place within the offices of various intelligence and government departments. Even then, the sequences set on the Kola Peninsula are intercut with a new crisis unfolding in the office space when it transpires that the Norwegians have duplicitously recruited the CIA to undertake the same mission, needlessly and irresponsibly jeopardising the sandbaggers who have already entered Soviet territory. The episode then has a downbeat ending as the rescue mission fails, with both the Norwegians and Americans captured by the Soviets, although the sandbaggers are able to escape back to Norway. This episode introduces a number of the series’ distinctive characteristics. Firstly, there is the heavy emphasis on procedure through careful planning. This is explicitly highlighted in the concluding scene as an angry Burnside confronts Torvik. Providing what might be interpreted as a mission statement for the series, he declares that: Special Operations doesn’t mean going in with all guns blazing. It means special planning, special care. Fully briefed agents in possession of all possible alternatives. If you want James Bond, go to your library. But if you want a successful operation sit at your desk and think, and then think again … Our battles aren’t fought at the end of a parachute. They’re won and lost in drab, dreary corridors in Westminster.

This is only the first of many disparaging or ironic references to Bond from the mouths of SIS employees across subsequent episodes, yet in a way, with its focus on special operations, The Sandbaggers can be read as an exercise in exploring how figures such as Bond might really work. It also introduces the prominent theme of the intelligence services being subjected to the pressures of realpolitik, with both SIS and the CIA pressured into undertaking the Kola mission and endangering their agents by governments competing to sell missiles to the Norwegians. Finally, the unhappy outcome establishes the series’ bleak and pessimistic tone, where clear victories are far from guaranteed. Another part of its demystification project is the extensive use of dense intelligence terminology and acronyms in fast-flowing



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dialogue. This would become something of a running joke for critics, with Herbert Kretzmer drily noting in a Daily Mail review of a later episode that ‘in the course of the 54-minute instalment I jotted down at least one reference each to the K.G.B., MI5, CIA, S.I.S., ‘C’, J.I.S., F.C.O., J.I.C., P.A., P.F.L.P, D.A.S., D.Int., P.S.O., the P.A. to D Ops, I.K., M.O.D., F.C.S., and even the PS to the PUS. I may have missed a few.’28 The use of intelligence jargon was a characteristic feature of the spy novels by Deighton and le Carré, the latter’s biographer Adam Sisman describing how it ‘accentuates the sense of verisimilitude, giving the reader the impression that he or she is being admitted into a select society, with its own private lexicon’.29 Yet whilst le Carré’s novels had tended to feature fictional euphemistic terms such ‘the Circus’, ‘the competition’ and ‘the cousins’, The Sandbaggers is much more directly focused upon precise citations of real organisations and occupations, with Kretzmer’s jottings being a long list of genuine reference points at time of transmission. This therefore constitutes another aspect of Mackintosh’s drive towards a documentary ‘realism’, cutting through the more literary ambiguity of the existential novelists. This precision even extends to which words to avoid, with Mackintosh specifying in his outline that ‘the term “spy” is never used, except in a derogatory way’ and indicating that ‘agent’ is the appropriate professional term.30 Thus despite the fictional nature of his Special Operations Section, there is an unprecedented attention played to contextualising this within convincing documentary detail. The positioning of a spy chief as the lead character substantially alters the conventional dynamics of the genre. Umberto Eco has described the role played by M in the James Bond stories as being an ‘omniscient chief’ and the ‘sole source of meaning’, essentially distilling the state apparatus down into a single paternalistic figure who licences Bond’s missions whilst eliding political and ethical complexities.31 Yet in focusing on Burnside’s bureaucratic battles, The Sandbaggers does much to demystify these structures of power as part of its documentary project. The series features a number of more senior intelligence leaders in regular roles, including Sir Richard Greenley (Richard Vernon), a former diplomat who serves as Director-General of SIS (or ‘C’, a codename used by the real SIS Chief) in the first two series, and Matthew Peele (Jerome Willis), the SIS Deputy Director. Both of these characters are defined by

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Figure 2.5  The Sandbaggers. SIS Director of Operations Neil Burnside (Roy Marsden) in conference with his superiors ‘C’ (Richard Vernon) and Deputy Director Matthew Peele (Jerome Willis).

their lack of an operational background in intelligence, and much of the institutional drama comes from conflicts that arise when Burnside ranks their judgements as less worthy than his own, more experienced perspective and works to circumvent them (see Figure 2.5). The demystifying ‘realism’ pursued by The Sandbaggers also extends to an unusually expansive focus on the intelligence services’ relationship with its customers in the elected government, civil service, armed forces, as well as the intelligence services of other countries. Richard J. Aldrich describes three vistas of secret service, ‘East versus West, West versus West and each Western state bitterly divided against itself’, all of which are very much present in The Sandbaggers.32 A key figure is Sir Geoffrey Wellingham (Alan MacNaughtan) who, as Permanent Undersecretary of State at the Foreign Office, provides the main link between SIS and the government. He is characterised as a smooth, Machiavellian senior civil servant, often shown to manipulate events for explicitly partisan purposes, such as in 1.3 ‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?’ (2 October 1978), when he exploits the outcome of an intelligence operation to force the resignation of a prominent opposition politician. Burnside has a personal connection to Wellingham due to a previous failed marriage to his (never seen) daughter Belinda, and he is often able to bypass C and Peele in order to consult the mandarin for private favours and deals under the ‘old pals act’, much to the frustration of his superiors. Wellingham is often suggested to be something of a mirror to Burnside, and perhaps the only



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Figure 2.6  The Sandbaggers, 1.2 ‘A Proper Function of Government’. A tense confrontation between Burnside and Sir Geoffrey Wellingham (Alan MacNaughtan).

person capable of outmanoeuvring him at the Whitehall game (see Figure  2.6). The unseen government itself often plays a tangible role, providing another set of agendas and often politicising cases in a hypocritical or unsavoury manner. The political focus comes to the fore in 1.2 ‘A Proper Function of Government’ (25 September 1978), which deploys one of the series’ most distinctive and sophisticated features, the juxtaposition of multiple intelligence plotlines to comment on each other and create ironic contrasts. Here the primary narrative concerns the discovery that Sir Donald Hopkins (Laurence Payne), Chief Scientific Advisor in the Cabinet Office, has travelled to Vienna with the intention to defect. Meanwhile, a parallel storyline sees murderous East African dictator President Lutara come into Burnside’s sights after executing a British journalist. Burnside is seeking retribution after Lutara’s previous brutal murder of a sandbagger, and attempts to use the current situation to have a political assassination approved by the British government. The storylines converge when both cases are referred to the unseen Prime Minister. Whilst rejecting the possibility of killing Lutara on the ethical grounds that ‘he does not consider assassination to be a proper function of government’, he is nonetheless hypocritically prepared to authorise the covert assassination of Hopkins if he refuses to come quietly, being willing to sacrifice principles in order to protect the reputation of himself and his government. In narratives such as this, the series’ complex vision of the intelligence bureaucracy enables it to make an especially effective use of the episodic series form, exploring political and

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ethical dilemmas relating to a succession of elaborately constructed intelligence scenarios. Although Burnside’s perspective is generally privileged in these scenarios, this is complicated by his explicit portrayal as a troubling and unsettling figure in many instances. He is often shown to mount operations without receiving proper departmental or political clearance, causing much resentment and often bringing SIS to the verge of causing a major international scandal. Whilst this might be read as a variation on the rule-bending ‘rogue cop’ character in the model of Jack Regan (John Thaw) in The Sweeney, The Sandbaggers highlights the disturbing potential of Burnside’s abuses of power much more deliberately and adopts a more ambivalent attitude. In ‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?’ one of his sandbaggers, Alan Denson (Steven Grives), traumatised after a mission gone wrong, asks to leave the section in order to get married. Unwilling to part with a uniquely skilled agent, Burnside responds by threatening Denson’s fiancée and mounting a digging operation against her. Later in 2.6 ‘Operation Kingmaker’ (3 March 1980) Burnside responds to the news that his old enemy John Tower Gibbs (Dennis Burgess) is likely to replace Greenley as C by mounting a digging operation against this senior officer, although on this occasion his actions are discovered and thwarted by Wellingham. Comfortable with deceiving and manipulating those around him for a personallydefined greater good, Burnside’s ethics can be seen to correspond to the Eleventh Commandment that whistle-blower Peter Wright would later famously attribute to the intelligence services: ‘thou shalt not get caught’.33 Like Callan before it, The Sandbaggers resists the formulaic tendencies of the adventure series, providing some limited serialisation and showing central characters to be affected by their experiences. Indeed, perhaps due to its status as a short-run commission with a single author and potentially no renewal, the initial seven-episode series has a particularly defined narrative arc. Following the deaths of two sandbaggers in ‘Is Your Journey Really Necessary?’, Burnside reluctantly takes on Laura Dickens (Diane Keen), his first ever female agent, as a replacement in 1.4 ‘The Most Suitable Person’ (9 October 1978). Burnside and Laura, both emotionally damaged, forge a bond which becomes a relationship in 1.6 ‘A Feasible Solution’ (23 October 1978). However, a complex series of events in the finale, 1.7 ‘Special Relationship’ (30 October 1978), force



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Burnside to order a sniper to shoot Laura dead at the Berlin Wall for the greater strategic advantage of safeguarding shared intelligence with the CIA. Although juxtaposed against standalone narratives for each of the individual episodes of the series, the overarching personal and tragic quality of this narrative is unusually ‘novelistic’ in style for a series at this time, paralleling concurrent developments in closed-form serial drama (see Chapters 3 and 4). With the narrative culminating in the unexpected shooting of a major character at the Berlin Wall, there is an echo of the famous conclusion to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, yet the difference between the two is revealing. Whilst the end of le Carré’s novel had emphasised the pointlessness of the situation and Leamas’ disillusionment, by contrast The Sandbaggers has its central protagonist be directly responsible for Laura’s death, implicitly accepting his decision as defensible within the wider strategic concerns of the Cold War whilst not shying away from its unpleasantness. This perhaps illustrates what Folsom describes as a key difference between Mackintosh and le Carré, arguing that ‘MacKintosh never fell into the trap of moral equivalency. In The Sandbaggers, he questions the methods of the state, but he never goes so far as to maintain that the West and its democratic nations are no better than the East and its totalitarian societies.’34 This single-minded devotion to an overarching national interest and refusal to be swayed by existential anxiety might also be interpreted as another part of the military sensibility that Mackintosh brought to the spy series. Broadcast over autumn 1978, the first series of The Sandbaggers was the only one to air within its creator’s lifetime. The series proved successful enough that it was recommissioned for a longer second run of 13 episodes, all to be written by Mackintosh, who in the interim devised another naval series, Thundercloud (ITV, 1979). However, on 7 July 1979 Mackintosh mysteriously disappeared whilst flying a light aircraft over the Gulf of Alaska, ostensibly for leisure purposes even though this was a hotbed of Soviet naval activity. By this point he had completed ten scripts for the second series of The Sandbaggers which was already in production, with cast and crew occupied on a three-week shoot in Malta in a bid to open the series out beyond its dependence on Yorkshire landscapes. After a further setback from an industrial dispute which shut down ITV for ten weeks, the second series was ultimately split into two shorter

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series, broadcast in separate runs over 1980 (January–March and June–July).35 The latter run featured three scripts by other writers in order to fill the remaining slots, although it was agreed that no further series would be produced thereafter. Little attention had been paid to Mackintosh himself on the programme’s original 1978 debut, although in the Daily Express Roy Boyle noted his past work in ‘a never-revealed department of Whitehall’ and his refusal to be interviewed or photographed.36 By the time that the six-episode second series transmitted in early 1980, however, the disappearance of Mackintosh had created an irresistible mystique around the programme that was incorporated into press coverage.37 Popular conspiracy theories would grow around the writer, suggesting that he had been gathering intelligence about Soviet activities for the British government and been killed during his mission, or alternatively that he had defected to Moscow and survived, although no trace of him has even been found.38 By the time of its return in 1980, however, The Sandbaggers had also been somewhat eclipsed by another, much more lavish and prestigious spy drama, with James Murray complaining in the Daily Express that the BBC’s adaptation of le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (BBC 2, 1979) had ‘put shows like “Sandbagger” [sic] out of business.’39 Yet in the years following its original transmission, The Sandbaggers has come to develop a highly respected (if somewhat marginal) status, the quality of its writing and acting enabling it to transcend its humble production circumstances for many viewers, although undoubtedly the fate of Mackintosh has also added to its mystique. It has also proved an unusually popular spy series with specialists in real intelligence, with Allason (under his more ­commonly used pseudonym Nigel West) describing how ‘the intelligence community knew that it was the only television series that had more than a veneer of verisimilitude’.40 Initially The Sandbaggers’ exposure in the US was limited to transmission on a few Public Broadcasting Service stations in the late 1980s (see the following chapter for a fuller discussion of PBS), where it was acquired on the basis of Roy Marsden’s later popular role as P.D. James’ detective Adam Dalgliesh. However, by the time the third series was released on DVD in the US in 2003, a New York Times review by Terrence Rafferty championed it as a precursor to contemporary US critical hit The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007) for its complex portrayal of ‘a



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deeply flawed, even monstrous, series hero’, dubbing it ‘the best spy series in television history’.41 Conclusion Michael Denning has written that the le Carré tradition of spy thriller is fundamentally ‘a cover story about work, particularly white-collar work, and its readers invest as much in its narration of bureaucratic power struggles and everyday office routine as in its international intrigue’.42 Like many existential spy novels of the 1960s, Callan had rendered this in the terms of an agent trapped within an alienating system trying to find moral value in his work, positioning its protagonist in a highly underprivileged role in the hierarchy of the office. However, with the shift towards a new ‘realism’ grounded in procedure and bureaucracy in the 1970s, Special Branch and The Sandbaggers provided two highly contrasting interpretations of this work-based ‘cover story’. Special Branch drew upon the conventions of the spy series but, in positioning police officers as its central protagonists, orientated itself around a team of professionals whose execution of procedure was rooted in a ‘rejection of politics’ and disavowal of ethical engagement with their work. As such, it demonstrated a much stronger acceptance of one’s place in the office hierarchy. For the series’ 1973 revamp under Euston Films, a combination of new headline anxieties concerning international terrorism and a 16mm film documentary aesthetic enabled it to situate anxieties surrounding terrorist violence within a more vivid social context. Here the displacement of the networked threat of Soviet Communism in favour of more disparate radical threats only served to strengthen the procedural element in the face of such an existential threat to society. The Sandbaggers, by contrast, embraced the constraints of the traditional studio-bound drama in order to focus more directly upon ‘the men who make the decisions’. The emphasis on conflicts and rivalries in the corridors of Westminster enabled it to demystify the bureaucratic structures which normally underpinned and legitimated spy narratives. In particular, through presenting a spy chief as its leading character and its willingness to engage with ethically complex scenarios and the pressures of realpolitik, The Sandbaggers looked directly at the power, responsibility and values of those commanding the intelligence world, often finding the reality to be troubling.

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The new narrative models provided by both of these series, with the framing of counter-terror security work in terms of police procedural on the one hand, and the casting of espionage as an office-based drama capable of dealing with the complexities of the geopolitical world on the other, would both prove hugely influential on many later spy series. In particular, Spooks (BBC 1, 2002–11) would later, to some extent, work to converge these traditions (see Chapter 6). Concurrently, however, the BBC’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (BBC 2, 1979) offered yet another variant on the work-based ‘cover story’, situating this not within a modernised SIS but instead amongst a much older generation of intelligence officers and a more traditional Establishment world. Notes  1 Adrian Wootton, ‘John le Carré at the NFT’, The Guardian (5 October 2002), www.guardian.co.uk/film/2002/oct/05/features1.  2 Peter Hennessy, The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945–2010 (London: Penguin, 2010; 2nd ed.), p. 2.  3 Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London: Palgrave/ BFI, 2015; 2nd ed.), p. 77.  4 John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 111.  5 Max Sexton, ‘The Origins of Gritty Realism on British Television: Euston Films and Special Branch’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 11:1 (January 2014), pp. 29–30.  6 Rupert Allason, The Branch: A History of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch, 1883–1983 (London: Secker & Warburg, 1983), p. 141.  7 Jack Bell, ‘Playing the war game’, The Daily Mirror (27 May 1970).  8 Cooke, British Television Drama: A History, p. 101.  9 Manuel Alvarado and John Stewart, Made for Television: Euston Films Limited (London: Thames Methuen, 1985), p. 44. 10 Alvarado and Stewart, Euston Films Limited, pp. 42–50. 11 Ted Childs; quoted in Alvarado and Stewart, Euston Films Limited, p. 57. 12 Raymond Williams, ‘What happened at Munich’, The Listener (14 September 1972); reprinted in Raymond Williams, Alan O’Connor (ed.), Raymond Williams on Television (New York; London: Routledge, 1989), p. 21. 13 John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), p. 9.



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14 Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Penguin, 2010; updated ed.), p. 600. 15 Edward Braun, ‘“What truth is there in this story?”: The Dramatisation of Northern Ireland’; in Jonathan Bignell, Stephen Lacey and Madeleine MacMurraugh-Kavanagh (eds), British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), p. 175. 16 Philip Schlesinger, Graham Murdock and Philip Elliott, Televising ‘Terrorism’: Political Violence in Popular Culture (London: Comedia, 1983), p. 32. 17 Jean Seaton, ‘Reith and the Denial of Politics’; in James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power without Responsibility: The Press, Broadcasting and the Internet in Britain (London; New York: Routledge, 2010; 7th ed.), p. 107. 18 Sexton, ‘The Origins of Gritty Realism on British TV’, p. 34. 19 Brian Clemens; interviewed in Without Walls, ‘C4PD: The Professionals’ (Channel 4, 9 April 1996). This documentary is included in ‘The Professionals: Mk 1’ (Blu-Ray, Network Distributing, UK, 2014). 20 Schlesinger et al., Televising Terrorism, pp. 82–83. 21 Jeremy Potter, Independent Television in Britain. Vol.4, Companies and Programmes, 1968–80 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990), p. 90. 22 Robert G. Folsom, The Life and Mysterious Death of Ian MacKintosh: The Inside Story of The Sandbaggers and TV’s Top Spy (Washington D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012), pp. 74–75. 23 Ian MacKintosh, ‘MacKintosh’s Outline for The Sandbaggers’ [1977]; in Folsom, Ian MacKintosh, p. 166. This document has also been reprinted in the liner notes of the ‘The Sandbaggers: The Complete Series’ (DVD, Network Distributing, UK 2009). 24 Christopher Moran, Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 255–280. 25 Folsom, Ian MacKintosh, pp. 13, 166. 26 MacKintosh, ‘Outline for The Sandbaggers’, pp. 167–168. 27 Folsom, Ian MacKintosh, p. 8. 28 Herbert Kretzmer, ‘The Sandbaggers’, Daily Mail (4 March 1980). 29 Adam Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography (London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 201. 30 MacKintosh, ‘Outline for The Sandbaggers’, p. 174. 31 Umberto Eco, ‘Narrative Structures in Fleming’ [1965]; in Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 147. I have made a more extensive examination of the role of intelligence leaders in British spy dramas in Joseph Oldham, ‘The Man Behind the Desk and Other Bureaucracies: Portrayals of Intelligence Leadership in British Television Spy Series’; in Christopher Moran, Mark Stout and Ioanna

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Iordanou (eds), Spy Chiefs I: Intelligence Leaders in the Anglosphere (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017). 32 Richard J. Aldrich, The Hidden Hand: Britain, America, and Cold War Secret Intelligence (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2002), p. 14. 33 Peter Wright, with Paul Greengrass, Spycatcher (Richmond, Victoria: Heinemann Australia, 1987), p. 31. 34 Folsom, Ian MacKintosh, p. 72. 35 Ibid., pp. 120–126. 36 Roy Boyle, ‘The real-life spy – gunning for greenfly’, Daily Express (14 August 1978). 37 Jane Ennis, ‘Vanished: The original Sandbagger’, TV Times (26 January–1 February 1980), pp. 2–3; Sean Day-Lewis, ‘Fact & fiction mix in spy outbreak’, Daily Telegraph (29 January 1980); Herbert Kretzmer, ‘I spy a vain bid for realism’, Daily Mail (19 January 1980). 38 Folsom, Ian MacKintosh, p 134. 39 James Murray, ‘Bring back those simple spymen!’, Daily Express (29 January 1980). 40 Nigel West, ‘Foreword’; in Folsom, Ian MacKintosh, p. ix. 41 Terrence Rafferty, ‘Spies who were cool and very, very cold’, New York Times (12 October 2003), www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/arts/ television-spies-who-were-cool-and-very-very-cold.html. 42 Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 130.

3

‘Who killed Great Britain?’: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (BBC 2, 1979) as a modern classic serial From 1955 to 1982 British television broadcasting was organised as a duopoly consisting of the BBC and the ITV companies. Across this period a key point of differentiation between these two broadcasters was broadly accepted; whilst both would compete over popular programming in order to reach a broad audience, the BBC was required to qualify such competitive impulses with a higher degree of cultural aspiration as part of its public service remit. Indeed, with its funding from the licence fee protecting it from commercial pressures, the Corporation placed pride in its capacity to specialise in more highbrow material. The spy genre on British television had, over the 1960s and early 1970s, been epitomised by the adventure series, a highly commercial subgenre dominated by ITV. By contrast, as Lez Cooke writes, the BBC was ‘wary of venturing too far down the road towards the commercialism and consumerism associated with pop culture’ due to its Reithian public service ethos.1 It had made some excursions into the spy genre, but these had tended to imitate models which were already successful on ITV. In the 1960s, for example, the fantastical Adam Adamant Lives! (BBC 1, 1966–67) had been consciously designed as a rival to The Avengers (ITV, 1961–69), whilst the success of Callan (ITV, 1967–72) in the following decade had led to a number of more realist spy dramas in the same vein ­including Codename (BBC 2, 1970) and Spy Trap (BBC 1, 1972–75). At the end of the 1970s, however, the BBC would, for arguably the first time, take the initiative in this genre with a seven-part serialised adaptation of John le Carré’s novel Tinker Tailor Soldier

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Spy (1974). Whilst the existential thriller tradition associated with le Carré had provided a loose inspiration for some earlier spy series including Callan and The Sandbaggers (ITV, 1978–80), the strategy of directly adapting a novel by arguably the most acclaimed living spy author of the time marked this as far more of an ‘event’ production. Indeed, as this chapter will explore, the BBC’s approach to this adaptation was not in fact framed primarily in terms of genre, but instead within one of the most overtly Reithian categories of drama, the classic serial. Whilst Callan and The Sandbaggers have been relatively marginalised in the history of British television drama as somewhat ephemeral texts, Tinker Tailor is a far more iconic programme. In its original context, it was a highly prestigious production, nominated for nine BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) awards and winning two, and it was successfully sold to over 30 countries. In retrospect it has often been cited as one of the finest dramas in the history of British television, with Dominic Sandbrook’s popular history of the 1970s describing it as perhaps the greatest television programme of the decade.2 Its totemic status is further illustrated by its regular use as a point of comparison for the later film adaptation of the same novel (Tomas Alfredson, 2011), with critics frequently referencing it as an exceptionally high bar to be cleared.3 This chapter will position Tinker Tailor as a key moment of intervention in both the television spy genre and British television drama more broadly around the turn of the 1980s. Initially I explore its production context within the classic serial tradition, situating it within a drive to refresh the strand by adapting more modern novels, moving towards 16mm locating filming and embracing the growing export potential of such programming. I then provide a close analysis of the serial, adopting what Sarah Cardwell describes as a ‘televisual’ approach to the classic novel adaptation through considering how features specific to the medium shape textual characteristics.4 Firstly, I consider how the complex narrative and detailheavy writing style of le Carré was adapted for a more general audience, exploring the sources of pleasure that this could be seen to offer in the context of prime-time television drama. Secondly, I examine how serial’s aesthetic style, in particular its use of extensive location filming, enabled it to visualise some of the deeper, elegiac themes of the novel.



‘Who killed Great Britain?’ 75 The classic serial and heritage England

Originating on the radio, the classic serial had long been one of the most overt examples of the BBC’s Reithian adherence to cultural enrichment. It was a strand designed to present long-form adaptations of literary classics from an established canon of authors including Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. From the early 1950s the classic serial also became a regular presence on BBC television, beginning with an adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s The Warden (BBC, 1951). Notably it was one of the pioneering instances of the closed serial in British television drama, a form which presented a continuous story over several episodes, building to a set conclusion in the final instalment. Although it would be several decades before this became established as a popular form for original drama, John Caughie characterises the closed serial as arguably the ‘classical form of television narrative’, the extension of interrupted time providing ‘forms of engagement, involvement, and subjectivity specific to television’.5 In 1964 the BBC launched its new minority interest channel BBC 2 which would become the classic serial’s primary home. A few years later the strand reached a major turning point with The Forsyte Saga (BBC 2, 1967), an expansive 26-episode adaptation of six novels by John Galsworthy which presented a complex family saga unfolding over a period from 1906 to 1928. The Forsyte Saga was a huge success, not only on its original BBC 2 transmission but also through sales to 45 countries which allowed it to reach a worldwide audience of over 165 million viewers and established the classic serial’s export potential.6 In 1969 this serial was able to crack the particularly lucrative American market when it was distributed amongst local public television stations to great acclaim. Juxtaposing this with the concurrent disappearance of British adventure series from US networks, Jeffrey S. Miller argues that this moment represented a shift in imported British drama’s signification ‘from a mod sense of contemporary consumption to a historical and literary sensibility of aristocratic noblesse oblige’.7 Unlike the ITVdominated adventure series, this was an area in which the BBC held the more firmly established tradition. Over the early 1970s the classic serial became part of a broader proliferation of historical drama on British television. Against a

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backdrop of economic and imperial decline, the decade saw a wider growth in the heritage industry, described by Robert Hewison as the symptom of ‘a country obsessed with its past, and unable to face its future’, and the prominence of historical drama can be seen as a particular manifestation of this trend.8 The economic downturn also severely impacted the BBC itself, as Carl Gardner and John Wyver described in 1980: Inflation began slowly to outstrip the Corporation’s fixed revenue and the licence fee fell more and more out of phase with costs – from being an other-worldly institution where vulgar things like money were somehow slightly sordid considerations compared with the fondly-paraded ‘enrichment’ of the cultural life of the nation, television slipped inexorably into the era of ‘cost-effectiveness’.9

This was a context in which the serial form of the classic adaptation posed several advantages over the more erratic and unpredictable form of the single play, as costs for sets, costumes and casting could be spread over the budget for multiple episodes, whilst stronger audience loyalty could be nurtured by regular scheduling. Furthermore, the success of The Forsyte Saga in the US had opened up new doors for export possibilities. In the late 1960s the American public television stations had been organised into a loose network known as the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), positioned as a non-commercial alternative to the three main networks. Whilst PBS could not afford to produce its own drama, it provided a ready outlet for British period drama and literary adaptations, particularly when Boston station WGBH developed an anthology programme for such productions entitled Masterpiece Theatre (signalling its Anglophile identity by adopting the British spelling). Although PBS attracted a much more marginal audience by comparison with the networks, it was targeted specifically at an affluent, educated elite for whom it would help to define influential notions of ‘quality’ in television drama. Historical dramas thus increasing became co-productions funded with US money, although, with British television’s high reputation for such programming, creative control tended to reside with the British producers.10 This created a situation in which the BBC could pursue alternative income sources whilst simultaneously remaining true to the Reithian public service ethos, and through this the Corporation came to establish itself as a key player in the international market for television drama.



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Throughout most of the 1970s the classic serial remained largely studio-bound and shot on videotape. It is perhaps surprising that a strand of drama which was emerging as British television’s most successful export would resist modern developments in production techniques such as the innovations in 16mm location filming discussed in the previous chapter, instead favouring a highly conservative style. Yet some have argued that this aesthetic could, in this context, evoke more culturally-valued media. Cardwell, for example, argues that the studio-bound style can be interpreted as ‘literary’ due to an ‘excessive reliance upon language and a downplaying of the pictorial or visually impressive or expressive’.11 Alternatively, Elke Weissmann argues that it can be seen as ‘theatrical’, as suggested by ‘the set-up of the studio where one of the walls remained open and establishing shots constantly returned the audience to a space which in theatre would be taken up by the auditorium’.12 The latter interpretation was indeed acknowledged by the Masterpiece Theatre label, which also traded upon the high reputation of British theatrical acting in the international television market. The classic serial was therefore validated as ‘quality’ drama, particularly in the PBS context, through providing a dialogue-driven adaptation of a literary source utilising the theatrical aesthetic of the traditional television studio. Any visual pleasures were generally to be found in areas such as costumes, props and set design, with Caughie suggesting that the classic serial offered ‘a pleasure in the ornamental and the everyday which the history of aesthetics has assigned to the feminine, a pleasure which the academy, and academic film and television theory, has not regarded as manly, noble, or dignified’.13 This sits in contrast to the more ‘masculine’ focus of 16mm filmed drama associated with Play for Today or The Sweeney (ITV, 1975–78), which more typically sited their pleasures in the documentary-style presentation of authentic, gritty locations. In the mid-1970s Jonathan Powell arrived at the BBC to produce an adaptation of Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (BBC 2, 1978) written by Dennis Potter. Powell had previously forged his career at Granada Television, the ITV franchise-holder for the Northwest where his most recent project had been The Nearly Man (ITV, 1975), an original serial concerning a middle-aged Labour MP written by Arthur Hopcraft and directed by John Irvin. By the time of his arrival, the BBC was producing around three or four classic

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serials per year, and Powell would remain in charge of the strand up until the early 1980s. In his first few years in this position, his productions included adaptations of traditional classics such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (BBC 2, 1978) and Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (BBC 2, 1979). In addition to this, however, he describes how ‘there had always been an informal agreement that we could do classics and also pepper it with more contemporary material’, in order to avoid exhausting the bestknown classics and to keep the strand fresh.14 One example of this produced shortly into his tenure was The Birds Fall Down (BBC 2, 1978) based on a 1966 novel by Rebecca West. With a narrative centred on intrigue amongst aristocratic Tsarist exiles in the 1900s, this set a precedent whereby a certain kind of literary thriller might be eligible for adaptation into a classic serial. At the same time, however, Powell’s former employer was working to build up its own tradition of prestigious historical dramas. Julia Hallam describes how from ITV’s early days Granada had ‘set itself the objective of providing high quality popular programmes that would surpass even the BBC’s threshold of quality and standards’.15 In terms of historical drama, this had previously taken the form of long-running, popular dramas with a strong north-western regional identity, including John Finch’s A Family at War (ITV, 1970–72) and an adaptation of A. J. Cronin’s The Stars Look Down (ITV, 1975). Later in the 1970s, however, Granada mounted an incursion into the BBC’s prized tradition of the classic novel adaptation with a four-part version of Dickens’ Hard Times (ITV, 1977), written by Hopcraft and directed by Irvin. Although much of Granada’s Hard Times was still taped within the studio, this was unusually done with a single-camera rather than the conventional multi-camera set up, enabling tighter control over the image. This was furthermore supplemented by more lavish filmed exteriors than was typical of BBC Dickens productions, with an old railway yard outside Granada’s Manchester studios providing a suitably atmospheric location for the 1850s industrial town setting, establishing a dark and gloomy aesthetic that would become a standard approach for subsequent Dickens adaptations. As Powell recalls, this caused something of an existential anxiety within the BBC, as the classic serial had long been ‘one of the planks that really was inbuilt into the BBC’s proposition about the licence fee, the audience and the BBC’s relationship to society’, demonstrating the



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BBC’s commitment to literature, education and quality.16 The prospect of such prestigious programming emerging from a commercial company therefore threatened to undermine one of the most compelling cases for the BBC’s licence fee funding. The competition between the BBC and Granada converged in an attempt by both to acquire the rights to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). Despite having been written over three decades previously, this was a somewhat timely choice of novel for adaptation. In its original context, it had been Waugh’s nostalgic celebration of a fading English land-owning aristocracy, as symbolised by the titular setting of Brideshead Castle. Waugh had written Brideshead at a time when many such country houses were being demolished, although in the end many had been saved through donation to the National Trust, forming the basis of the late twentieth-century heritage industry. In 1974 the Labour government had proposed the introduction of a wealth tax in order to help with the country’s economic woes, but this had been met with vehement opposition from the preservation lobby, who argued that this would endanger such properties. This sparked a public ‘heritage debate’ which would run across the late 1970s.17 Yet despite the BBC’s ambitions, the rights to Brideshead were ultimately awarded to Granada, enabling them to build upon the confidence they had gained making Hard Times and produce their most lavish drama yet. With the BBC even further alarmed by this development, Powell was tasked with finding another novel to adapt into a worthy rival production, and thereby re-establish the Corporation’s superiority over commercial television at producing such material. Adapting Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy as a classic serial Over the decade since he had first came to prominence with The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963), John le Carré had retained the status of an internationally bestselling author, yet none of his subsequent novels had entirely recaptured the same heights of critical and popular success as his breakthrough. Three of his earliest books had been adapted as feature films during this period, whilst the author had also made an initial excursion into writing for television with The End of the Line, his first (and ultimately only) original television play. This was a claustrophobic piece, confined almost entirely to the setting of a railway carriage, which portrayed a battle of wits

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between an atomic spy suffering a breakdown and a mysterious clergyman seeking his confession. When first submitted to the BBC as a potential Wednesday Play, this script was rejected; perhaps in this ‘golden age’ of British television drama, the strand’s production team was sufficiently confident in its indigenous writing school that it saw no particular value in producing the work of an acclaimed bestselling author to order to ‘legitimate’ a medium then keenlyfocused on developing its own dramatic traditions.18 The script was instead taken up by Thames Television, then experiencing success with the similarly downbeat and psychologically-oriented Callan, and produced for Armchair Theatre (transmitted on 29 June 1970). In the mid-1970s, le Carré achieved a return to form with the novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), which became his most critically acclaimed book in a decade and a No. 1 bestseller in both the UK and US. The narrative depicts the retired George Smiley being pressed back into service to uncover the identity of a mole within the highest echelons of British intelligence. This premise served in part as an allegory of the discovery of Kim Philby’s treachery in 1963, with le Carré aiming to explore the complex ‘inside-out logic’ of the ­double-agent operation.19 This essentially takes the form of a traditional whodunit narrative structure, with the identity of the mole withheld until the end and uncovered through a process of painstaking detection, as Smiley and his allies consult numerous former intelligence colleagues and documentary sources. Yet it is also notable for its complex, non-linear structure, making extensive use of flashbacks as prior events are remembered by Smiley or related to him by former colleagues. Much of this centres on Smiley’s attempts to unravel the circumstances of Operation Testify, a doomed mission into Czechoslovakia carried out by the officer Jim Prideaux six months prior to the start of the narrative. This, it transpires, has been masterminded by the mole to ensure the downfall of Control, the previous head of the Circus, and the installation of a new regime more pliant to his machinations. As such, the truth behind Operation Testify proves key to unravelling the traitor’s identity. The complex narrative also enabled le Carré to examine the culture of the Circus more extensively than in any of his 1960s novels, developing an idea he had articulated in 1968 that the British secret services can be interpreted as ‘microcosms of the British condition, of our social attitudes and vanities’.20 Here institutional treachery serves a device for a broader examination of



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the state-of-the-nation in a climate of decline, the novel exploring the implications of the Philby narrative as, in Michael Denning’s words, ‘the riddle and cover-up of the question “who killed Great Britain?”’.21 More specifically, it serves as a portrait of Smiley’s generation. These were the senior intelligence officers who had fought the espionage side of the Second World War only for their victory to be lost to the post-imperial disillusion of, as Smiley muses near the end, ‘a poor island with scarcely a voice that would carry across the water’.22 The intricacies of their relationships and rivalries within this institutional world thus provide a professional variation on the family saga. As with previous novels, le Carré received film offers for Tinker Tailor but as he later recalled, ‘I was very leery, then, of the short form and I thought that Tinker, Tailor would work far better in long form.’23 The television serial thus presented itself as an obvious alternative screen vehicle. A first attempt was made by London Weekend Television who acquired the rights to the novel in the mid-1970s, yet this adaptation was abandoned when a set of scripts written by Julian Bond did not prove to le Carré’s liking.24 According to Powell, LWT had attempted ‘to unravel Tinker Tailor into a 12-parter and tell the story from the beginning to the end’, reorganising the complex, non-chronological narrative structure of the novel into a more linear progression.25 Whilst this approach ultimately proved unworkable, it is nonetheless indicative of how the novel was perceived by would-be television adaptors, offering something perhaps closer to the long-term dynastic family intrigue seen in lengthy serials such as The Forsyte Saga. At the time of Granada’s acquisition of Brideshead, Powell had recently read Tinker Tailor and ‘absolutely loved it’. He was furthermore struck by its potential for television adaptation, not simply due to its entertainment value as a spy thriller but ‘mainly because of its literary quality, because of its storytelling quality’.26 This was evidently another example of a contemporary text being adapted into a ‘modern classic’, but with the novel having yet to be absorbed into an established canon this was open to a more critical perspective. Robert Giddings and Keith Selby, for instance, position the BBC’s Tinker Tailor as a key example of the classic serial’s ability to confer ‘classic status’ upon a work, describing it as ‘a full-blown attempt to transform a modern spy novel into a classic novel by means of translating it into an undeniable classic serial’.27

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This connects to the issues at the core of what le Carré’s biographer Adam Sisman describes as the author’s ‘curiously ambiguous’ reputation, with critics divided on whether he is merely a writer of high quality genre novels or has in some sense transcended his genre and achieved the status of ‘literature’.28 In deciding to adapt a le Carré novel as a classic serial, the BBC by implication accepted his literary status albeit in a consciously bold and daring move. Le Carré’s high profile in the US provided perhaps another incentive, with his novels now prominent enough over the Atlantic to receive front page reviews in the New York Times Book Review and cover essays in Time magazine. Another reason for Tinker Tailor’s suitability might be found in a curious mirroring between it and Brideshead. Whilst Waugh’s novel had returned nostalgically to the formative years of the ‘Brideshead generation’ who had attended Oxford University in the 1920s, Tinker Tailor is the story of a generation only slightly removed, with Smiley and many of his associates described as having attended the same university in the 1930s. This was also the decade in which the Cambridge Five had first been recruited by Soviet intelligence, and a concurrent popular account of these figures by Andrew Boyle, The Climate of Treason (1979), characterised the period in terms of ‘an agony of conflicting beliefs’ where ‘the choice between fumbling democratic procedures for intractable local problems and the final revolutionary solution of the Communist International seemed a simple one for rebellious and discontented idealists to make’.29 With its contemporary setting Tinker Tailor is focused on the twilight of this generation’s careers and the consequences of such a choice in the present. Whilst Brideshead opens with the youthful summer shared by its central homosocial pairing Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte at Oxford, one of Tinker Tailor’s plotlines focuses on the troubled later days of a similar relationship between Prideaux and senior Circus officer Bill Haydon. Collectively, therefore, the two adaptations provided an oddly complementary bookending exploration of a privileged generation whose lives and careers had spanned most of the twentieth century and borne witness to the end of empire. The rights for Tinker Tailor were by this point available, with LWT having coincidentally allowed their option to expire the week prior to the BBC’s enquiry. However, a substantial obstacle was posed by Paramount Pictures who, as a result of a contractual situation surrounding their film adaptation of The Spy Who Came in



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from the Cold (Martin Ritt, 1965), had retained the rights to several of le Carré characters (including Smiley himself). As a solution, Paramount was brought on board as co-producer with distribution rights for the USA and Canada.30 Powell recruited Hopcraft to write the scripts and Irvin to direct, reuniting him with the team behind The Nearly Man and providing the BBC with a coup through enlisting the partnership responsible for Granada’s Hard Times. Occupying the unusual position of a ‘classic’ author still living at the time of adaptation, le Carré asked for ‘the right to be consulted and to comment on the scripts’ as a condition of the BBC’s licence, and would become involved with the production in an advisory capacity.31 Although he was given no contractual rights, the BBC was keen to work with him for, as Powell commented, ‘it was his world that he’d created in his books, and we were all very, very committed to recreating that world, so what he had to say was important.’32 This was particularly the case with regard to le Carré’s intelligence background, as he possessed key knowledge and insight unavailable to the production team. Furthermore, after agreeing with Powell that Alec Guinness would be an excellent choice for the part of Smiley, the author personally made a preliminary and informal ‘early warning’ approach to the actor, presenting himself as part of the team, and this initiated a long exchange of letters and eventual friendship between the two. 33 Guinness had first risen to prominence as a stage actor in the 1930s, described in a Radio Times feature on Tinker Tailor as one of ‘that group of actors who came up in the classical theatre (mainly the Old Vic)’ alongside such other luminaries as Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richardson, John Gielgud and Michael Redgrave.34 In the 1940s, he had also established himself as a major film actor, particularly through early starring roles in two iconic Dickens adaptations, Great Expectations (David Lean, 1946) and Oliver Twist (Lean, 1948). By the time of Tinker Tailor’s production, as biographer Allan Hunter writes, Guinness ‘enjoyed a status that few ever attain; a fiercely respected elder statesman of his art and craft who at his peak was one of the most precise and eloquent players that ever strutted across a stage or screen’.35 He was, however, known for his general refusal of work in television, a medium which had still been in its infancy when he had first risen to fame. As a result, his recruitment was another major coup for the production, bringing the cultural capital of two older, more established art forms and clearly indicating that

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this would be far from a typical television production. At the time of original transmission, Guinness’ apparently surprising decision to accept a multi-episode television role was perhaps the most significant source of comment in surrounding press discourse, overshadowing even the focus placed on le Carré’s authorship.36 Whilst it is possible to imagine Hopcraft’s dialogue-heavy scripts being recorded in the studio, Powell was by this point pushing for classic serials to be shot on 16mm film, bringing them in line with cutting-edge aesthetic trends in British television drama. He describes how Euston Films productions such as The Sweeney had ‘really moved the possibility of the popular series forward’, making the classic serial ‘begin to look slightly dusty and old-fashioned and not very exciting, not very contemporary, not very good-looking compared to other forms of drama’. Whilst allowing that certain kinds of historical drama could be accomplished well in the studio, he indicated that ‘what you couldn’t do was really contemporary pieces, and the kind of narrative and character energy of programmes like The Sweeney was getting all the attention.’37 Euston had by this point begun experimenting with the closed serial form with Trevor Preston’s Out (ITV, 1978). This utilised the same filming style as The Sweeney but substituted the episodic crime narratives with a more slow-burning and morally ambiguous story of an ex-convict seeking vengeance on the informant responsible for his imprisonment. G.F. Newman’s Law and Order (BBC 2, 1978), a BBC serial also shot on 16mm and produced by Tony Garnett as a continuation of his earlier radical work, had similarly subverted the gritty police series by depicting corruption and brutality as rife in the British police and legal system. Meanwhile, by the late 1970s the main US networks were developing their own indigenous tradition of serials (or ‘miniseries’), including Roots (ABC-US, 1977) and Holocaust (NBC, 1978), combining complex ongoing narratives with a more filmic aesthetic. Whilst over most of the decade the studio aesthetic of the classic serial had been valued in the PBS context for its ‘theatrical’ connotations, such a development may have indicated its potential to be superseded over the 1980s. In the end, the prestige that accumulated around Tinker Tailor, particularly with the recruitment of Guinness, as well as the looming threat from Granada’s Brideshead, led to it becoming the first classic serial to be shot entirely on 16mm film and almost entirely on location. At the time of transmission, the Radio Times



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quoted Guinness as saying, with regard to television, ‘I always had a slight feeling that it provided the worst of both worlds. But Tinker, Tailor has changed my mind.’38 These two ‘worlds’ might be interpreted as theatre and film, with a long-standing complaint levelled against traditional studio recording concerning its supposedly hybrid status between these two more respected media. With the switch to 16mm film, however, Guinness was essentially spared the traditional television production technique, experiencing a mode of production more akin to feature filmmaking. The tighter time constraints of television production by comparison to feature films, however, proved incompatible with his usual acting methods. Thus, by a special agreement not conventionally afforded to other actors, the production team spent around ten days with Guinness in a committee room in Lime Grove Studios, going over ‘every single line of the script prior to filming’ so that he could ‘enact the scenes with the director … and fit the words to it’.39 For much of the preceding decade, 16mm film had been employed in drama largely for its documentary associations, its grainy quality typically used to connote a gritty contemporary style which lay somewhat against the identity of the classic serial. The quality of 16mm had been improving over the 1970s, however, and by the latter part of the decade there had been new drives to experiment with employing it for a more stylised aesthetic. One notable instance was Licking Hitler (BBC 1, 10 January 1978), a Play for Today written and directed by David Hare, which focused on a counter-intelligence unit broadcasting black propaganda into Nazi Germany from an English country house in 1941. Peter Ansorge, the play’s script editor, later recalled how, despite it being filmed entirely on location, ‘each shot was lit according to the style of 1940s cinema. They highlighted the contrast between light and shadow; the actor’s face was often surrounded by darkness in order to convey an emotional effect. For the first time in a BBC film the camera did not move, apart from one long tracking shot towards the end.’40 A style of this kind, enabled by the ability to light shots individually for single-camera filming, would be adopted in numerous sequences in Tinker Tailor. This therefore eliminated the ‘immediacy effect’ identified by Caughie in pioneering 16mm work by figures such as Ken Loach, rejecting ‘the conventions of spontaneity and the appearance of being unrehearsed’ in favour of a much more stylised and composed image.41

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Tinker Tailor thus provided something of a climax to developments in British television drama through the 1970s, combining the long-standing tradition of literary adaptation with the more innovative strain of drama shot on location using 16mm film. With production of Granada’s Brideshead delayed by a strike, it enabled the BBC to temporarily reassert its dominance in the classic adaptation, Powell describing how: Tinker Tailor certainly did a job for the BBC in terms of saying to the audience … they may take this classic novel and try and steal our thunder, but we’ve got Alec Guinness in this contemporary novel so what we’re doing is something new and more interesting, something slightly more of the BBC, something more adventurous, something which pushes the boundaries.42

Brideshead Revisited (ITV, 1981) eventually appeared on ITV two years after Tinker Tailor’s BBC 2 broadcast. As a similarly prestigious production, this shared many features with Tinker Tailor, including two highly distinguished actors from Guinness’ generation, Olivier and Gielgud, providing further legitimation from more established art forms. Powell describes how over this period, ‘there was this kind of reputational battle going on between these two organisations to try and claim the high ground of this area of programming, which of course was very important to the BBC.’43 Thus BBC went on to produce notable ‘prestige’ adaptations of Dickens’ Bleak House (BBC 2, 1985), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night (BBC 2, 1985) and Olivia Manning’s Fortunes of War (BBC 1, 1987), although it was Granada’s dramatisation of Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown (ITV, 1984), featuring extensive location filming in India, which marked the high-point of escalating production values in the classic adaptation. Following the model established with Tinker Tailor, over the 1980s the most prestigious classic adaptations from both broadcasters would all be shot on 16mm film, cementing the banishment of the ‘theatrical’ style in favour of the new filmic aesthetic. ‘A new-found pleasure in losing one’s bearings’: complexity and modes of engagement Tinker Tailor was first broadcast on Monday evenings on BBC 2 over September and October 1979, with each episode repeated the



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following Sunday. Despite being scheduled on the BBC’s minority interest channel, it was unexpectedly aided by the same ITV strike that had disrupted production on the 1980 runs of The Sandbaggers, which eliminated all commercial competition. As a result, the serial was able to achieve average viewing figures of 8.5 million, with an extra 3 million for the repeats, and over the seven weeks of its original transmission it became a national talking-point. The adaptation was therefore able to reach a broader, more general audience than le Carré’s usual readership, including many viewers less accustomed to his intricate, detail-heavy writing style. A part of the popular response centred on the ostensible incomprehensibility of the plot, with Terry Wogan’s BBC Radio 2 breakfast show famously running a quiz around the serial entitled ‘Does anyone know what’s going on?’. Similarly, when the serial appeared in the US on PBS the following year, personal introductions to each episode were provided by news anchor Robert MacNeil, whose function was ‘to explain the workings of the Circus to the baffled  but fascinated American viewers’.44 This did not, however,  appear to harm the serial’s reception in either country, instead simply c­ontributing to its mystique. The complexity of Tinker Tailor can in fact be located on two levels; the macro, in reference to the overall structure and presentation of the complex, non-linear narrative, and the micro, in reference to  the  use of highly specialised jargon and other similarly dense detail in the dialogue. On the micro level, the characteristic terms of le Carré’s novels such as ‘scalphunters’, ‘lamplighters’ and ‘housekeepers’ are used liberally in the adaptation with minimal explanation provided. This signals the serial as a challenging drama that requires and rewards close attention. The accompanying Radio Times feature even provided a special glossary for these terms, supplementing the central television text with, in a sense, a guide to aid the dedicated viewer in fully decoding it.45 The fascination with detail also has a visual dimension, with le Carré having provided extensive advice to production designer Austen Spriggs on how to present secret files, code-books, encryption pads and other paraphernalia of espionage.46 In contrast to the more ornamental and ostensibly ‘feminine’ pleasures of the traditional classic serial, therefore, here a fascination with detail is used to evoke a professional space engaged with geopolitical affairs, providing what might be considered a more

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‘masculine’ reconceptualisation of such pleasures. Casual references to espionage cases past and present abound in the dialogue, whether relevant or otherwise, creating an impression of a constant stream of long-term and often banal intelligence activity occurring in the background. This arguably provides a more plausible depiction of espionage than possible in episodic series by sheer virtue of not having to shape operations to fit the limited canvas of single episodes. The emphasis on procedure at the centre of a series like The Sandbaggers is therefore pushed to the background in order to focus on a wider existential crisis in the institution for which standard procedure is inadequate. On the macro level, for the most part Hopcraft’s adaptation hews closely to the novel’s structure, preserving its non-linear approach and following Smiley as he consults his former colleagues for their personal testimonies concerning prior events. These conversations are typically depicted in one of two different ways. On the one hand, many are presented simply as long, uninterrupted scenes dominated by dialogue, and Powell recalls that priority was placed on keeping faith ‘with these really fantastic interrogation scenes’.47 For example, Smiley’s conversation with former Circus Head of Research Connie Sachs (Beryl Reid) in Part Three (24 September 1979) lasts a largely unbroken seven minutes (see Figure 3.1), whilst his conversation with Prideaux (Ian Bannen) consumes essentially the entire second half of Part Five (8 October 1979), albeit moving between several locations. This conversational style recalls the two-hander approach of le Carré’s own earlier television script for The End of the Line, which in many ways provides a short-form prototype for a model of drama deployed more expansively by Tinker Tailor. The slow pace of these scenes is also a key stylistic trait of the classic serial, serving, as Cardwell argues, to differentiate the strand from ‘both fast-paced television and frenetic modern life’, providing ‘a textual resonance of its connection with literature, which is seen as a more leisurely, measured and thoughtful pursuit, for reading is carried out more slowly and quietly than watching television’.48 Previously, such slowness had been in part technologically determined by the ‘theatrical’ studio-bound production style, but with the adoption of 16mm filming for Tinker Tailor this became no longer a necessity but a stylistic choice. The refusal of a Euston-style ‘kick, bollock and scramble approach’ in favour of a slow, dialogue-driven style



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Figure 3.1  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. George Smiley (Alec Guinness) talks to his old colleague Connie Sachs (Beryl Reid) in one of the ‘interrogation’ scenes that characterise much of the serial.

is therefore a deliberate and self-conscious technique to provide distinction and demonstrate prestige. Other recollections, such as those of Sam Collins (John Standing) earlier in Part Five, are presented in the form of on-screen flashbacks, yet even in these instances the contents of the flashbacks also tend to be lengthy conversations. The most ambitious use of this device comes in the second half of Part Three, as Smiley describes to his protégé Peter Guillam (Michael Jayston) his own experiences of the political infighting within the Circus during the last days of Control’s regime. This takes the form of an extended and continuous flashback sequence lasting for around 21 minutes 30 seconds, encompassing several long conversation scenes. Both techniques are particularly demanding of an audience’s engagement, as full comprehension requires that attention is paid not just to the detail conveyed in the dialogue and potential clues that it might contain but also how these past events, described or depicted out of chronological order, fit together in the narrative’s overall timeline. There are, however, some notable instances in Part One when the presentation of events on-screen is changed from the order of

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presentation in the novel. Firstly, the episode opens with a pretitles sequence which depicts the four top members of the Circus assembling for a meeting in a drab-looking office. In a lengthy scene lasting a full two minutes, Toby Esterhase (Bernard Hepton), Roy Bland (Terence Rigby), Percy Alleline (Michael Aldridge) and Bill Haydon (Ian Richardson) all enter one by one and take a seat, a single camera covering the entrance of each, repeatedly panning from door to table and cutting back to the door for the next entrant. During this sequence, no dialogue is spoken, although some physical actions stand out; Bland chokes on a cigarette whilst Haydon balances a saucer on top of his teacup to keep it warm and has to kick the door open and closed. When all have arrived, a medium shot depicts the group sat at the table, Alleline announces ‘Right, we shall start’ and the scene concludes (see Figure 3.2). It is never revealed what this meeting is about and indeed it seems to be offered for its typicality and banality. Although some of the characters’ mannerisms are derived from later in the novel, the scene as presented is essentially an invention of the television adaptation. Indeed, whilst it introduces the slow pace typical of the

Figure 3.2  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The meeting of the Circus’ top personnel which opens the serial.



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many conversation scenes across the serial, the complete absence of dialogue and entirely visual points of interest mark this quite conspicuously as a non-literary and specifically televisual sequence. On one level, it serves to highlight the four characters who will come to the fore as suspects in the mole-hunt, as well as affording some subtle character insights (such as Haydon’s irreverence). On another, however, the lack of any clear narrative purpose establishes immediately that this is not a programme which will work to seize its audience’s attention, as with the more conventional use of the pre-titles sequence (as seen on the adventure series and police series such as The Sweeney), but instead a drama with the confidence to rely upon the discerning viewer’s patience. Another variation on the novel’s structure takes up most of the first half of Part One. Here the narrative skips back six months, unmotivated by any recollection, and the events of Operation Testify are depicted from Prideaux’s perspective, showing the fateful events leading up to his capture by the Soviets in Czechoslovakia. In the novel, Operation Testify only gradually comes into view as other characters recall it from their more marginal perspectives, and Prideaux’s central experience is only related when Smiley eventually tracks him down in Chapter 31 (of 38). The relocation of this sequence to the beginning of the serial has some significant effects. Firstly, it gives the story an opening teaser, providing in essence the appetiser that the pre-titles scene had refused, but again at a much slower pace. It also, however, highlights the whodunit structure of the plot at a much earlier point than in the novel. The sequence begins with Prideaux summoned to visit Control, who explains his suspicions of a traitor in the Circus, and as a result provides the central narrative hook at a much earlier point. (In the book the existence of a mole only becomes apparent in Chapter 8.) This aspect of the narrative is even given a visual aid when Control reveals a noticeboard on which he has pinned photographs of all of the suspects (see Figure 3.3). Through moving certain elements of the novel to the beginning, the adaptation can therefore be seen to provide some limited accommodations for the more general audience, and indeed it is notable that the 2011 film would adopt a similar strategy. Nonetheless, this is an isolated example in an adaptation that elsewhere does little to compromise on the complexity of its source novel. Over the following decade, the form of the closed serial would continue to grow in prominence on British television. Caughie argues

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Figure 3.3  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Control’s suspect chart, presented at an early point in the serial, provides a visual motif for the whodunit narrative structure.

that this represents ‘a significant shift in expectations of popular narrative form: a new-found pleasure in losing one’s bearings; an openness to – or appetite for – forms of narrative that sustain attention and pleasure without all the narrative links being in place’.49 Tinker Tailor stands as an influential television drama in terms of nurturing such new expectations and pleasures. Whilst the wealth of verbal detail and non-linear structure offer much for the committed viewer to engage with, the narrative is nonetheless deployed to serve a simple and elegant narrative hook, that of a whodunit to establish the identity of the mole. As a result, a viewer with the disposition of Wogan’s call-in listeners is able to enjoy the complexity and tolerate instances of confusion in the case of a story that is structured to support a simple and compelling central mystery. The effectiveness of this balance in Tinker Tailor is well illustrated through comparison with several subsequent prestige spy dramas. As an offshoot of their rivalry over classic novel adaptations, the BBC and Granada would also develop competing ­traditions of lavish spy novel dramatisations in serial form over



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the 1980s. The BBC adapted two further le Carré novels, the first of which, Smiley’s People (BBC 2, 1982), was produced as a direct sequel to Tinker Tailor with Guinness returning as Smiley. Later an adaptation of A Perfect Spy (BBC 2, 1987) returned to the topic of betrayal, this time through reversing the emphasis and depicting the full life and career of a traitor, Magnus Pym (Peter Egan). Granada, meanwhile, focused on other spy novelists, first adapting Chessgame (ITV, 1983) from three Anthony Price books, and later dramatising a trilogy of novels by le Carré’s contemporary Len Deighton into the 13-episode ‘blockbuster’ Game, Set and Match (ITV, 1988). This latter venture proved a critical and ratings disaster, as a far more dense and convoluted narrative, making little accommodation from the highly specialist appeal of the sophisticated spy novel, transpired to be too alienating for critics and general audiences.50 Overall, whilst these 1980s prestige spy dramas would, to varying extents, attempt to recapture the narrative and visual style of Tinker Tailor, none would exercise quite the same fascination for the viewing public without the underlying clear proposition of the whodunit premise. ‘That unrepeatable, fading Circus generation’: connecting landscape and theme On a deeper thematic level, Tinker Tailor provides, as previously noted, an elegiac portrait of Smiley’s ageing generation, and this is another key way in which it differs from the contemporaneous realist spy series, The Sandbaggers. Whilst Ian Mackintosh had attempted to move beyond the old-boy image of SIS with a more modern and professional culture rooted in his own naval intelligence background, le Carré had instead come to intelligence from a more privileged background which included education at Sherborne School and Oxford. Tinker Tailor instead, therefore, examines a more traditionally upper-middle-class conception of SIS that was well suited to the high culture focus of the classic serial. The story of ‘that unrepeatable, fading Circus generation’ which still gave the service ‘its dying flavour of adventure’, as Guillam describes them in the novel, is given a new dimension in the television adaptation through the use of location filming.51 Here architecture and landscape are used to enhance the themes of the story whilst also providing pictorial pleasures in their own right.

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A key example can be found in Part Two (17 September 1979) when Oliver Lacon (Anthony Bate), the civil servant responsible for overseeing the intelligence services, invites Smiley into his garden and asks him to lead the hunt for the mole. In another instance of the serial’s characteristic slow pace, the entire conversation lasts six minutes as the characters traverse several rural settings. Of particular note, however, is the long take that depicts their walk through the garden away from Lacon’s house, a shot which lasts an unbroken two minutes. Initially this is a static and intensely composed shot, with the house on the left of the image and a bare tree framing the characters as they walk towards the camera (see Figure 3.4). After briefly pausing in the foreground of the image, they continue walking and the camera tracks to following their progress whilst constantly keeping the country house and surrounding trees in the background. The whole sequence therefore retains a composed style, demonstrating break with the spontaneous orthodoxy of Euston Films in favour of a more stylised aesthetic. Furthermore, the scenery here is strikingly autumnal, with the trees bare and the ground covered in red and brown leaves, giving a bleak and melancholic tone. Indeed, this is where one of the serial’s most effective visual devices first emerges. Le Carré’s novel opens at the beginning of autumn and moves into winter, with Powell describing how ‘for Smiley it’s a journey into darkness as he finds the heart of the traitor’. This ‘connection between landscape and theme’ was considered sufficiently important, and the drama itself sufficiently prestigious, that the production team were able to ‘schedule it so that the visual narrative of the television series

Figure 3.4  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Smiley and Oliver Lacon (Anthony Bate) converse amidst the autumn scenery of Lacon’s garden.



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echoed the backdrop narrative, the mise-en-scène narrative, of the novel’.52 Thus, after production had commenced in Portugal for the Part Two flashback sequence in October 1978, it subsequently relocated to the UK from the beginning of November and thereafter for the most part followed the events of the story in order, tracing the narrative through the winter months.53 As a result, through its location work, the adaptation faithfully recaptures this seasonal metaphor. Notably a similar device would later appear in Brideshead which also illustrated a fall from innocence through a seasonal shift, this time from full summer to winter. In its interior environments, meanwhile, the serial demonstrates a recurrent fascination with high-culture spaces. The club of the obnoxious civil servant Roddy Martindale (Nigel Stock), for example, is decorated with wood panelling, candelabras and paintings (see Figure 3.5), whilst the living room of Lacon’s house contains ornate furniture, paintings and a fireplace. Settings such as these, rendered more vivid through the use of authentic locations rather than studio sets, see the visual interests of the classic serial increasingly coinciding with the interest in elite property popularised by the heritage

Figure 3.5  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. The gentleman’s club in which Smiley dines with Roddy Martindale (Nigel Stock).

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movement. Of particular note are the closing credits, which are displayed over a shot of Oxford scenery featuring the Radcliffe Camera and St. Mary’s Church and accompanied by a melancholy musical setting of Nunc Dimittus. Although only a small part of the story is set in Oxford, specifically Smiley’s visit to Connie in Part Three, the recurrent presence of this imagery as a framing device does much to evoke the shared history of Smiley’s generation. Appropriately, by the time of Tinker Tailor’s broadcast, the Conservatives had returned to power in the 1979 General Election under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, who had allied herself to the heritage movement as part of, as Patrick Wright describes, ‘her project of bringing back national pride and other old values back to the country’.54 This was an appropriate climate for Granada’s Brideshead to subsequently appear, and Hewison describes how: This story of nostalgic sensuality, frustrated desires, corrupted principles and lost prospects was presented with all the splendour that costume drama can provide … The mere things of the Twenties and Thirties – motor cars, charabancs, steam trains – gleamed with brass and deep varnished paint. Dark polished wood, bright silver and the dense textures of twee, linen and flannel evoked a rich material past made all the more desirable by the knowledge that, except in memory, all this was lost.55

Cardwell argues that, in the history of the classic serial, Brideshead helped to forge ‘a clear generic microcosm to which later adaptations were faithful’, citing features such as its slow pace, emphasis on nostalgia and highly composed shots, as well as the use of particular locations such as the English country house and the gleaming spires of Oxford.56 Yet these characteristics can be found earlier in Tinker Tailor, which has perhaps been overlooked in this regard due to its contemporary setting. In fact, both Tinker Tailor and Brideshead, through their use of 16mm location filming, shift the visual pleasures of the classic serial from the ‘feminine’ decorative emphasis on costume, props and sets to what might be considered a ‘masculine’ focus on architecture and landscape, this in both cases coinciding with a strong narrative focus on homosocial bonds between men. Such high-culture aesthetics are, however, by no means straightforwardly celebrated in Tinker Tailor, and indeed they are often contrasted with highly differing environments. As Smiley seeks



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out witnesses to help him with his investigation, two of his former colleagues are found in the formative spaces of the Establishment, with Connie now a teacher in Oxford and the burnt-out Prideaux having been retired to teach at a prep school where Smiley locates him in Part Five. Both characters have been discarded by the new bureaucracy and put out to pasture in the elite institutes that made them, both having sunk into alcoholism. Prideaux in particular is shown to live in a confined, tilted and gloomy caravan on the school grounds, visibly illustrating his existence on the fringes of this privileged world. The inside of the Circus itself, meanwhile, is presented as a grey bureaucratic world. Whilst the use of office sets in the studio had created an effective space for more immediate intelligence drama to be played out in The Sandbaggers, here the use of location filming creates a more atmospheric portrayal of the Circus as a warren of drab offices and shadowy corridors where intrigue is played out. Smiley and his allies, meanwhile, largely operate outside of the purview of the Circus, and much of the story unfolds in a succession of safe houses and hotels, most of which are just as dark and dingy. Many of these feature highly expressive lighting, particularly the Camden Lock safe house where Smiley and Guillam stake out the mole in Part Seven (22 October 1979), where high contrasts between light and shadow create a mood of tension and paranoia. One feature that these spaces have in common, however, is a continual sense of refusing the contemporary day-to-day society and public sphere, presenting instead the settings of an enclosed institutional world enveloped in its own private histories. Through utilising a very different style of location filming by comparison to the urban gritty realism of Euston, in terms of both the spaces used and the stylised manner in which they are presented, Tinker Tailor marks itself as ‘separate’ from regular television and perhaps the wider world. Whilst, like its source novel, it may offer a microcosmic portrait of the state-of-the-nation, it is a purely allegorical one that seems to exist at a remove from much of the nation itself. Conclusion Considering the concurrent transformation of the single play into the single film, Caughie argues that ‘at some level, the desire for the prestige and production values of the art film in television drama is

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a desire not to be television, or a desire, at least, to conceal the traces of the televisual in television.’57 A similar characterisation might be made in part concerning the BBC’s classic serial adaptation of Tinker Tailor, which similarly aspired to new heights in prestige and production values. This followed the overarching trend in British television drama towards more extensive location filming, here situating le Carré’s world against evocative landscapes and architecture and employing these spaces to vividly chart the journey of Smiley into a heart of darkness within the British Establishment. Featuring a highly composed visual style, slow pace and strong thematic interest in the past, this seems to self-consciously reject many of the key aspects of the more conventionally televisual, in particular the characteristic of immediacy which I previously argued to be a key feature of series such as Callan and Special Branch. Yet a central feature of Tinker Tailor’s wide popularity and ability to engage an audience during its original broadcast came through its use of the specifically televisual structure of the long-form serial. Through this it presented a self-consciously challenging, complex narrative at a considerably extended length, whilst engaging with the shared national culture of broadcasting over seven weeks through striking a careful balance between the underlying simplicity of its whodunit narrative and the pleasures of ‘losing one’s bearings’. Less than a month after the conclusion of its original transmission on 22 October 1979, Tinker Tailor was given an unexpected new topicality with revelation that Sir Anthony Blunt, the Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, had been Fourth Man of the Cambridge Spies, confirmed by Thatcher in Parliament on 15 November. That Blunt had been able to retain his prestigious position in return for a full confession instead of receiving a prison sentence like other less well-connected traitors seemed to indicate for many that the old-boy network was as alive as ever. Yet those who hoped that this would mark a new climate of openness were to be disappointed. In reality, Thatcher’s hand had been forced by the appearance of a figure heavily implied to be Blunt in Boyle’s The Climate of Treason, and over the following decade she would instead come to develop a notoriously hawkish attitude towards state secrecy.58 This would also be a period in which many of the televisual characteristics of Tinker Tailor would prove influential upon a growing lineage of original serial drama written directly for television by some of the medium’s leading authors. Several of these would, in fact, draw



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upon the growing climate of state secrecy to develop highly conspiratorial interpretations of society. Notes  1 Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London: BFI, 2015; 2nd ed.), p. 97.  2 Dominic Sandbrook, State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970–1974 (London: Allen Lane, 2010), p. 48.  3 See, for example, Philip French, ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – review’, The Observer (18 September 2011), www.theguardian.com/film/2011/ sep/17/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-review; Peter Hitchens, ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Travesty’, The Mail on Sunday (21 September 2011), http:// hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/09/tinker-tailor-soldiertravesty.html; Jonathan Romney, ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, The Independent (17 September 2011), www.independent.co.uk/arts-­ entertainment/films/reviews/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-15–2356404.html  4 Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), p. 92.  5 John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 205.  6 Cooke, British Television Drama: A History, pp. 91–92.  7 Jeffrey S. Miller, Something Completely Different: British Television and American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 75.  8 Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 9.  9 Carl Gardner and Wyver, John, ‘The Single Play: From Reithian Reverence to Cost-Accounting and Censorship’, Screen 24:4–5 (1983), p. 118. This was originally presented as a paper at the 1980 Edinburgh Television Festival. 10 Elke Weissmann, Transnational Television Drama: Special Relationships and Mutual Influence between the US and UK (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 143–144. 11 Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, p. 82. 12 Weissmann, Transnational Television Drama, p. 71. 13 Caughie, Television Drama, p. 215. 14 Jonathan Powell, interviewed by the author, 26 July 2012. 15 Julia Hallam, ‘Introduction’; in John Finch (ed.), Granada Television: The First Generation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 12. 16 Jonathan Powell, interviewed by the author, 26 July 2012. 17 Hewison, The Heritage Industry, pp. 63–68.

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18 BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham (hereafter BBC WAC), T48/368/1: Drama Writer’s File: John le Carré, letter to Shaun MacLoughlin (script editor, The Wednesday Play) from Carol Smith (at A. P. Warr), 17 July 1969. 19 Adam Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography (London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 354. 20 John le Carré, ‘Introduction’; in Bruce Page, David Leitch and Phillip Knightly, Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation (London: Andre Deutsch, 1968), p. 15. 21 Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 121. 22 John le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (London: Pan Books, 1975 [1974]), p. 297. 23 Adrian Wootton, ‘John le Carré at the NFT’, The Guardian (Saturday 5 October 2002), www.guardian.co.uk/film/2002/oct/05/features1. 24 BBC WAC, R CONT 20: John le Carré: 6 July 1977, memo from Assistant Head of Copyright to H.B.C. Tel, 6 July 1977. 25 Jonathan Powell, interviewed by the author, 26 July 2012. 26 Ibid. 27 Robert Giddings and Keith Selby, The Classic Serial on Television and Radio (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 53. 28 Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography, pp. xviii–xix. 29 Andrew Boyle, The Climate of Treason: Five who Spied for Russia (London: Hutchinson, 1979), p 11. 30 BBC WAC, R CONT 20: John le Carré, memo to John Stringer (A.H. Copyright) from Jonathan Powell, 5 July 1977. 31 BBC WAC, R CONT 20, Letter to Morton Leavy from Ben Travers (A.H. Copyright), 28 June 1977. 32 Jonathan Powell, interviewed by the author, 26 July 2012. 33 BBC WAC, T65/38/1: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Producer’s File, letter to Alec Guinness from David Cornwell (John le Carré), 27 February 1978. This Producer’s File consists of an exchange of letters between Cornwell and Guinness, donated to the BBC by Cornwell himself. Many are extensively reproduced in Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography. 34 Robert Cushman, ‘Sir Alec’s assignment’, Radio Times (8–14 September 1979), p. 87. 35 Allan Hunter, Alec Guinness on Screen (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1982), p. 91. 36 For example, Peter Knight, ‘My goodness, Sir Alec in a BBC serial!’, Daily Telegraph (21 August 1978); and Charles Catchpole, ‘Sir Alec to star in TV serial’, Evening Standard (18 July 1978). 37 Jonathan Powell, interviewed by the author, 26 July 2012. 38 Alec Guinness; quoted in Cushman, ‘Sir Alec’s assignment’, p. 87.



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39 Jonathan Powell, interviewed by the author, 26 July 2012. 40 Peter Ansorge, From Liverpool to Los Angeles: On Writing for Theatre, Film and Television (London: Faber, 1997), p. 99. 41 Caughie, Television Drama, p. 111. 42 Jonathan Powell, interviewed by the author, 26 July 2012. 43 Ibid. 44 Sisman, John le Carré: The Biography, pp. 406, 409. 45 Cushman, ‘Sir Alec’s assignment’, pp. 84–93. 46 BBC WAC, T65/38/1, transcript of a conversation between David Cornwell and Austen Spriggs, undated. 47 Jonathan Powell, interviewed by the author, 26 July 2012. 48 Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, pp. 112–113. 49 John Caughie, Edge of Darkness (London: BFI, 2007), pp. 52–53. 50 Alan Burton, Historical Dictionary of British Spy Fiction (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), pp. 171–172. 51 Le Carré, Tinker Tailor, p. 79. 52 Jonathan Powell, interviewed by the author, 26 July 2012. 53 BBC WAC, T65/38/1, letter to David Cornwell from Jonathan Powell, 13 September 1978. Sent shortly before the beginning of production, this letter indicates the planned filming schedule. 54 Patrick Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985), p. 42. 55 Hewison, The Heritage Industry, p. 51. 56 Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, p. 126. 57 Caughie, Television Drama, p. 122. 58 Hugo Young, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher (London: Pan, 1993; final ed.), p. 460.

4

Conspiracy as a crisis of procedure in Bird of Prey (BBC 1, 1982) and Edge of Darkness (BBC 2, 1985)

At the turn of the 1980s an episode of The Sandbaggers, 2.5 ‘It Couldn’t Happen Here’ (15 February 1980), centred on an unusual topic for a British spy series, that of political assassination in the USA. Following the killing of a prominent left-wing senator, the Head of the CIA’s London Office Jeff Ross (Bob Sherman) is shown expounding his theory to Neil Burnside that the FBI was responsible, not only for this but also for the assassination of progressive figures such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King over the 1960s. Although less convinced, Burnside remarks gratefully, ‘Well thank god it couldn’t happen here’. Indeed, whilst the history of the anglophone spy genre has traditionally been traced through British adventure novels, the conspiracy thriller has commonly been seen as a classically American fascination. The entrenchment of the Cold War in the 1950s saw the emergence of a right-wing conspiracist movement, with figures such as Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater fixating on the fear of communist infiltration. In this context, Richard Hofstadter’s influential essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ mounted an analysis of such discourse, describing a ‘paranoid style’ which posited the existence of ‘a vast and sinister conspiracy, a gigantic and yet subtle machinery of influence set in motion to undermine and destroy a way of life’.1 By the early 1970s, however, the dominant US conspiracy culture had shifted to the political left, against the aforementioned spate of political assassinations, growing public unrest surrounding the contentious Vietnam War and the unravelling of the iconic Watergate conspiracy. Furthermore, during this time the American dimension of the era of exposure saw many



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scandalous revelations about US intelligence agencies’ use of dirty tricks overseas and monitoring of their own citizenship, culminating in hearings by the Church Committee into the CIA in the mid-1970s. The cumulative result was, as Peter Knight writes, ‘the emergence of a popular paranoia marked out by its half-serious, half-cynical suspicion toward the “official version” of events told by the authorities’.2 The same period saw the emergence of the ‘New Hollywood’ generation, whose films sought to address contentious issues, break taboos and articulate anti-Establishment politics, often through subversive treatments of classical American genres (or genre deconstruction). One product of this was the conspiracy thriller, described by Barry Langford as ‘a hybrid of the spy and the crime film in which the us-and-them moral certainties of the Cold War dissolved in the gangster mentality and corrosive cynicism of the Nixon years’.3 Notable early conspiracy films included Executive Action (David Miller, 1973) and The Parallax View (Alan J. Pakula, 1974), which depicted conspiracies to assassinate left-wing politicians, and 3 Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack, 1975), which portrayed a renegade faction of the CIA plotting an invasion in the Middle East in order to exploit oil resources. The real and fictional worlds of conspiracy crossed over most vividly in All the President’s Men (Pakula, 1976), a dramatisation of the Watergate investigation from the perspective of Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein which derived tension from its behind-the-scenes look at events of such immediate historical proximity. The UK, by contrast, lacked a clearly defined conspiratorial tradition over the 1970s. Existential spy thrillers had often centred on the capacity of intelligence services to betray agents, as described in Chapter 1, yet such ethical ambiguities remained largely contained within the clandestine world, disconnected from wider society. Whilst the New Hollywood conspiracy cycle centred on fear of a growing and unaccountable secret state, Britain’s crises over the 1970s, including economic instability, widespread industrial action and violence in Northern Ireland, seemed instead to suggest the weakness of the state, particularly when Edward Heath’s Conservative government was toppled by industrial action in 1974. Nonetheless, a conspiratorial element would often creep into more fantastical genres. At the beginning of the 1970s, Raymond

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Williams noted that recent episodes of the science fiction series Doctor Who (BBC 1, 1963–89) and Doomwatch (BBC 1, 1970–72) featured the underlying sense ‘of some intricate and persistent conspiracy against life’, arising from ‘an alien presence, destructive and dangerous, whether in a business suit or in full reptilian scales’.4 The decade also saw a cycle of pessimistic dramas set in dystopian futures, depicting a country ruled by authoritarian governments of either the far right, as in The Guardians (ITV, 1971), The Donati Conspiracy (BBC 1, 1973) and State of Emergency (BBC 1, 1975), or the far left, as in 1990 (BBC 2, 1977–78). Unlike the New Hollywood conspiracy thrillers, here the authoritarian regimes are not positioned as an extension of the current political order but instead shown to have arisen following its collapse. When James Callaghan’s Labour government was also brought down by industrial action in 1979, such gloomy speculations might have seemed more pertinent than ever. Yet at the turn of the 1980s, the narrative of ‘It Couldn’t Happen Here’ was arguably prophetic in its suggestion of the potential for American-style conspiratorial paranoia to intrude into British culture. Over the course of the episode, Burnside discovers that a prominent British politician is a deep-cover Soviet agent, but finds his superiors unwilling to take action officially. In an ironic twist characteristic of writer Ian Mackintosh, Burnside ultimately finds himself ordering an assassination, the episode openly highlighting the disturbing potential of ‘opening the door’ to America’s rampant culture of conspiracy. As it transpired, the 1980s would be dominated by a new political culture which readily lent itself to a new cycle of grounded, contemporary conspiracy dramas on British television. The 1979 election of a new Conservative government under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher is often characterised as a key transitional moment in British political history due to the explicit abandonment of the post-war social-democratic consensus in favour of divisive, free market neoliberalism. Andrew Gamble describes how the political philosophy which would become known as Thatcherism was characterised by ‘a fierce commitment to the ideal of a more limited government and freer markets, and a readiness to use the powers of the state to confront those groups that resisted’.5 This two-stranded characterisation is useful for contextualising the production context of such conspiracy dramas. On the one hand, the new emphasis



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upon the free market posed a pronounced existential crisis for the public service ideals which had traditionally underpinned British broadcasting, and in particular for a large public institution such as the BBC. Indeed the Corporation was perceived by Thatcher as relic of the statism that she was striving to roll back, leading to pronounced tension between them across the decade. On the other hand, the Thatcher government’s strong enforcement of state secrecy provided much inspiration for a more haunted, paranoid depiction of the intelligence world in popular fiction. Ultimately, the abandonment of the social-democratic consensus created a situation in which the ‘rejection of politics’, a foundational value of the BBC, and indeed the style of policing seen series in such as Special Branch (ITV, 1969–74), became a more overtly contested terrain. Against a political culture that explicitly disregarded the ideal of forging shared goals and values across a common culture, what precisely constituted ‘impartiality’ and ‘balance’ in both broadcasting and security was fundamentally thrown into question. British television’s long-standing tradition of radical drama in the Loach–Garnett school had already been significantly diminished over the 1970s as a result of external attacks and internal selfcensorship.6 As the broadcasting climate grew even more hostile over the 1980s, Lez Cooke describes how the conspiracy thriller became ‘one vehicle progressive dramatists and film makers turned to’.7 In an echo of New Hollywood, this would prove effective for dramatising the erosion of certainties through genre deconstruction. Analysing a British conspiracy feature film from the period, Defence of the Realm (David Drury, 1986), John Hill describes how: The conventional crime drama tends to rely upon a general confidence in the ability of the current social set-up to triumph over injustice and right wrongs (which are then characteristically identified as the responsibility of isolated or ‘deviant’ individuals rather than social institutions or political regimes). In the conspiracy thriller, however, it is those who are in power who are the source of wrongdoing and it is therefore much more difficult to identify the means whereby social ills may be remedied.8

Aside from this notable cinematic example, in Britain in the 1980s the conspiracy genre could more often be found on television, which can in part be attributed to the specific forms offered by this medium. Whilst the crime drama had long been a classic television

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genre, with the episodic series offering a reliable and repetitive structure for crime-solving narratives, the conspiracy thriller would typically mount a far more irrevocable subversion of such formulaic conventions. As such, it would make optimal use of another dramatic form that was growing in popularity. Although the closed serial had long been an established form for adapting classic novels, prior to the 1970s it had been a relatively marginal vehicle for original work by television’s leading writers, who had instead tended to concentrate on the standalone single play. A new lineage of original ‘authored’ serials, however, had been pioneered by such productions as John Hopkins’ Talking to a Stranger (BBC 2, 1966) and Dennis Potter’s Casanova (BBC 2, 1971). This was motivated in part by the same economic advantages as on the classic serial, with costs spread more efficiently and a greater potential to build and retain audiences, but as John R. Cook writes, it also grew out of ‘the desire of writers to explore single play themes in greater depth than the temporary constraints of the single play form would allow’.9 Jonathan Powell described how such productions were thought of within the BBC as a form of ‘television novel’ to signify how they were mounted on ‘a novelistic scale but written from an original pen’.10 This lineage had grown over the 1970s, and by the time of the 1980s was increasingly coming to supplant the single play in prestige. Caughie argues that many such original serials display ‘a significant, almost generic development of what might be called “paranoid narrative” in which the extension of time allows the slow erosion of order and the invasion of everyday normality by irrationality and unreason’.11 Although, as Caughie indicates, this can be applied more broadly than just to the conspiracy genre, it is notable how many serialised conspiracy dramas of the period begin their opening episode with a ‘normal’ situation featuring a protagonist sited in a procedural role within the state apparatus, such as in the civil service or police. However, a sudden shift of circumstances results not in a resolution of the situation by the conclusion of the episode, but instead their descent into the uncertain and unpredictable paranoid narrative of conspiracy. Jerry Palmer argued in 1973 that ‘in the modern thriller the representation of deviant acts is used to construct a component of the consensus’, yet in these dramas the loss of consensus requires more extensive deviance to uncover the circumstances behind society’s corruption.12 The fact that the



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protagonists within this cycle are overwhelmingly implicated within the state apparatus makes them well positioned for a dramatically effective moral awakening, whilst clearly signifying that this narrative constitutes a collapse of standard procedure. This chapter will consider several such dramas, all of which were produced by the BBC. With ITV showing little apparent interest in the conspiracy genre during this period, these serials can be broadly positioned in a specifically public service impulse to provide challenging dramatic engagements with contemporary issues. Firstly Bird of Prey (BBC 1, 1982) is largely focused on anxiety surrounding the free market economy, particularly through the growing influence of sinister forces from an increasingly integrated Europe. I also explore the emphasis that the narrative places on computers and the surveillance state, adding new terrain for both individual agency and fear of political repression. I then extend this analysis into the sequel Bird of Prey 2 (BBC 1, 1984), examining how this attempted to expand the visual repertoire for depicting the digital terrain through the use of experimental videographic techniques. Finally, I examine Edge of Darkness (BBC 2, 1985), a far more stylish and prestigious drama which mounts a sombre examination of the nuclear state in a climate of increased Cold War tension. Across these dramas, I trace the crisis of procedure on two levels. Most obviously there is the paranoid narrative of the serials themselves, but underlying this is the broader crisis in the BBC’s understanding of its own procedure against the existential challenge posed by Thatcherism. ‘These are the eighties; death by violence counts as natural causes’: fighting the Power in Bird of Prey (BBC 1, 1982) An early instance of a ‘television novel’ in the conspiracy genre was Bird of Prey (BBC 1, 1982) a four-part videotaped serial written by Ron Hutchinson and based around the international finance sector of the City of London. The protagonist is Henry Jay (Richard Griffiths), an unassuming, fastidious civil servant who works as a Principal Scientific Officer in the fictional Department of Commercial Development (DCD) with an expertise in computing and new possibilities for electronic fraud. Whilst covertly helping Fraud Squad officer D.S. Richardson (Jim Broadbent) with an investigation, he discovers that one of his prized reports has

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been tampered with in order to cover up a major fraud implicating the corrupt European MP Hugo Jardine (Christopher Logue). Investigating further, he finds himself marked for death by a sinister pan-European conspiratorial force known as Le Pouvoir or ‘the Power’, and is forced to go on the run with only his IT skills to protect himself. Bird of Prey was produced by the BBC’s English Regions Drama department and largely recorded at its Pebble Mill Studios in Birmingham. Created in an organisational restructuring at the turn of the 1970s, most of English Regions Drama’s early output had been in single plays. However, it had achieved early success in the ‘authored’ serial with two runs of Philip Martin’s Gangsters (BBC 1, 1975 and 1978), a thriller which approached contemporary issues such as drug trafficking, racism and immigration in Birmingham through a pastiche of gangster films, using a genre deconstruction approach akin to that of New Hollywood. Concurrently Hutchinson, then an up-and-coming playwright, had written two single plays for English Regions Drama before progressing to serial writing with the four-part Bull Week (BBC 1, 1980), which concerned industrial tensions in a Birmingham factory. This was overseen by one of the department’s major producers, Michael Wearing.13 Two years later Hutchinson, now a writer-in-residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company, reunited with Wearing to create a second drama serial at Pebble Mill. As with Gangsters, Bird of Prey appropriates what was then a classically American cinematic genre, the conspiracy thriller, and self-consciously reapplies it to a British context with a strong sense of irony. Nowhere does it assert this British twist more clearly than through Jay, an unremarkable, suburban-dwelling civil servant whose major hobby is stamp-collecting and whose life aspirations extend no further than steady promotion through the ranks of his civil service department (see Figure 4.1). The civil service was, in fact, a timely setting. In the same year, Anthony Sampson described how it had ‘become the strongest and closest-knit professional group in the country, protected both by its trade unions and by its permanent occupation of positions of power’, and this was the basis on which it was subject to both open hostility from Thatcher and an unflattering satirical portrayal in the sitcom Yes Minister (BBC 2, 1980–88).14 Yet in Bird of Prey, the service is portrayed more fondly, seeming to emerge over the



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Figure 4.1  Bird of Prey. The unlikely protagonist Henry Jay (Richard Griffiths), an unassuming civil servant.

serial as the epitome of cosy British statism against the ravages of an encroaching free market economy. The DCD is a world of banal, everyday office procedure, but as the paranoid narrative takes hold, the stability and reason of this space comes to unravel. Over the course of the opening episode, 1.1 ‘Input Classified’ (22 April 1982) Jay comes under pressure from a group of corrupt policemen for sex crimes that he did not commit in retaliation for helping Richardson. This culminates in a cliffhanger in which Richardson is mysteriously murdered in the DCD, forcing Jay to flee and go into hiding. As a result, Jay is thrust out into a conspiracy thriller’s world of irrationality and unreason, characterised by unprecedented levels of violence and insecurity. As his contact Hannah Brent (Sally Faulkner) dryly notes in 1.2 ‘Mode Murder’ (29 April 1982): ‘Look around you: bomb-proof glass, security men, the ever-present eye. These are the eighties; death by violence counts as natural causes.’ Throughout Bird of Prey international terrorism is frequently referenced as a background anxiety, using headline issues to evoke immediacy as in Special Branch. However, the shift to the serialised

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paranoid narrative creates a significant change in emphasis. As an episodic procedural series, Special Branch typically separated its topical threats into discrete episodes, a model which can be characterised according what Skip Willman posits as the rival ideology to conspiracy theory. ‘Contingency theory’, or the ‘shit happens’ theory of history, asserts ‘that social symptoms, such as right-wing militia movements, lone gunmen, or violent teens on school rampages, are aberrations from an otherwise harmonious … society. Society is thereby delivered from responsibility for these isolated outbreaks of violence.’15 Thus in Special Branch threats from domestic anarchists or Arab nationalists appear as pathological intrusions into British society with minimal context. Conspiracy theory, however, offers no such deliverance, and in Bird of Prey terrorism is mere background colour compared to the true menace in the heart of society. Emanating from continental Europe, the Power’s malevolent influence runs across politics, the police, the intelligence services, the civil service and big business. Jay describes it as ‘not a big machine working day and night under anyone’s control in particular. It’s scores of little people like you and me, removing a file here, returning a favour to another department there.’ Characters carry out its bidding due to deception, blackmail or the expectation of ‘favours’, often showing little understanding or interest in the larger context of their actions. Yet Caughie describes how, in the conspiracy drama, Hofstadter’s paranoid style can ‘be traced to the level of narrative, organising the way the story is told. It takes what seem to be separate worlds and builds them into a system in which everything is connected.’16 In Bird of Prey the underlying vision is identified with a sinister capitalist elite taking advantage of social chaos to profiteer and build up their own power base. This scenario draws upon the growing influx of international finance into the City of London since the late 1960s, particularly with Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community in 1973. The Power is, in many ways, a remodelling of the Establishment for a globalised age, where access and influence remain a product of ‘who you know’ but the bonds of the old school tie are increasingly supplanted by a gangster capitalism which transcends class and national boundaries. Whilst the traditional Establishment had been accused of presiding over national decline through its amateurishness and inefficiency, here it is supplanted by an all-too-efficient force that has abandoned the public interest in



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favour of a monstrous private agenda, exploiting British society for ‘profit maximisation and accelerated acquisition’. Although the rise of the new capitalism predated the 1979 General Election, once in office the Conservatives would fiercely promote monetarist policies as a solution to the nation’s ills, in the process forging an odd alliance between global finance and a nationalist rhetoric. This in embodied in Bird of Prey through the character of Charles Bridgnorth (Nigel Davenport), a malevolent intelligence chief who works to protect Jardine by covering up all traces of his fraudulent activity, often readily resorting to murder. Despite the continental scope of the conspiracy, he possesses an exaggerated patriotism, shown to passionately believe in the value of the Power’s scheme to ‘the national us’, bringing in thousands of jobs even as power and profits go to corrupt politicians and multinationals at the top. Otherwise, as he declares in 1.4 ‘Printout Urgent’ (13 May 1982), ‘the decline continues. Grass grows on the pavements. Sheep graze on the airport runways. We’ll be the rumour of a thing that’s died. Didn’t there used to be a country once called England?’ Bridgnorth is in some ways a logical extension of dubious man-from-the-ministry types such as Strand in Special Branch, repositioned into a more overtly villainous role by the paranoid narrative’s loss of certainty. With its focus on computing technology Bird of Prey also engages with another growing anxiety, the potential rise of an electronic surveillance state. Attempting to track Jay down on behalf of the Power in 1.2 ‘Mode Murder’, D.S. Eric Vine (Richard Ireson) tries to enlist the Police National Computer (PNC), quoting Jay’s own professional declaration that ‘in the age of information technology, the description “missing person” does not compute’. Previous portrayals of surveillance cultures on British television had tended to be found in dystopia future dramas, portraying societies similar to that in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), where espionage serves a means of social control.17 However, key revelations in the era of exposure suggested that such possibilities might no longer be so remote. In 1967 the Daily Express had revealed that British authorities routinely intercepted private cables and telegrams, and subsequently in 1976 Time Out had revealed the existence of the agency responsible for such interception, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), until then unknown to the public. Both articles had been met by legal action from hostile

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governments, but each time this had backfired, incensing journalists and damaging public confidence in state secrecy.18 Through this the British public would become increasingly aware of the practice of signals intelligence (sigint), the gathering of data from electronic communications. Whilst human intelligence (humint) had provided the basis for heroic individual agency in romantic spy fiction such as the James Bond stories, sigint appeared more alienating and systematic, with dystopian overtones that enhanced the more paranoid perspective of intelligence typically taken by the conspiracy genre. Unlike prior dystopian dramas, therefore, Bird of Prey situates its surveillance paranoia firmly within the contemporary world, introducing a theme which would be developed further in later conspiracy dramas. Yet Bird of Prey also works to establish the potential for heroic individual agency in the terrain of sigint. Jay’s success in defying the Power, despite his lack of espionage experience, is based largely upon his superior computing skills. Early in ‘Mode Murder’ he purchases a computer and hides in a rented flat, using his skills to feed false information into the PNC to evade detection. In 1.3 ‘Process Priority’ (6 May 1982) he enlists the help of Rochelle Holliday (Ann Pennington), a private intelligence consultant. As they plan to pool their information on Jardine using her computer, Rochelle comments that ‘a few years ago it would have stayed in the files gathering dust. Now you put it in the magic machine and sometimes it comes up with connections that you never dreamed of.’ The computer therefore instigates a profound shift in the thriller, as the process of painstaking research that was key to the slowness of Tinker Tailor Solider Spy (BBC 2, 1979) can now be hugely accelerated. The utopian vision of the computer enhancing human agency was a newly topical theme at the time of Bird of Prey’s production. The years following the invention of the microprocessor at the turn of the 1970s had seen a revolution in personal computing technology as machines became increasingly compact and affordable. Johnny Ryan describes how by the early 1980s ‘the computer, long the preserve of large corporate headquarters and elite government research facilities, was now within the grasp of amateur enthusiasts operating from their bedrooms and garages’, introducing a personal element absent from prior dystopian fantasies.19 The BBC had committed to this revolution as part of its public service mission through the BBC Computer Literacy Project, with a tie-in magazine



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Figure 4.2  Bird of Prey. Jay is characterised by his aptitude with the latest computing technology.

series The Computer Programme (BBC 2, 1982) which completed its run just prior to Bird of Prey’s debut. Bird of Prey qualifies its authenticity in this area with the extensive on-set appearance of commercially available computers from the time, sometimes for characters to perform actions on (see Figure 4.2), sometimes simply as part of the background mise-en-scène. The dialogue also is continually prone to lapse into dense computing jargon, a technological variant of the specialist terminology found in The Sandbaggers and Tinker Tailor. Through its depiction of computing, therefore, Bird of Prey offers whole new dramatic possibilities for human agency, empowering a new model of white-collar protagonist to challenge sinister forces. Following his work on Bird of Prey, Wearing would go on to produce Pebble Mill’s other serialised drama of the year, Alan Bleasdale’s Boys from the Blackstuff (BBC 2, 1982), often acclaimed as one of the defining British television dramas of the early 1980s. This dramatised the plight of a group of unemployed Liverpool labourers, examining the effect of Thatcherite economic policies on the industrial north. Although situated within a fundamentally different genre to Bird of Prey, Boys from the Blackstuff in many ways explored the flipside of the same political concerns, exchanging Jay’s professional white-collar perspective on the corruption of global finance for a more grounded perspective on how such economic shifts affected the working class. Through these productions, therefore, Wearing established an affinity for topical, challenging and socially-conscious drama which he would maintain when, shortly afterwards, he was headhunted by the London-based Drama

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Department to work on what would prove to be the final series of Play for Today (1984). Bird of Prey, meanwhile, had laid the groundwork for a specifically British form of serialised conspiracy thriller which would develop over the next few years. Surveillance and the videographic in Bird of Prey 2 (BBC 1, 1984) Two years later Hutchinson’s sequel Bird of Prey 2 was recorded at Pebble Mill. Centring on a scheme by the Power to corrupt a panEuropean electronic banking system, this adds little to the original 1982 serial on a thematic level. It would, however, be distinguished by a new experimental strain to its visuals which will be the central focus of my analysis. Whilst the first Bird of Prey had embraced the new narrative possibilities offered by computers, it had been hampered by the limitations of videotaping in the studio, the static, dialogue-driven style undermining the contemporary focus on state-of-the-art technology. Indeed the tendency of the television medium to orientate around human faces and actions poses fundamental problems in terms of visually communicating narrative developments in the digital realm, although Bird of Prey had pushed against these with a distinctive synthesised score by prog-rock musician Dave Greenslade and an animated opening title sequence which whimsically mimics the aesthetic of an early 1980s computer game, showing pixelated images of gunmen pursuing and shooting at another figure with hat and umbrella. Bird of Prey 2, however, went much further in employing innovative aesthetic techniques to address this problem. This period saw the development of what John Thornton Caldwell terms ‘televisuality’ in American television, denoting a shift from approaching broadcasting ‘primarily as a form of wordbased rhetoric and transmission … to a visually based mythology, framework, and aesthetic based on an extreme self-consciousness of style.’20 Caldwell divides televisuality between two stylistic worlds, the ‘cinematic’ and the ‘videographic’, which can be readily mapped onto the technological divide between film and videotaped productions during this period. Videographic televisuality manifested through new techniques in electronic manipulation which saw ‘the bland and neutral look that characterized video-origination studio productions in earlier decades’ replaced by ‘acute hyperactivity and



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an obsession with effects’.21 In the US, where prime-time drama had long since entirely migrated to film, this was more evident in nondramatic genres of programming, used for instance to embellish the presentation of news and music. The UK had, however, maintained a rich tradition of drama shot on videotape to which these techniques could be applied, and this resulted in a brief movement to expand the expressive potential of such programmes and offer an alternative to the widely-presumed superiority of filmed drama. New computer graphics workstations such as Quantel Paintbox were used to digitise video so it could be easily manipulated, composited, mixed and matched, and in drama, this was used to provide special effects in series such as Doctor Who and The Tripods (BBC 1, 1984–85) as well Brechtian devices in several experimental plays.22 Pebble Mill had opened a cutting-edge graphics centre in 1983, between production on the two Bird of Prey serials, and this enabled Bird of Prey 2 to pursue a far more experimental and selfconscious visual style than its predecessor. It repeatedly works to cut up the long, static scenes typical of videotaped drama with fast edits and the insertion of rapid flashbacks and fantasy sequences, many of which are in black-and-white or pixelated as if to mimic CCTV footage. In other instances, the image breaks up into elaborate splitscreen effects, such as the pre-title sequence for 2.4 ‘Trapdoor and Spook’ (27 September 1984), which conveys the theme of relentless capitalist acquisition by showing a pair of hands counting out money, then continually dividing the image and multiplying the same shot to fill the different screen segments. A new opening title sequence retains the aesthetics of the computer game from the original serial, but this time animated in more detail and with even more absurd humour, as Jay is represented by a Little Pig and is chased through a maze by a Big Bad Wolf. Even more unconventionally, the serial reprises these graphics during the body of the episodes, using it as a metaphorical narrative device during moments of high tension. For example, a sequence in 2.3 ‘Ducks in a Row’ (20 September 1984) sees Jay chased through a modern housing estate by the Power’s agent Roche (Lee Montague). In one moment a high-angle long-shot of the estate, capturing its grid layout, suddenly pixelates and transforms into the maze from the title sequence. Thereafter live-action shots of Jay struggling to find a way out of the estate are intercut with animated clips of the Little Pig and the Big Bad Wolf (see Figure 4.3). Despite such bursts

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Figure 4.3  Bird of Prey 2. Jay’s flight from an assassin through a modern housing estate is intercut with metaphorical computer imagery in an innovative use of videographic techniques.

of creativity, however, over the remainder of the decade the movement to pursue videographic televisuality in British drama would ultimately be subsumed by the larger gravity exerted by 16mm film, not least due to the growing pressure for sales to markets such as the US where video was untenable for drama. Nonetheless, this stands as a crucial forerunner for a later revival of interest in videographic techniques for filmed drama in the 2000s (see Chapter 6). Surveillance would, however, remain a central anxiety for two conspiracy dramas broadcast in the following year, In the Secret State (BBC 2, 10 March 1985), a television film based on Robert McCrum’s 1980 novel, depicts an investigation by retired spy chief Frank Strange (Frank Finlay) into the abuse of a computerised national identity database by sinister forces conducting politicised smear campaigns. The Detective (BBC 1, 1985), a serial based on Paul Ferris’ 1975 novel, follows Commander Kenneth Crocker (Tom Bell) as he is assigned to mount a blatantly politicised surveillance



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operation on a union leader, but when he instead uncovers a scandal implicating the Home Secretary he finds the authorities far less willing to act. Eliminating the European dimension from the Bird of Prey serials, these two programmes sited a surveillance culture more directly within the British state, yet neither embraced the aesthetic experimentation of Bird of Prey 2, instead favouring a more restrained visual style. Whilst the earlier publication dates of the source novels work against reading these two dramas as direct responses to the political culture of the 1980s, both would gain an unexpected new topicality on transmission. This was a particularly charged period, coming shortly after the conclusion of the 1984–85 miners’ strike when the Thatcher government had achieved a resounding victory in the violent defeat of its opponents. On 8 March, just two days before transmission of In the Secret State, the current affairs series 20/20 Vision (Channel 4) screened an episode in which disaffected former MI5 officer Cathy Massiter accused her former employers of conducting politicised surveillance on the peace movement and trade unions. When The Detective began broadcasting two months later, screenwriter Ted Whitehead remarked in the Radio Times, ‘considering Paul Ferris wrote the original novel in the mid-70s … it’s remarkably prophetic. I don’t know how he managed to anticipate so much that really seems to be happening these days.’23 The new climate of disquiet would be explored even more deeply that autumn with the transmission of another conspiracy drama, this time written as a more conscious commentary on the state of Thatcher’s Britain. Revealing the ‘silhouette’ of British politics in Edge of Darkness (BBC 2, 1985) Over the early 1980s the tension between the BBC and the Thatcher government had become particularly focused through a number of high-profile conflicts. In mid-1982 the BBC’s reportage on the Falklands War had received criticism from the government for its insufficiently patriotic tone, and from early 1984 it became embroiled in protracted legal action after an episode of the current affairs programme Panorama (BBC 1, 1953–) had alleged connections between Conservative MPs and far-right organisations. In such scenarios the Thatcher government was frequently supported

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by the growing populist tabloid press, in particular the expanding media empire of Rupert Murdoch who, with his plans to enter the satellite television market, had a vested interest in diminishing the BBC. At the same time, the global reputation that the BBC had established for high quality drama was once again under threat. Granada Television’s lavish The Jewel in the Crown (ITV, 1984) had been able to recoup its large production costs entirely in advance through overseas sales, raising the possibility that literary adaptations, once a key marker of the BBC’s value as a public service broadcaster, could now be developed on a huge scale through an entirely commercial system without the need for state intervention. Meanwhile, a new movement of ‘quality’ drama was developing on US network television, pioneered by the police series Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981–87) and the medical series St. Elsewhere (NBC, 1982–88). Elke Weissmann argues that these responded to the critical culture that had grown up around classic serial imports on PBS, similarly appealing to an affluent, educated audience, differentiating themselves from ‘normal’ television, and embracing complex serial narratives with a ‘memory’. However, they also added new characteristics which would become key markers of ‘quality’ television drama on the global stage, including a willingness to address controversial contemporary subject matters and a celebration of the television writer as ‘auteur’ through allocating greater creative freedom to showrunners with a public profile.24 Collectively these developments posed a threat to the high international reputation that the BBC had established for its drama over the 1970s. Whilst it would continue to compete in the terrain of classic adaptations, this created an incentive for the BBC to assert its innovation and leadership in more contemporary drama, particularly as Tinker Tailor and Smiley’s People (BBC 2, 1982) had established a successful precedent for prestige serials set in the present day. Following his success on these productions, Powell was promoted to BBC Head of Drama Series and Serials and under his leadership the department began to invest some of its original serials or ‘television novels’ with the same high-end production resources as prestige classic adaptations.25 Such serials maintained the BBCs public service commitment to showcasing original contemporary writing, but unlike more cheaply made videotaped drama like Bird of Prey these were 16mm filmed productions with extensive



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location work and stylish lighting and direction, their more generous budgets  usually facilitated by international co-production arrangements. The BBC’s original prestige serials would, unlike ongoing ­multiple-season US ‘quality’ dramas, retain the closed format of the self-contained serial. Authored by a single writer rather than a team, they would be presented as more personal works and thereby adhere more closely to a ‘television novel’ concept. Two serials at the forefront of the movement were Troy Kennedy Martin’s conspiracy thriller Edge of Darkness (BBC 2, 1985) and Dennis Potter’s surrealistic musical drama The Singing Detective (BBC 2, 1986). The choice of these two writers for such important productions is significant. Whilst Hutchinson had been a discovery of BBC English Regions Drama and near the beginning of his career when he had written Bird of Prey, by contrast Kennedy Martin and Potter were veteran television writers with careers that dated back to the 1960s, both associated with the BBC’s climate of experimentation during that time. Echoing arguments that the televised Tinker Tailor had helped to impart a classic status onto John le Carré, Cook suggests that in producing and promoting The Singing Detective as a prestige serial ‘the BBC elevated the hitherto “controversial” Potter into a brand-name of “quality”, marketing him as an example of all that was distinctive about the Corporation’.26 Thus seasoned writers nurtured in the British public service context were now reoriented towards the international television market, deployed to re-establish the BBC’s institutional uniqueness. Yet the contrasts between these two writers are also revealing. Since his screenwriting debut in 1965, Potter had forged an identity as British television drama’s most prestigious writer within a largely self-contained oeuvre of his own single plays and serials (with the occasional novel adaptation). Kennedy Martin’s career, by contrast, had moved between single plays, episodes for genre series such as Z-Cars (which he had also devised, BBC 1, 1962–78) and The Sweeney (ITV, 1974–78), film screenplays including The Italian Job (Peter Collinson, 1969) and Kelly’s Heroes (Brian G. Hutton, 1970), and prestige serials including Euston’s period spy drama Reilly, Ace of Spies (ITV, 1983) and a BBC modern classic adaptation of Angus Wilson’s nuclear apocalypse novel The Old Men at the Zoo (BBC 2, 1983). Whilst his career had not reached the same critical zenith as Potter’s, Kennedy Martin’s output had nonetheless encompassed

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more variety and demonstrated a closer engagement with popular genres. In the 1960s Kennedy Martin had famously championed a ‘non-naturalistic’ ‘new drama’ to break television’s subordination to the conventions of other media.27 Yet in the long-term, this had arguably been an area in which Potter had surpassed him, with The Singing Detective as the culmination of the latter’s long-term interest in using experimental television drama techniques to explore internal psychological states, taking place in the complex mental landscapes of its troubled protagonist Philip Marlowe (Michael Gambon). In this later phase of his career, meanwhile, Kennedy Martin was more accepting of what he characterised as the serial’s heritage in the nineteenth-century novel, describing it as ‘a kind of literary form, long convoluted stories and lots of characters’.28 In contrast to the focus on character interiority in The Singing Detective, Edge of Darkness is focused more outwards towards contemporary political concerns. The serial’s central protagonist is Ronald Craven (Bob Peck), a widowed Yorkshire police officer who at the outset lives with his daughter Emma (Joanne Whalley), an environmentalist and political activist. The opening episode, ‘Compassionate Leave’ (4 November 1985), begins with their return home one night, where they are attacked by a mysterious gunman and Emma is killed. Unconvinced by the prevailing police theory that he was the intended target, Craven travels to London and mounts an investigation into Emma’s past, slowly discovering transatlantic cover-up in the shadowy world of the nuclear state. This narrative responded to the heating up of Cold War tensions over the 1980s, later described by Kennedy Martin as a time ‘when born-again Christians and cold-war warriors seemed to be running the United States’.29 Against this, Thatcher had developed a close political relationship with US President Ronald Reagan, supporting his strident anti-Soviet rhetoric, whilst the hosting of American cruise missiles at RAF Greenham Common from 1983 had become a focal point for oppositional movements including a revitalised Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). At the time of the serial’s original broadcast, Kennedy Martin described his aim as being to reveal the ‘silhouette’ of contemporary British politics, describing to the Radio Times how ‘everyone who’s writing about Thatcher’s Britain, particularly if they’re over a certain age, is unbelievably depressed about it’.30 This implicitly



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aligns Kennedy Martin with the generation of television practitioners who had forced their careers in the more liberal environment of the BBC in the 1960s, including figures such as Potter, Ken Loach and Tony Garnett. Indeed, in seeking to establish its distinctiveness by mining its own legacy, the leftist politics of many of the BBC’s boldest creative figures over previous decades proved something of a tightrope to walk against the increasing pressure from a dominant right-wing political culture. Yet in the British broadcasting context, a willingness to produce such potentially controversial drama could be legitimated within a continuing public service commitment to the vision of the single artist, long valued as a sign of individual expression in a free society. As the decade progressed, however, such selfconsciously daring drama would increasing play into the tabloid stereotype of a BBC staffed by left-wing radicals. The high production values of Edge of Darkness were partially enabled through co-financing by the American company Lionheart Television International, who would distribute it over PBS the following year. In this important ancillary market, the serial corresponded to the willingness of US ‘quality’ drama to embrace controversial subject matters; as Robert J Thompson argues, the politics of the American ‘quality’ tradition overwhelmingly tended towards liberal humanism in line with the typical views of its ‘quality demographic’.31 With a conspiracy narrative centred on the privatisation of the nuclear industry and the complicity of the British government with US defence policy, the serial displays considerable suspicion towards the forces of the free market and globalisation, yet ironically it was the growth of those forces within the television industry that permitted its leftist politics to be rendered in such a prestigious and high-profile form. Despite sharing the left-wing politics of many in his generation, however, it is notable that Kennedy Martin had made relatively little contribution to earlier politically radical drama (despite being a vocal advocate of aesthetic radicalism). Instead, much of his work had been as a jobbing writer of episodic genre series, giving him rich experience in operating in forms with less scope for articulating a personal ‘vision’. This perhaps made him a particularly effective writer for adopting the paranoid narrative, with Edge of Darkness articulating its politics by subverting the conventions of police series in which Kennedy Martin was well versed. The positioning of the protagonist as a policeman, another institutional ‘insider’, allows

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the serial to dramatise a collapse of procedure with particular vividness, as Craven is plunged into a situation in which in the established structures are corrupted and the rule of law no longer adequate to resolve problems. Given Kennedy Martin’s prior work for Euston, it is tempting to speculate that the naming of Ronald Craven in Edge of Darkness may be a deliberate subversion of Special Branch’s DCI Alan Craven, a character notable for his rejection of politics (see Chapter 2, although Kennedy Martin did not work on Special Branch itself), and both even share the background of having served in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s. Yet Ronald Craven, unlike his predecessor, comes to break with procedure over the course of the serial, claiming his own political agency in the process. Continuity with the first Bird of Prey was established with the presence of Wearing as producer, whilst Martin Campbell was recruited as director on the basis of his experience with filmed thriller series including Minder (ITV, 1979–94) and The Professionals (ITV, 1977–83). Both worked closely with Kennedy Martin in developing the project even from initial storylining stages, echoing Powell and Irvin’s close involvement throughout production of Tinker Tailor. Thus even as the prestige ‘television novel’ foregrounded the authorship of Kennedy Martin, the larger creative role given to the director saw a partial dilution of the assumption that television was predominantly a writer’s medium. Edge of Darkness, along with other prestige dramas of the time, embraced the other strand of televisuality identified by Caldwell, that of the ‘cinematic’, which ‘brought to television spectacle, high-production values, and feature-style cinematography’.32 Shot entirely on 16mm film with extensive location shooting and expressive lighting design, this is a far more integrated style of televisuality by comparison with Bird of Prey 2’s post-production videographic embellishments, and one that was ultimately more marketable overseas. Edge of Darkness utilises its film production resources to create highly dynamic variations in mood and pace. There are several thrilling action sequences drawing on Campbell’s experience with series such as The Professionals, whilst other scenes deploy a slowness inherited from classic filmed serials such as Tinker Tailor, particularly in those depicting Craven’s grief over Emma’s death. Furthermore, in his detailed analysis of the serial’s aesthetics, Caughie describes how ‘Edge of Darkness creates an anxiety around meaning and motive by a mise en scène which does not



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settle easily on what is significant or why … constantly confronting us with distraction and an excess of information’, through this providing a visual dimension to the paranoid style.33 In the following chapter I will provide my own closer analysis of such paranoid aesthetics through a focus on the later conspiracy drama A Very British Coup (Channel 4, 1988), which pushed a variant on this style to far greater extremes. The generous budget also enabled Edge of Darkness to be shot extensively on location in places all around the UK, helping to project an expansive state-of-the-nation scope. The first five episodes shift between Craven’s hometown of Craigmills in Yorkshire and London, allegorically evoking the regional division between the declining industrial north and the prosperous metropolitan south that had been exacerbated by the Thatcher government’s policies. Whilst the state-of-the-nation portrait offered by Tinker Tailor centred around the microcosmic significance of a select cultural elite, here a more literal quest through the nation is more expansive in the regional and social milieus presented. Unlike contemporary US ‘quality’ dramas which, with their precinct formats, tended to employ large ensemble casts in order to facilitate a variety of viewpoints and multiple plotlines, the British ‘television novel’ of this period tends towards variations on individualistic hardboiled fiction. Many sequences in Edge of Darkness evoke the conventions of film noir, noted as an influence by Kennedy Martin who commented that ‘it’s dark, heavy, portentous; it pours with rain the whole time. It’s meant to have a big, brooding sort of presence.’34 The Singing Detective also incorporated numerous sequences shot in the style of 1940s film noir, indicating the allure of this style for the prestige ‘television novel’. Yet the noir sequences in The Singing Detective are far more stylised and exaggerated in their use of expressive lighting, signifying the internal hallucinatory space of Marlowe’s mind as he re-enacts his own hardboiled detective novel. In Edge of Darkness this aesthetic is, by contrast, used to represent a more tangible world, keeping one foot in the realist style of Euston’s 16mm filming and resulting in a comparatively more gritty iteration of noir (see Figure 4.4). Yet any naturalistic identity is undermined by one recurrent feature, the regular reappearances of Emma as an insubstantial ghost to aid Craven with his investigative journey. It is never clear whether such sequences are entirely the product of Craven’s

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Figure 4.4  Edge of Darkness. Examples of the film noir-style highcontrast lighting deployed by the serial.

imagination, but it nevertheless adds a strong element of subjectivity to the drama. Emma is shown to provide wisdom unavailable to Craven and to provide a critical perspective on his attitudes, constituting what might be regarded as a ‘feminine’ intervention in the traditionally ‘masculine’ wisdom of hardboiled fiction. Her characterisation echoes the archetype of the young female leftwing activist, as featured prominently in several episodes of Special Branch (including 1.6 ‘A New Face’ and 4.4 ‘Stand and Deliver’). In such episodes, the taking of direct political action through violence had typically been a more overtly villainous role played by male characters, whilst the outspoken articulation of left-wing ideals had been more typically a female role (usually treated with some condescension by the investigating officers). In the collapse of moral certainties in the paranoid narrative, however, this alternative political perspective is increasingly given more serious weight by the narrative, with The Detective having featured a similar character in the form of Crocker’s civil rights activist daughter Alison (Sasha Mitchell). This gendering of protest resonates with the prominence of women in progressive movements of the era such as the antinuclear Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. Yet despite their new moral authority, such characters remain marginalised with the central focus placed on the moral awakening of an older, male protagonist, corresponding with the more traditional gendering of the everyman. At its conclusion, however, Edge of Darkness shifts far beyond the conventions of the conspiracy genre, with the vein of magical realism represented by Emma coming to dominate the final episode,



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‘Fusion’ (9 December 1985). By this time, Craven is dying of radiation poisoning following his discovery of an illegal hot cell at the heart of the nuclear state. Urged by Emma’s ghost, however, he declines to fight the conspiracy, instead embracing an even more radical environmentalism in the form of Gaia Theory, that the Earth is a self-regulating organism that will protect itself even if it ultimately needs to destroy the human race. Craven thus places faith in a positive outcome which need not even include the survival of humanity. This is a strikingly unconventional ending for television, a medium otherwise overwhelmingly dominated by the self-evident importance of human experience and agency, arguably nowhere more so than radical drama. Whether read as the proposition of an even more radical argument or simply the defeatist abandonment of a grounded political critique, it nonetheless stands as perhaps the ultimate expression of this serial’s more novelistic ambitions. On its original BBC 2 transmission in autumn 1985, Edge of Darkness proved a critical triumph, with the BBC scheduling an immediate repeat on BBC 1. It would go on to win six BAFTA awards, including Best Drama Series/Serial. When it appeared in the US on PBS in August 1986, a sign of changing transatlantic currents was evident in John J. O’Connor’s New York Times review, which remarked that ‘British producers are finally catching up with American television in the special art of producing slick, taut, action-adventure thrillers’, although he praised the BBC’s willingness to inject ‘substance’.35 The following autumn’s The Singing Detective achieved similar acclaim, particularly on PBS. As Jean Seaton writes rhetorically in her history of the BBC during this period: These were innovative masterpieces of television – unexpected, beautiful, passionate, telling terrible and awesome human tales – and huge audiences were utterly gripped by them … This was public service originality at its highest – adventurous and rewarding for audiences. How could an organisation that made such iconic and enduring new culture – popular, radical, intelligent and affecting – be under any kind of threat? Why weren’t politicians crowing at a national triumph?36

Some politicians, however, had other priorities. In March 1985, between production and broadcast of the serial, Thatcher had initiated the Committee on the Financing of the BBC (Peacock

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Committee). It was hoped that the Peacock Report (19 May 1986) would recommend funding the BBC commercially, although in the end it unexpectedly advocated retaining the licence fee for the immediate future.37 However, in 1986 the controversies surrounding BBC programming would expand beyond non-fiction programming and into drama, centring on issues such as the explicit sexual content in The Singing Detective and the contested depiction of the ‘true story’ of an army mutiny during the First World War in Bleasdale’s The Monocled Mutineer (BBC 1, 1986). Tension over investigative journalism into state secrecy, meanwhile, erupted into a furore over Secret Society (BBC 2, 1987), a documentary series by Duncan Campbell, the journalist responsible for exposing the existence of GCHQ a decade earlier. These battles culminated in the dismissal of Director-General Alasdair Milne by the BBC Board of Governors at the instigation of its new Thatcherite Chair Marmaduke Hussey, interpreted by many as a politically motivated act. By contrast, Edge of Darkness attracted little controversy, perhaps surprisingly considering its clear political critique.38 Indeed it had openly declared itself as providing a specific portrait of Thatcher’s Britain with a cameo by Thatcher herself on Craven’s television in the opening episode in which she is shown defending Britain’s nuclear deterrent, echoing the extensive use of television images of Nixon in All the President’s Men to authenticate its engagement with the real political landscape of Watergate. Thus, perhaps only by virtue of being transmitted some months before the drama controversies of 1986, Edge of Darkness was successfully able to walk the tightrope of exploring leftist anxieties in the Thatcher period whilst reasserting the value of the BBC at home and abroad in producing challenging drama engaged with contemporary issues. Within a year of its transmission, however, possibilities for drama in this vein seemed arguably more besieged than ever. Conclusion Although often positioned as a successor to earlier traditions of radical drama, a recurrent line of criticism against the conspiracy thrillers of the 1980s has found them wanting by comparison. Steven Fielding, for example, argues that they promote ‘a pessimistic and disabling view of politics’,39 whilst Hill complains that conspiracy ‘has the virtue of neatness’ and ‘the benefit of dramatic



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effectiveness’ but ‘at the expense of genuine social and political complexity’.40 As I have argued, however, the political qualities of these dramas can instead be best situated in their use of genre deconstruction, articulating the loss of shared cultural values in the abandonment of the social-democratic consensus by dramatising the collapse of earlier generic certainties of procedure over the extended paranoid narrative of the serial form. Across the decade, dramas such Bird of Prey, In the Secret State, The Detective and Edge of Darkness depicted protagonists implicated within the status apparatus undergoing moral awakenings and breaking with procedure in order to claim their own political agency. Through this they resonated with the BBC’s own crisis of identity against a growing free-market orthodoxy, whilst the strong state provided a suitable dramatic device for articulating such themes. In the middle of the decade, Edge of Darkness reworked the British television conspiracy drama into a stylish prestige serial, its provocative contemporary themes marking it as public service event television in the UK and a ‘quality’ export for overseas. Yet although it had largely avoided controversy, this was still the tradition of public service broadcasting that seemed most under threat from concurrent moves to impose free-market ideals on British television. Despite saving the BBC from commercial funding, the Peacock Report had nonetheless been committed to a long-term deregulation of the British broadcasting landscape, and this initiated widespread public debate as to if and how quality could be maintained in a more commercially driven broadcasting landscape. Yet as Charlotte Brunsdon observed, the overwhelmingly dominant reference points for ‘quality’ drama in this discourse were literaryderived heritage dramas such as Brideshead Revisited (ITV, 1981) and The Jewel in the Crown, conforming to a fundamentally conservative definition of the term.41 As public service broadcasting saw its confidence increasingly diminished, programmes which had worked to create more contemporary, challenging and mediumspecific models of ‘quality’ drama such as Edge of Darkness and The Singing Detective now appeared conspicuously overlooked. With American ‘quality’ drama growing in confidence, this proved the end of an era in which British television drama could make a relatively uncontested claim to a leading role in the increasingly globalised television market. Notions of bold, challenging drama, once assumed to be a key mission of public service broadcasting

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offered to a broad public, would be increasingly deployed instead to offer a challenging experience for affluent, educated elites. Yet at the same time an alternative possible model for high-end drama was offered by a new British television broadcaster which had broken the assumptions of the duopoly era. In the late 1980s this new channel would mount its own excursion into the embattled radical conspiracy tradition which had, until then, been the preserve of the BBC. Notes  1 Richard Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’; in Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), p. 29.  2 Peter Knight, ‘Introduction: A Nation of Conspiracy Theorists’; in Peter Knight (ed.), Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America (New York: New York University Press, 2002), pp. 6–7.  3 Barry Langford, Post-classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style and Ideology since 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), p. 175.  4 Raymond Williams, ‘There’s always the sport’, The Listener (16 April 1970); reprinted in Raymond Williams, Alan O’Connor (ed.), Raymond Williams on Television (New York; London: Routledge, 1989), p. 98.  5 Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994; 2nd ed.), p. 7.  6 John Hill, ‘From Five Women to Leeds United!: Roy Battersby and the Politics of “Radical” Television Drama’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 10:1 (2013), p. 146.  7 Lez Cooke, Troy Kennedy Martin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 167–168.  8 John Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 151.  9 John R. Cook, Dennis Potter: A Life on Screen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998; 2nd ed.), pp. 150–151. 10 Jonathan Powell, interviewed by the author, 26 July 2012. 11 John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 205. 12 Jerry Palmer, ‘Thrillers: The Deviant Behind the Consensus’; in Ian Taylor and Laurie Taylor (eds), Politics and Deviance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), pp. 136–137. 13 Lez Cooke, A Sense of Place: Regional British Television Drama, 1956–82 (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 110–177.



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14 Anthony Sampson, The Changing Anatomy of Britain (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982), p. 167. 15 Skip Willman, ‘Spinning Paranoia: The Ideologies of Conspiracy and Contingency in Postmodern Culture’; in Knight (ed.), Conspiracy Nation, p. 28. 16 John Caughie, Edge of Darkness (London: BFI, 2007), p. 88. 17 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin Books, 2000 [1949]). 18 Christopher Moran, Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 136–164, 186– 198. 19 Johnny Ryan, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), p. 65. 20 John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), p. 4. 21 Ibid., pp. 12–13. 22 For an analysis of two of these plays, see Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London: BFI, 2015; 2nd ed.), pp. 144–148. 23 Ted Whitehead; quoted in Ilona Dixon, ‘Electric Bell’, Radio Times (4–10 May 1985), pp. 4–5. 24 Elke Weissmann, Transnational Television Drama: Special Relationships and Mutual Influence between the US and UK (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 167–169. 25 Jonathan Powell, interviewed by the author, 26 July 2012. 26 Cook, Dennis Potter, pp. 239–240. 27 Troy Kennedy Martin, ‘“Nats go home!”: First Statement of a New Drama for Television’, Encore 48 (March/April 1964), pp. 21–33. 28 Troy Kennedy Martin; quoted in Cooke, Troy Kennedy Martin, p. 158. 29 Troy Kennedy Martin, Edge of Darkness (London: Faber, 1990), p. vii. 30 Troy Kennedy Martin; quoted in Benjamin Woolley, ‘Power politics’, Radio Times (2–8 November 1985), p. 85. 31 Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1997), p. 15. 32 Caldwell, Televisuality, p. 12. 33 Caughie, Edge of Darkness, p. 99. 34 Kennedy Martin; quoted in Woolley, ‘Power politics’, p. 85. 35 John J. O’Connor, ‘Edge of Darkness, award winning series’, New York Times (8 October 1986), p. C26. 36 Jean Seaton, ‘Pinkoes and Traitors’: The BBC and the Nation, 1974– 1987 (London: Profile Books, 2015), p. 257. 37 Report on the Financing of the BBC [Cmnd 9824] (Peacock Report) (H.M.S.O., London, 1986), p. 137.

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38 Caughie, Edge of Darkness, p. 128. 39 Steven Fielding, A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), p. 209. 40 Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s, p. 150. 41 Charlotte Brunsdon, ‘Problems with Quality’, Screen 31:1 (Spring 1990), p. 86.

5

Death of a master narrative: the battle for consensus in A Very British Coup (Channel 4, 1988) The 1980s had seen the development of a new kind of serialised conspiracy drama demonstrating great anxiety over the growing hegemony of Thatcherite politics. In the final years of the decade, however, a new conspiracy drama would take a somewhat different approach, beginning instead with the apparent defeat of Thatcherism. A Very British Coup (Channel 4, 1988) opens with the coming to power of a radical socialist Labour government in an imagined General Election of 1991 on a manifesto of reversing a decade of Thatcherite policies and unilateral nuclear disarmament. Over a montage depicting this election victory, a speech by the charismatic newly elected Prime Minister Harry Perkins (Ray McAnally) (see Figure 5.1) recounts how the country arrived at this moment: It came to pass that the oil money ran out, and Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard and there was nothing left to privatise, and the merchants and the money-lenders in yuppieland no longer collected two million pounds for passing go, because most of them were in jail. And among the patient charge of the poor and the sick and the dispossessed there was great rejoicing. And behold, they looked at the rulers of the land, the ageing city slickers from fifth-rate public schools, and they said … ‘gotcha’!

The victory of a socialist Labour government is therefore sited in an imagined popular disenchantment with the dominant political culture of the 1980s, and furthermore a reformed social-democratic consensus to reclaim the country on behalf of the economically

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Figure 5.1  A Very British Coup. Socialist Labour leader Harry Perkins (Ray McAnally) gives a victory speech upon winning the 1991 General Election.

marginalised. Over the course of this three-part serial, however, Perkins finds himself facing an elaborate Establishment conspiracy running through the intelligence services, media, civil service and US government to engineer his downfall. At the very level of its premise A Very British Coup is far more overt in its leftist politics than any of the BBC-produced dramas discussed in the previous chapter, and this can be attributed to its differing production culture. A Very British Coup was a break-out prestige serial for Channel 4, a new terrestrial broadcaster which had launched on 2 November 1982 and broken the long-standing BBC–ITV broadcasting duopoly. Based upon recommendations in the 1977 Annan Committee Report and formally instated by the 1980 Broadcasting Act, Channel 4 was designed as a publiclyowned publisher of programmes commissioned from a wide range of independent companies, a model which sharply differed from the in-house production that underpinned the BBC and ITV.1 Indeed the new channel was positioned at something of an ideological midpoint between the existing broadcasters. On the one



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hand, it was given a public service remit, but this was reimagined to be lest centralised than that of the BBC, with an aim to reflect a more pluralist society, to encourage innovation, and to appeal to tastes not catered for by the existing broadcasters. On the other, however, Channel 4’s structure provided an enormous boost for the independent production sector in accordance with the commercial enterprise philosophy of the Thatcher government. As a result of this structure, John Ellis argues, ‘Channel 4 was crucial in breaking open the habits of the era of scarcity, in leading the development away from concepts of balance and towards that of diversity of view’ and in guiding British television towards a new ‘era of availability’ defined by a greater provision of choice.2 Over its first decade, Channel 4 was funded by a levy on the ITV companies, who in return sold its advertising space. Offered some protection from the market, the new channel was encouraged to develop a bold and independently-minded voice in the British television landscape, and under founding Chief Executive Jeremy Isaacs came to embrace the ethos of championing new voices and alternative perspectives. As a result, much of the channel’s early output was of an opinionated and sometimes oppositional nature, attracting criticism from the Independent Broadcasting Authority, the press and Parliament. Yet overall this was a far less intensive conflict than the Thatcher government’s concurrent battle against the BBC, likely due to Channel 4’s substantially smaller audience share and its role as a positive example of effective private enterprise in practice.3 With the new channel lacking the resources to produce significant quantities of home-grown drama, the output of its fiction department initially largely consisted of its mainstay soap opera Brookside (Channel 4, 1982–2003) and its Thursday evening Film on Four slot, the main vehicle for its prestige drama output. The latter represented a convergence between the long-standing television single play tradition and the British film industry, with some films such as My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears, 1985) given a cinema release several months before their television broadcast. Serial drama, of the kind discussed in the previous two chapters, was rare in the new channel’s early days. One title developed as a potential Film on Four during this time was an adaptation of A Very British Coup (1982), a novel by leftwing journalist, activist and Tribune editor Chris Mullin. Mullin

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had written the novel at the beginning of the 1980s against the backdrop of various topical concerns, which he later recalled: Mrs Thatcher was in office, but had yet to consolidate her grip on power. Labour was high in the opinion polls. There was a real possibility that, come the election, the Labour party would be led by Tony Benn. The rightwing press was working itself into a frenzy at the prospect … To cap it all, the news that the US was planning to install cruise missiles in its British bases had given the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament a new lease of life.4

Against this climate, Mullin’s novel was prompted by paranoid s­peculation as to whether a Bennite leader, if elected as Prime Minister, would truly be free to carry out a socialist agenda, or if  an intervention by the ‘real masters’ behind society might occur. Further inspiration came from the so-called ‘Wilson plot’,  a  high-profile conspiracy theory which alleged that MI5 officers had plotted to undermine the Labour government of Harold Wilson during his second period in office in the mid-1970s. Indeed, following his 1976 retirement on grounds of ill-health, Wilson himself had made claims of such a plot to BBC journalists, and the topic had continued to receive press attention over subsequent years. Shortly after publication, an option for adapting Mullin’s novel for the screen was acquired by Ann Skinner and Sally Hibbin of the independent production company Skreba Films, who began developing it as a potential Film on Four. By late 1984 they had secured the services of veteran television writer Alan Plater to provide the screenplay.5 With a career dating back to the early 1960s, Plater had recently, like his contemporaries Dennis Potter and Troy Kennedy Martin, undergone something of a canonisation through a prestige production of his original serialised ‘television novel’ The Beiderbecke Affair (ITV, 1985), a comedy investigative thriller which in many ways presented a much lighter variant on the collapse of procedure with its whimsically nonsensical plot. Over the course of 1985, the year in which the BBC broadcast In the Secret State (BBC 2, 1985), The Detective (BBC 1, 1985) and Edge of Darkness (BBC 2, 1985), Plater developed several outlines for his screenplay, considering a variety of adaptation techniques and possible changes to the narrative. By early 1986, he had produced a full script for the intended film version.6



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As Channel 4 strengthened its identity over the 1980s, however, it would make increasing moves into the production of drama series and serials as it adapted to the changing pace of the era of availability. The Peacock Report had recommended that the channel be made to sell its own advertising, raising the possibility that it would be forced to operate more competitively, particularly with the anticipated arrival of satellite television within the next few years.7 Peter Ansorge, the commissioning editor who assumed responsibility for drama series from 1985, considered series and serials to be particularly appealing to viewers, embracing a strategy of nurturing audience loyalty over long-form drama that the BBC and ITV had been increasingly pursuing over the last decade.8 In particular, an adaptation of Tom Sharpe’s academic satire Porterhouse Blue (Channel 4, 1987) had proven a great success, winning the channel’s first International Emmy for Best Drama. Thus A Very British Coup was redeveloped from a potential film into a three-part television serial, apparently at the instigation of Isaacs himself, although in many ways this would anticipate the more populist strategies taken by his successor Michael Grade, who had assumed the role of Chief Executive by the time that A Very British Coup was transmitted.9 From the earliest outlines, Plater’s adaptation had been designed with a three-act structure, each part centring on a particular flashpoint confrontation between Perkins’ cabinet and the conspiratorial Establishment. The first act portrayed the aftermath of Perkins’ election and the first plot by the conspirators, an orchestrated run on sterling. The second depicted a national crisis brought on by a power workers’ strike, stage-managed by the conspirators to damage the popularity of Perkins’ government. Finally, the third focused on Perkins’ commitment to a programme of unilateral nuclear disarmament and a final blackmail plot against him.10 This provided the structural basis for it to be reworked into three television episodes, and Plater had prepared a new set of scripts for this version by summer 1987.11 Filmed over the subsequent year, A Very British Coup was broadcast in June 1988, providing Channel 4 with a major prestige drama serial and later winning four BAFTAs including Best Drama Series. Ansorge, who had risen to the position of Head of Drama for Television Series and Serials by the end of the decade, later described how it ‘raised expectations of Channel 4 drama’, helping it to escape exclusive association with the Film on Four strand.12 A Very British

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Coup also became Channel 4’s most successful overseas export up until that point, given a US broadcast in PBS’ Masterpiece Theatre strand as part of a drive to screen more modern works alongside the more typical historical dramas and literary classics. Here the serial won Channel 4 its second consecutive Best Drama award at the 1988 International Emmys. This therefore marked a moment when the younger Channel 4 came to position itself as a key contributor to the international market of filmed prestige serials alongside the older British broadcasters. Overall, however, A Very British Coup stands as an oddly transitional text, its status as a serialised prestige drama with export potential heralding the direction in which Grade would take the channel, but with its vein of radical politics rooted in the early, more experimental Channel 4 of Isaacs. Mr Perkins goes to Westminster: conspiracy in the corridors of power With an outspoken socialist politician as its central character, A Very British Coup is far more overt in its radical stance than any of the BBC conspiracy thrillers of the period. This can be attributed not only to the politics of Mullin, who had been elected as Labour MP for Sunderland South in the 1987 General Election and was consulted for advice on the adaptation, but also to the politics of the production culture in which the television version was made. Skreba Films had previously made Comrades (Bill Douglas, 1986), a Film on Four which told the story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, one of the first trade unions, whilst Hibbin’s prior career in independent film had included making campaigning films for the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and CND. Plater, meanwhile, shared the leftist politics of contemporaries such as Potter and Kennedy Martin, and there was even an attempt to recruit Ken Loach as director, although this was declined.13 The broadcast of such a drama was undoubtedly aided by the comparatively independent and decentralised nature of Channel 4. Much as the privileging of the individual artist’s vision had traditionally enabled alternative perspectives to emerge from writers and directors at the BBC, at the new channel under Isaacs this logic was effectively extended to the viewpoints and distinct identities of entire independent companies such as Skreba Films. The focus on a Prime Minister as the central character is a key point of difference between A Very British Coup and the BBC



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conspiracy dramas. Arriving at the beginning of the narrative with his radical convictions already fully formed, Perkins undergoes no moral awakening narrative and any notion of standard procedure has already been thoroughly disrupted by the opening premise. Plater seemingly considered this something of a challenge when first approached to write the serial. In an early letter to Skinner and Hibbin, he suggested that they emphasise an ‘investigative thriller approach’ by expanding the role of one of the novel’s supporting characters, Perkins’ loyal press secretary Fred Thompson, positioning him as the central investigator with a much greater involvement in the various strands of the narrative.14 This cast Thompson as an investigative journalist investigating state corruption in the tradition of Woodward and Bernstein, or well-known British secret state specialists such as Chapman Pincher and Duncan Campbell (the latter of whom later advised on the serial’s depiction of the intelligence world). In early 1985, Plater proposed that Thompson would carry a climactic ‘High Noon encounter’ scene in which, having identified intelligence chief Sir Peregrine Craddock as the overall ringleader of the conspiracy, he would burst into a private box at Royal Ascot where all of the conspirators were present and confront them with his findings, only to be outmanoeuvred by their blank denials. Plater also suggested a framing narrative set 18 months after the opening election in which Thompson would create a documentary film chronicling the plot against Perkins and his eventual downfall, expanded from a brief mention of Thompson writing a book on the last page of the novel.15 From here the main narrative would be told in flashback, although at the conclusion Special Branch would arrive, confiscate the film and take Thompson away for questioning.16 By July 1985, however, a revised outline reversed the emphasis on Thompson in favour of a greater focus on Perkins. The ‘big High Noon scene’ was adapted into a confrontation between the Prime Minister himself and Craddock in 10 Downing Street with Thompson absent, and the flashback structure was abandoned.17 Nonetheless, in the final version Thompson (Keith Allen) plays an important supporting role in investigating the conspiracy for Perkins, recruited to serve as an unofficial spy in parallel to his press secretary duties and to ‘keep an eye on the bastards’. The internal debates and ideological divides within the Labour Party had previously been a popular topic for drama, with two

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formative authored serials of the 1970s, Arthur Hopcraft’s The Nearly Man (ITV, 1974) and Trevor Griffiths’ Bill Brand (ITV, 1976), dramatising the struggles of idealistic backbench MPs against party politics. Yet by 1988 the presentation of a Labour leader with strong socialist convictions as protagonist was a relic of the early 1980s origins of the novel, lying out of step with new leader Neil Kinnock’s agenda to change the party’s image by shifting it further to the centre ground. Against this, however, Plater elected to fully embrace the wish-fulfilment aspect of Perkins as a humble workingclass hero and a staunch, principled last bastion of old Labour. He later described the narrative as ‘a traditional story about a guy from the sticks who takes on the big city slickers and almost wins: a combination of Dick Whittington and Robin Hood with a little bit of Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) thrown in’.18 Thus much like Capra’s Mr. Smith (James Stewart), an idealistic, ordinary man from small-town America who confronts political corruption in Washington D.C., Perkins is likewise an honourable outsider, his northern working-class background juxtaposed against the corrupted metropolitan milieu and the elitist figures of the Establishment against whom he clashes. He comes from a family of Sheffield steelworkers and the opening scene of the serial stresses his grounded authenticity by showing him urinating into the toilet in his mother’s council flat. When first elected, he is shown to display an irreverent attitude to the grander traditions of government, travelling to London to take up office by InterCity, refusing an official car to travel around the capital, and visiting Buckingham Palace wearing an off-the-peg Marks and Spencer’s suit. Like many characters throughout Plater’s work he displays a sharp northern wit, here used to restore a clear articulation of socialist values to British parliamentary politics. Despite the departure of the Conservatives from government at the outset of A Very British Coup, the serial portrays much of the underlying political vision associated with Thatcherism remaining in effect behind-the-scenes of society across a variety of undemocratic bodies and institutions. To adopt Andrew Gamble’s terms, Perkins may have won a mandate to reign in the ‘free economy’, but he must still reckon with the ‘strong state’, particularly in the form of the intelligence services.19 This would prove a timely theme when, just two years after the 1985 Cathy Massiter allegations (see previous chapter), there came an even more spectacular instance



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of whistleblowing as embittered former Assistant-Director of MI5 Peter Wright published his notorious autobiography and exposé Spycatcher. Wright’s politically embarrassing claims included the allegation that ‘up to thirty officers’ had been involved in a plot to undermine Harold Wilson, thereby reviving and further publicising the rumours that had originally inspired Mullin’s novel. The Thatcher government’s fierce attempts to suppress the book backfired, meanwhile, helping it to become a runaway bestseller in overseas editions and seeming to add a veneer of credibility to its contents.20 As a result, A Very British Coup was produced and broadcast during an all-time low for MI5’s public perception, with Hibbin describing how ‘as the Wright allegations emerged we realised that the reality was much harder and tougher than in our story. We then had to make it all sharper.’21 Even as the shift by the Labour Party away from the radical socialism of Perkins threatened to make the serial seem out of step with contemporary politics, therefore, this new intelligence scandal came to invest the on-screen conspiracy with a fresh topicality. A Very British Coup converges two paranoid visions of the intelligence world. On the one hand, Sir Percy Browne (Alan MacNaughtan) (as Craddock was renamed, most likely to avoid confusion with the real-life diplomat Sir Percy Cradock whom Thatcher had appointed as the Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee in 1985) represents the traditional Establishment, characterised as an aristocratic Old Etonian who sincerely believes in his right to control British society behind-the-scenes as inherited from his forefathers, ‘yea even unto the middle ages’. He recalls the privileged bureaucrats of Callan (ITV, 1967–72) but with his machinations extended beyond manipulating the put-upon agent and into interfering with the democratic process. Throughout the serial, the struggles of Perkins are increasingly focused through a series of highly personal confrontations with Browne framed in terms of a class-based conflict between their different values and backgrounds (see Figure 5.2), with Perkins in one scene wryly comparing the inherited privilege of Browne against the humble shaving mug that he inherited from his own grandfather. On the other hand, Fiennes (Tim McInnerny) represents the modern sigint side of intelligence at its most sinister, continuing the technological anxieties of Bird of Prey (BBC 1, 1982) and In the Secret State. Fiennes is a younger man whose zealous disposition

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Figure 5.2  A Very British Coup. Perkins faces intelligence chief Sir Percy Browne (Alan MacNaughtan) in the final version of the ‘High Noon encounter’.

contrasts with the smooth, languid demeanour of his superior, and who is most commonly seen sitting in a darkened room looking at a single computer screen, sifting through computer files to find scandals with which to implicate Perkins and his associates. The dystopian potential of Fiennes’ ability to monitor seemingly any member of the populace is emphasised when Browne remarks, ‘One day, Mr Fiennes, you will have the entire population under permanent 24 hour surveillance. Will you be happy then?’ ‘Happy?’ Fiennes replies, ‘Satisfied.’ Unlike Bird of Prey’s Henry Jay, Perkins is not shown to possess equivalent skills and he seems ultimately at the mercy of such forces. Whilst he possesses a clean record devoid of scandals for MI5 to exploit, this does not stop the intelligence officers from opening an illicit Swiss bank account in Perkins’ name and distorting data to suggest that he is on the payroll of the Kremlin in their climactic blackmail plot. This therefore displays a new, digitalage paranoia whereby facts and history are utterly malleable to private and controlling interests. Whilst the power of the secret state was an established thematic component of the British conspiracy genre by this time, A Very



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British Coup adds to this a new fascination with the role of the news media and its capacity to either reveal or obfuscate the truth. Here the positive force of investigative journalism that Thompson represents is countered by the depiction of two powerful media personnel as key conspirators. Most obviously, the right-wing media magnate Sir George Fison (Philip Madoc) mounts a continual campaign of negative, biased and distorted news stories across his numerous newspapers designed to undermine the Prime Minister. Fison can clearly be read as a thinly veiled substitute for Rupert Murdoch, whose continual support for Thatcher’s Conservatives was considered by many to play a key role in their multiple election victories and who was by this time poised to expand his media empire into satellite television in early 1989. A widespread fear that the Murdoch press was so powerful that it could play a significant role in setting the political agenda is satirised particularly blatantly in A Very British Coup, with Fison’s office shown to look down upon the Houses of Parliament from a greater height (see Figure 5.3). In other scenes, he is seen lounging in his swimming pool, drinking cocktails and composing headlines designed to cause the maximum damage for Perkins into a tape

Figure 5.3  A Very British Coup. The elevated view over the Houses of Parliament from the office of press baron George Fison (Philip Madoc).

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recorder, his life of decadent luxury contrasting with the grounded integrity of Perkins. The other key conspirator within the media is the BBC Deputy Director-General Mr Alford (Jeremy Young), whose role in the narrative is smaller yet perhaps more insidious. In contrast with the accusations of left-wing bias frequently levelled against the BBC during this period, Alford personifies long-standing criticisms of the BBC as being overly elitist, paternalistic and supportive of existing structures of power, against which Channel 4 had positioned its own ‘outsider’ image. By the late 1980s, the presence of such a character also reflected the leftist anxiety that the corporation’s independence had been excessively and dangerously curbed in the battle with the Thatcher government, most obviously through the recent dismissal of Alasdair Milne. Alford can be read as an imagined outcome of this trajectory a few years into the future, with ‘yes’-men pliant to special interests having come to dominate the BBC management. The relationship between these institutions is expressed most clearly during a scene in the second episode in which, whilst Perkins plays darts, Thompson draws a diagram on a blackboard illustrating how the conspiracy is structured and thereby visualising the connectedness of the paranoid style (see Figure 5.4). In the year of A Very British Coup’s broadcast, Fredric Jameson would famously describe conspiracy theory as ‘the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content.’22 Organising disparate forces across society into a coherent totality or master narrative of conspiracy, Thompson’s diagram seems to visualise this, but with an almost absurd self-consciousness. This is an example of a dark and ironic vein of humour which runs throughout the serial, offsetting the more polemical elements, with Plater citing the famous Ealing black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets (Robert Hamer, 1949) as an influence on his tone.23 The malevolent conspirators in particular are rather broadly drawn, prone to wry, knowing witticisms such as Fison’s remark, ‘I’ve nothing against dirty tricks providing they are deeply felt and really sincere.’ This satirical element may in part be why, despite the bitter conflicts over other radical television programmes during this period, a right-wing backlash expected by many ultimately failed to engulf the serial.24 Instead, some of its strongest criticism came in fact from



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Figure 5.4  A Very British Coup. The diagram drawn by Fred Thompson (Keith Allen) showing how the conspirators are connected.

Kinnock’s Labour, with deputy leader Roy Hattersley remarking in an exasperated review that ‘despite possessing many of the characteristics of genuine socialist heroism … Harry Perkins never existed. Nor could he ever exist.’25 In an era when the Labour leadership was attempting to improve the party’s popularity through appealing more to the centre ground, a drama which so boldly celebrated the party’s socialist past and implicitly attributed its recent failures to conspiracy, no matter how ironically, was somewhat less than desirable. From modernist montage to paranoid style If its politics were not to everybody’s taste, an aspect of A Very British Coup which won consistent critical praise was the direction of Mick Jackson, whilst its innovative technical and aesthetic characteristics were recognised with BAFTA awards for Best Film Editor and Best Film Sound. Like other prestige drama serials of the period, A Very British Coup was shot entirely on 16mm film, with the tradition of the videotaped, studio-bound drama discussed in previous chapters having been essentially absent on Channel 4 since its inception due to the new broadcaster’s lack of in-house

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production. However, even more so than any of the filmed dramas discussed so far, it drew upon a long-standing tradition of aesthetic radicalism which can be traced back to the original deployment of 16mm filming for dramatic material, the drama documentaries associated with Loach and Tony Garnett in the 1960s. John Hill notes that ‘particularly during the 1960s and 1970s, the idea of “radicalism” [in television drama] was not merely associated with “radical” social and political content but also a commitment to certain kinds of formal invention and experimentation.’26 Indeed, the very earliest Loach–Garnett productions for The Wednesday Play had employed a highly experimental and inventive montage technique, which John Caughie positions as both an outgrowth of the modernist tradition of the British documentary movement and also as the clearest initial response to Kennedy Martin’s 1964 call for a ‘new drama’. Relying upon the (then superior) editing possibilities of 16mm film, these created a fragmented aesthetic through rapid cutting between different characters, spaces and narrative strands, the audio frequently juxtaposing contrasting elements over the visuals. The first such play, Up the Junction (BBC 1, 1965), was particularly loosely structured, with little obvious core to the drama, which explored life in a working-class community in Clapham. Here, the fragmented aesthetic creates what Caughie describes as a kind of ‘ethnographic narrative’, using ‘reality fragments’ and ‘little stories’ to establish the typicality and possible social meaning of the loose central narrative, whilst resisting the pull of emotional identification.27 This was followed by Cathy Come Home (BBC 1, 1966), which utilised a similar montage principle but this time to mount a more focused examination of the social issue of homelessness. Here, Caughie writes, the more urgent message ‘seems to require a stronger central narrative and a greater authority for the documentary evidence’, and the latter is provided by documentary voice fragments, giving a clear social context to the personal narrative. 28 The aim of these drama documentaries was therefore not to simply present content but to agitate the subjectivity of the viewer, in the latter case with an explicit purpose of inspiring political action. Yet even as Loach and Garnett’s works had become more politically radical in the 1970s, the expressive use of montage had subsided in later projects. Variants upon the tradition, however, were intermittently taken up elsewhere over the following decades. In



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the mid-1980s Jackson, then with a background primarily in documentaries, made the feature-length drama documentary Threads (BBC 2, 1984), which dramatised of the impact of nuclear attack on Sheffield. A descendent of the early Loach–Garnett montage style can be found in the dramatic use of fictional news media as a device to situate the drama of the central characters in a wider context. The first half of the film, which depicts the lives of ordinary Sheffield inhabitants in the run-up to the attack, continually features televisions and radios playing in the background, sometimes commented upon by the characters and sometimes not. The presence of these overlapping sound sources and screens-within-the-screen cumulatively convey a foreboding impression of the growing international crisis. This is effectively an upscaled version of the ‘ethnographic narrative’, conveying a world through ‘reality fragments’ but telling instead a highly atypical story and connecting it to a wider world beyond the locality of the central characters. The following year Martin Campbell’s direction on Edge of Darkness made some use of similar techniques, with extensive use of television and radio material to either convey political developments or enhance themes, as with the interview footage of Thatcher. Overall, however, this had been held in tension with sequences aspiring more towards the slow television style found in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (BBC 2, 1979). An interest in employing such techniques on A Very British Coup is evident from the earliest stages of production, with Plater describing in April 1985 how information about unfolding political events would be conveyed ‘not by talking heads but by a television set playing in the corner of a room while the main action is in the centre – by overheard fragments of news on car radios – by glimpses of newspaper headline – by oddments of vox pop conversation in the street’.29 Loach’s background in directing such material may therefore have been a factor in the attempt to recruit him as much as his politics, although ultimately it was Jackson, a more recent practitioner of this style, who was employed to direct the serial. A Very British Coup makes extensive use of the heavily mediated techniques of drama documentary, achieved through the extensive use of moving cameras, unusual angles and rapid cuts, creating a visual style that is unusually dynamic, energetic and fast-paced for British television in the 1980s. A particular sense of anxiety is repeatedly created through sudden cuts to extreme close-ups of people and objects that deny any wider establishing shots and

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hence undermine the viewer’s orientation. An example of this is the sequence in the first episode in which Perkins first enters 10 Downing Street. On the street outside he is pursued and mobbed by the press, portrayed as in many other crowd sequences throughout the serial as being almost overwhelming in intensity. Yet as he steps through the door, two figures appear rapidly beside him to take his coat and bag, actions depicted through quick, disconcerting cuts and close-ups. The sound of the crowd outside is abruptly cut off, leaving a pronounced and unnerving silence punctuated only by sparse, ominous synthesised chords. Much of his initial tour is depicted from Perkins’ point of view, with rapid dissolves between group shots of the staff members, and close-ups of faces and clapping hands. With the viewer aware from the premise that a conspiracy is mobilising against Perkins, the sequence of stony, impassive and unreadable faces become unsettling, carrying the implication of unseen potential hostility (see Figure 5.5), whilst the rapid transition between images works against the objective comprehension of the scene, creating a subjective and disorientating sense of paranoia.

Figure 5.5  A Very British Coup. Perkins first encounters the staff of 10 Downing Street.



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The direction also continually works to generate a paranoid mood through surveillant imagery. The camera repeatedly peers at characters through railings and window blinds, conveying an impression of perpetual voyeurism. Technological surveillance is also emphasised through cutting, with one example occurring when Perkins first picks up his telephone in 10 Downing Street, prompting an instant cut to a close-up of a CIA tape recorder whirring into life to monitor his conversation. This is jarring due to its unexpected interruption of the otherwise continuous scene in Perkins’ office, and the lack of a wider shot to contextualise the technological apparatus. Similarly, when the members of his cabinet first arrive at Downing Street, there are rapid cuts between each minister walking towards the door and a similarly decontextualised close-up of a computer screen in a different location as Fiennes researches their histories, looking for scandal and potential blackmail material. Adopting the upscaled ethnographic approach of Threads and Edge of Darkness, A Very British Coup makes extensive use of media fragments to dramatise a wider society beyond the high political milieu occupied by the central characters, illustrating parallel events occurring in different locations all over the country. Indeed, uniquely it expands this approach further through continual glimpses inside various media institutions. Sequences regularly intercut quickly between spaces such as a BBC television studio where fictional commentators are interviewed, the adjacent control room where BBC staff comment dryly on events (see Figure 5.6), government press conferences where Perkins faces the full flare of the media (see Figure 5.7), Fison’s office where he dictates skewed and biased headlines to his staff, a newsagents where papers displaying the latest headlines are delivered (see Figure 5.8), and ordinary homes where ‘the people’ watch the unfolding events with anxious expressions. The serial thus provides an unusual behind-the-scenes view of its media fragments, interrogating their origin and implicitly questioning their reliability. As with the drama documentary tradition, the visuals are often overlaid with audio excerpts of speeches and interviews from a different timeframe. In such a complex, multi-stranded narrative, this montage style serves the useful function of rapidly communicating information. High-end film production is used to its full advantage, quickly and deftly sketching a state-of-the-nation portrait that would be

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Figure 5.6  A Very British Coup. The BBC reports on Perkins’ government, the serial providing views both inside the studio and behind-the-scenes in the control room.

Figure 5.7  A Very British Coup. Perkins is interrogated by the media in two press conference scenes.

impossible in the more intimate style of videotaped studio drama. At the same time, however, it serves as a greater extreme of the ‘excess of information’ that Caughie describes as characteristic of the paranoid visual style of Edge of Darkness, here accentuated



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Figure 5.8  A Very British Coup. Newspapers, usually displaying headlines hostile to Perkins, are prominently displayed in the mise-en-scène of many sequences.

further by the relative lack of slow sequences to counterbalance it.30 The use of screens-within-the-screen has some parallel also with the videographic experiments in multi-screen imagery seen in Bird of Prey 2 (BBC 1, 1984), which had similarly provided something of an excess of information, yet here such dense imagery is resolutely cinematic in style, not breaking up the viewer’s screen in a two-dimensional manner but instead creating a three-­ dimensional diegetic  world characterised by overbearing mediatisation. The ‘paranoid narrative’ is thus more than ever situated within a paranoid space. The cumulative effect of such montage sequences is to evoke the intensity of public life that Perkins faces, although this does not take the form of close identification, with such sequences typically presenting him as a subject of the montage rather than aligning with his perspective. With its effective reunion of the politically and  aesthetically radical currents of earlier Loach–Garnett drama  documentaries, A Very British Coup might be considered as a work that similarly seeks to agitate the viewer’s subjectivity. However, for much of its length the serial does not offer obvious possibilities for inspiring political action on the part of the audience as in Cathy Come Home, seeming instead overpowered by a sense of disorientation and helpless paranoia. Nonetheless, in its concluding episode, A Very British Coup offers something of a possibility for restoring public involvement in the nation’s political life, placing this front and centre of the issues at stake in the narrative climax.

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Despite the anxiety with which A Very British Coup regards the broadcast news, the conclusion of the final episode offers a potential restoration of its positive role in upholding society. Here the adaptation radically departs from the source novel’s pessimistic ending, in which the conspirators had succeeded in blackmailing Perkins and forcing him to resign quietly on grounds of ‘ill-health’ (providing a paranoid echo of Harold Wilson’s abrupt resignation in 1976).31 Plater’s initial outlines had adhered to this, but by the beginning of 1986 he had proposed a new and different conclusion, more reflexively invested in the possibilities of the television medium. Winning the approval of Mullin, who declared it superior to his own ending, this would be used as the climax for the final televised version.32 Here, Browne similarly attempts to blackmail Perkins over forged records of financial impropriety, offering him a ‘tasteful’ exit through a resignation on grounds of ill-health. When Perkins darkly characterises this as a coup d’état, Browne replies, ‘But no firing squad, no torture or retribution, no bloodshed. A very British coup, wouldn’t you say?’ Initially Perkins appears to cave in to these demands, and prepares a resignation speech to be read during a live televised Prime Ministerial Broadcast. Yet when he goes on air, Perkins seizes the initiative and goes off-script, instead calling for an immediate public inquiry into the allegations with the aim of exposing the conspiracy, and declaring a new General Election explicitly on the question of who truly rules the country (see Figure 5.9). Hill describes how a key point differentiating the conspiracy thriller from the conventional crime story is in how ‘it is those who are in power who are the source of wrongdoing and it is therefore much more difficult to identify the means whereby social ills may be remedied.’33 With the current structures of power corrupted and inadequate for addressing the problems at hand, the genre must instead locate its potential for narrative closure in a different site of moral meaning, and this is most commonly found in the sphere of public opinion. The classic form of the conspiracy thriller is frequently characterised by narratives in which the protagonist, in addition to uncovering the truth, must also strive to put it into the public domain, with the implication that the subsequent



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Figure 5.9  A Very British Coup. Perkins exposes the conspiracy and calls a General Election at the climax of the serial.

public reaction may prove the most productive force for affecting positive change. Paranoia, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick writes, ‘acts as though its work would be accomplished if only it could finally, this time, somehow get its story truly known. That a fully initiated listener could still remain indifferent or inimical, or might have no help to offer, is hardly treated as a possibility.’34 The narrative of the Watergate scandal is hugely influential in this regard, with the reporting of the conspiracy by The Washington Post forcing the resignation of Richard Nixon and thereby demonstrating a highprofile instance of public exposure achieving a positive result. Such narratives evoke the scenario of a population coming together, united in purpose, to reject a conspiratorial culture. This possibility is therefore invested in consensus, which functions as an alternative and more authentic social centre when the legal system is inadequate. As Skip Willman writes, ‘conspiracy theories presuppose a fallen society whose failure to constitute itself as a harmonious

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whole must be explained; the conspiratorial narrative resurrects the possibility of society even as it traces its demise through the agency of hidden forces.’35 In British culture such a vision of society can be readily linked to the ideal of the social-democratic post-war settlement, especially when appealed to by an old Labour socialist. Yet this is precisely what the Thatcher government had been working to dismantle over the course of the 1980s, promoting instead the alternative ideal of individualism and the ostensible restoration of individual freedom as the solution required for Britain’s problems. Thatcher’s famous remark that ‘there is no such thing as society’ is, in ideological terms, fundamentally in opposition to the leftist conspiracy narrative which is intensely invested in society’s renewal and the restoration of consensus. Underpinning this is an ideological dichotomy between two competing and highly idealised ‘golden ages’; the ‘Victorian values’ of self-reliance espoused by Thatcher, and the lost society rooted in consensus championed by Perkins, its idealised fictional spokesman. The role played by the television broadcast in the climax also serves as the culmination of the self-reflexive exploration of the media over the serial, with Perkins ultimately able to triumph over his opponents in this crucial arena. The broadcast of Perkins’ exposure of the conspiracy to the entire nation shows the BBC once again fulfilling its potential as a catalyst for positive change, even though this requires Alford to be physically restrained by Perkins’ personal bodyguard Inspector Page (Bernard Kay). Here the Corporation is briefly, but crucially, restored to its traditional public service role of providing, as Paddy Scannell writes, ‘an independent public sphere, as a forum for open public discussion of matters of general concern’, recalling the democratic potential which had first attracted writers such as Plater to the television medium in the 1960s.36 This is, however, somewhat ironic in the context of Channel 4, the harbinger of the era of availability, and might be read as Plater’s traditional public service ideals overpowering the channel’s investment in a new model of public service rooted in diversity and difference. In the end, however, the public response is displaced by other factors within the narrative. Plater’s original film script had simply finished with the election, leaving the response of the public unseen.37 However, when he reworked the adaptation into a threepart serial in 1987, he added an additional pessimistic coda to the final episode.38 After Perkins is shown preparing for the new



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election in his mother’s flat, a rising crane shot of the skyline of his native Sheffield is accompanied by a BBC radio news report announcing that a statement from Buckingham Palace to clarify the ‘constitutional situation’ will be forthcoming shortly. The final shot of the serial is of a polling station sign, and as the camera lingers, the soft-focus shape of a soldier carrying a rifle appears to obscure it, filling the frame with blackness. Over this, the sound of the radio report is drowned out by the noise of helicopters and military radios, growing in volume and urgency, until a sudden, final cut to silence. The uncomfortable inference is that, having rejected the bloodless ‘very British coup’ offered to him by Browne, Perkins will soon face a decidedly less ‘British’ coup, this one instigated by the military and backed by the Royal Family, two further pillars of the Establishment which had been relatively marginal in the narrative until this point. The threatening quality of the ending is therefore rooted in the explicit overruling of the restored utopian consensus by the sinister, anti-democratic Establishment. Here a master narrative of the social-democratic consensus, aligned with Perkins’ open appeal to the will of the British population at the climax, is displaced by a dystopian master narrative sited directly in the suppression of consensus possibilities. A Very British Broadcasting Coup: shaping the era of availability A Very British Coup can be positioned as a climax to the 1980s conspiracy tradition, where the themes and preoccupations that built through the BBC cycle reached their fullest expression. By the turn of the decade, however, the genre had been overtaken by significant changes in both national and international politics. Although the Labour Party had stuck to manifestos of unilateral nuclear disarmament in the 1983 and 1987 General Elections, Kinnock came to abandon this as part of his modernisation strategy, ironically in the same week that A Very British Coup’s first episode was broadcast. A more fundamental shift, however, was the ousting of Thatcher from the role of Prime Minister by her own party in November 1990. Whilst the Conservatives would remain in power until 1997 under the leadership of John Major, this marked the end of the particularly combative political style that Thatcher had personified and to which the conspiracy genre had responded so dramatically.

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The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, meanwhile, had heralded the end of the Cold War, dramatically removing the powerful symbol which had held an iconic status in existential spy fiction since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963). As well as appearing to diminish the possibilities for the spy genre, the prospect of a new geopolitical landscape in which Western neoliberal capitalism had emerged as entirely dominant diminished the anxieties surrounding the nuclear state which had underpinned Edge of Darkness and A Very British Coup in particular. Over this time the government also responded to intelligence scandals such as the ‘Spycatcher Affair’ by placing MI5 on a statutory footing for the first time in the 1989 Security Service Act, finally coming to acknowledge its existence openly. This commenced an ongoing effort to improve the service’s public profile and dispel the climate of conspiratorial paranoia that had built up around it.39 The turn of the decade was also a time of profound transition within the British television industry which, following many suggestions in the Peacock Report, was radically restructured by the 1990 Broadcasting Act to operate more in accordance with the free market. In the 1991 franchise round, ITV franchises were put out to competitive tender for the first time, whilst restrictions on the ability of franchise-holding companies to merge were removed, instigating a process of consolidation which would see all English and Welsh franchises come under control of a single ITV company by 2004. Channel 4, meanwhile, was obliged to begin selling its own advertising from 1993, removing some of the prior insulation from market forces and undermining the diversity of programming upon which it had built its reputation. The Act also sought to expand the perceived success of the publisher–broadcaster model of Channel 4 by requiring the BBC and ITV to commission 25% of their broadcast time from independent producers, intended to undermine their perceived monopolistic tendencies and to encourage competition between producers seeking commissions. This heralded the full arrival of the era of availability which, as Ellis describes, replaced the era of scarcity’s assumption of ‘a mass audience with relatively few differentiations’ with a more nuanced notion whereby ‘the audience is conceived as much more a loose assemblage of minorities to be brought into various kinds of coalition, or even to be addressed singly. The mode of address of programmes begins to change, becoming less universalistic and more



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specific.’40 Audiences became increasingly divided into taste groups defined by purchasing power, which as Scannell argued, undercut ‘the fundamentally democratic principles upon which public service broadcasting rests’, destroying ‘the principle of equality of access for all to entertainment, informational and cultural resources in a common public domain’.41 Two years after Perkins had addressed a fictional nation, challenging a master narrative of conspiracy and offering an alternative narrative of socialist unity, British television would itself shift to a more postmodern form that resisted totalising explanations. Channel 4 would continue to expand its drama content into the following decade, achieving another notable success with Alan Bleasdale’s satirical serial G.B.H. (Channel 4, 1991). Drawing inspiration from the activities of the Militant Tendency in Liverpool City Council in the mid-1980s, it depicts the takeover of a northern city by a radical left council led by Michael Murray (Robert Lindsay), presented in the early episodes as an aggressive and unsympathetic agitator. Later, however, the narrative makes an unexpected shift into conspiracy, revealing that the unrest has been clandestinely manipulated by MI5 agents within the Murray camp in order to discredit the Labour Party. Yet overall G.B.H. is ultimately far less invested in the paranoid possibilities of the conspiracy than its Channel 4 predecessor, using it instead as a metaphorical device for exploring the mental health concerns faced by Murray, who increasingly becomes a figure of fascination over the course of the drama. This is arguably indicative of how the conventions of the conspiracy genre would become diluted across other generic traditions in the 1990s. David Pirie’s Natural Lies (BBC 1, 1992), for example, depicts a conspiracy to conceal a case of human BSE infection, although here the tone is lighter and the conspiracy merely involves misdeeds in the world of big business with no involvement from the secret state. Another thriller taking place in the world of high politics, meanwhile, was House of Cards (BBC 1, 1990), which focuses on the schemes of the cynical, self-serving Conservative Party Chief Whip Francis Urquhart (Ian Richardson) who manipulates his way to the position of Prime Minister through murder and blackmail. This is in many ways an inversion of A Very British Coup’s narrative, with the honourable politician who becomes a victim of the malevolent system supplanted by a dishonourable politician who expertly manipulates a system which lacks the capacity to contain

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his ambitions. Perhaps appropriately, the systemic conspiracy of the 1980s was thus replaced by individualist conspiracy for the 1990s, with no master narrative beyond the charismatic anti-hero’s personal ambition. These were, however, only some of the more iconic dramas of the early 1990s, which continued the thread of ambitious serial drama from the 1980s. By the end of decade, a report commissioned by the Campaign for Quality Television complained of an increased homogenisation across British television drama, noting in particular an overabundance of police and detective series and attributing this to ‘pressure for predictable hits, renewable series, recognised stars and “drama reassurance”’.42 A loose parallel might be drawn with the rise of the Hollywood blockbuster in Ronald Reagan’s America, often characterised as the reconstruction of genre following the radical deconstruction of the 1970s. So too the proliferation of the police series on British television in the 1990s can be read as a reconstruction of the procedural conventions that had been deconstructed by serialised conspiracy dramas in the 1980s such as Edge of Darkness. Perhaps the most pertinent example of a new episodic crime series was Bugs (BBC 1, 1995–99), a family-oriented revival of the ITC-style adventure series centring on a group of crime-fighting security consultants. On the one hand, the BBC’s new willingness to broadcast an adventure series, a subgenre that had previously been dominated by ITV, was a significant sign of its shift to more commercial priorities. On the other hand, as implied by its title, Bugs is notable for a new fascination with digital technology, particularly in the field of surveillance, showing it as an effective (and even somewhat glamorous) crime-fighting tool. Describing portrayals of surveillance in popular culture, David Lyon separates the surveillance genre into two strands. Whilst dramas such as Bird of Prey, In the Secret State and A Very British Coup had developed the ‘alarmist, unsettling, haunting, conspiratorial’ strand from its dystopian roots in texts such as Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) into an all-toocontemporary threat, Bugs was one of the first British television thrillers to ‘reassure about the realities of surveillance’ and ‘support the view that surveillance is a necessary dimension of life today’, anticipating a growing strain of positive depictions of surveillance in spy and police series of the twenty-first century.43 As the television market became ever more globalised, meanwhile, the growing competition posed by stylish American dramas



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such as ER (NBC, 1994–2009) and The West Wing (NBC, 1999– 2006) became increasingly threatening. By the millennium there were widespread complaints that the once globally renowned British television industry had fallen behind, the new emphasis on free-market competitiveness plunging it into a battle where it was at a perpetual disadvantage. The most successful conspiracy drama on British television over this time was in fact the US science fiction hybrid The X-Files (Fox, 1993–2002), which appeared first on BBC 2 and soon afterwards transferred to BBC 1. With conspiracy narratives centred on paranormal phenomena rather than grounded topical concerns such as market domination or the nuclear state, this was far from the provocative engagement with real-world anxieties displayed by 1980s British conspiracy dramas. In 2002 Peter Knight positioned this series as a key example of how ‘a selfconscious and self-reflexive entertainment culture of conspiracy has become thoroughly mainstream’.44 On television, therefore, the radical impulse of earlier conspiracy dramas had become blunted to more abstract generic pleasures. This period also saw the eventual return of the Labour Party to power in the 1997 General Election, ending 18 years of Conservative governments. Under the leadership of Tony Blair, however, the party had embraced free-market ideals and abandoned its commitment to socialism, seemingly leaving the figure of Harry Perkins as an increasingly diminished historical curiosity. Conclusion Viewed in retrospect, the conspiracy dramas of the 1980s can in many regards be read as an expression of trauma as British broadcasting transitioned from the era of scarcity to the era of availability, a shift which would diminish the public service traditions from which many of its most renowned practitioners had built their careers. This is dramatised most clearly through the self-reflective focus on media cultures in A Very British Coup. Here television and the media more broadly offer the potential for either creating a paranoid space of deception, alienation and atomisation, or for redeeming society through an address to a culture-in-common and a restoration of consensus. Yet even as A Very British Coup resurrected the master narrative of socialism to combat a conspiratorial master narrative of

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Thatcherite politics, within a few years the implementation of the 1990 Broadcasting Act would usher in a postmodern broadcasting age defined by the lack of master narratives. The serial can therefore be read as providing the ‘High Noon encounter’ between the long-standing British tradition of radical drama and the ascendant neoliberal political culture, after which the nature of progressive drama would fundamentally change. The innovative and uniquely daring qualities of A Very British Coup, however, have been enough to mark it out as a significant, if perhaps somewhat exceptional, part of Channel 4’s heritage and the broader history of British television drama, as particularly well illustrated by two later developments. First was the commissioning of an ostensible remake 24 years later entitled Secret State (Channel 4, 2012) to celebrate Channel 4’s thirtieth anniversary. In practice, however, Secret State was barely recognisable as the same story, the process of adaptation serving to highlight how much debates in British politics had shifted away from the socialism represented by Harry Perkins after more than a decade of Blair’s New Labour. In this version, rather than being a socialist firebrand, protagonist Tom Dawkins (Gabriel Byrne) begins as a relatively naïve Deputy Prime Minister whose politics are left non-specific beyond a vague commitment to open government. He is unexpectedly thrust into the top office, not by a landslide General Election and a mandate for a clear reform agenda, but instead by the disappearance of the incumbent Prime Minister (Tobias Menzies) in a mysterious plane accident. Furthermore, the central conspiracy is not rooted in class conflict or the clash of underlying political visions, as in the 1988 production and Mullin’s original novel, but instead concerns a plot to provoke a war for profit motives, providing a more conventional ‘war on terror’ thriller with a smaller political scope.45 The remake may simply, however, have been produced just a little too soon. Three years later socialist candidate Jeremy Corbyn won a surprise victory in the Labour leadership election, providing the first frontbench challenge to neoliberalism since the 1980s. When Corbyn’s election was met with enormous hostility from sections of the media, along with dark murmurings of a potential army ‘mutiny’ and accusations of ‘dark practices’ conducted against him by MI5, for some commentators the original television version of A Very British Coup suddenly seemed to offer an unexpectedly rich source of comparison.46



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The most significant way in which the serial anticipated future developments in British television drama, however, came through its paranoid visual style. Over subsequent decades, an excess of information, expressed through the mediatisation of screens, cameras and computers, would become a common feature of many television thrillers. Absorbed into a more commonplace visual vocabulary for the medium, this would rarely be deployed to express a loss of certainty as dramatically as it had in A Very British Coup, instead often serving the opposite function of enhancing a reconstruction of faith in policing and intelligence procedure. Notes  1 Report of the Committee on the Future of Broadcasting [Cmnd. 6753] (London: H.M.S.O., 1977).  2 John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), p. 148.  3 For a broader history of Channel 4, see Maggie Brown, A Licence to be Different: The Story of Channel 4 (London: BFI, 2007).  4 Chris Mullin, ‘When the threat of a coup seemed more than fiction’, The Guardian (7 March 2006), www.theguardian.com/politics/2006/ mar/07/past.comment.  5 BFI National Archive, Special Collections, London (hereafter BFI), ITM-8314: Very British Coup, Item #1, letter to Alan Plater from Ann Skinner, 9 October 1984.  6 BFI, ITM-8314, Item #10, film screenplay by Alan Plater, A Very British Coup (second draft), May 1986.  7 Report on the Financing of the BBC [Cmnd 9824] (Peacock Report) (H.M.S.O., London, 1986), p. 144.  8 Brown, A Licence to be Different, p. 179.  9 Jeremy Isaacs, Storm over 4: A Personal Account (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), p. 179. 10 BFI, ITM-8314, Item #3, film outline by Alan Plater, A Very British Coup (4 February 1985). 11 BFI, ITM-8314, Item #13, three-episode television screenplay by Alan Plater (2 July 1987). 12 Peter Ansorge, ‘GBH: What the papers said’, The Independent (24 July 1991). 13 John Hill, Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 162. 14 BFI, ITM-8314, Item #2, letter to Ann Skinner and Sally Hibbin from Alan Plater, 15 December 1984.

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15 Chris Mullin, A Very British Coup (London: Serpent’s Tale, 2010 [1982]), p. 220. 16 BFI, ITM-8314, Item #5, film outline by Alan Plater, A Very British Coup, 1 April 1985. 17 BFI, ITM-8314, Item #7, film outline by Alan Plater, A Very British Coup, 14 July 1985, p. 10. 18 Alan Plater; quoted in Sean Day-Lewis, Talk of Drama: Views of the Television Dramatist Now and Then (Luton: University of Luton Press, 1998), p. 99. 19 Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994; 2nd ed.). 20 Peter Wright, with Paul Greengrass, Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (Richmond, Victoria: Heinemann Australia, 1987), p. 369; and Christopher Moran, Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 336–339. 21 Sally Hibbin; quoted in Julian Petley, ‘A Very British Coup’, Sight and Sound 57:2 (Spring 1988), p. 96. 22 Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’; in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 356. 23 BFI, ITM-8314, Item #5, film outline by Alan Plater, A Very British Coup, 1 April 1985, p. 1. 24 Jamie Dettmer, ‘TV drama is Spycatcher in disguise’, Sunday Telegraph (8 May 1988), p. 3; and Ken Livingstone, ‘A very popular coup’, Evening Standard (5 July 1988), p. 18. 25 Roy Hattersley, ‘Let’s pretend politics’, The Listener (23 June 1988), p. 9. 26 John Hill, ‘Radical Television Drama: Introduction’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 10:1 (2013), p. 108. 27 John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 115–120. 28 Caughie, Television Drama, p. 119. 29 BFI, ITM-8314, Item #5, film outline by Alan Plater, A Very British Coup, 1 April 1985, p. 11 (his emphasis). 30 John Caughie, Edge of Darkness (London: BFI, 2007), p. 99. 31 Mullin, A Very British Coup, pp. 207–213. 32 BFI, ITM-8314, Item #9, notes on Alan Plater’s screenplay by Chris Mullin, January 1986, p. 1. 33 John Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 151. 34 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performati­ vity (Durham, N.C.; London: Duke University Press, 2003), p. 138.



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35 Skip Willman, ‘Spinning Paranoia’; in Peter Knight (ed.), Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America (New York: New York University Press, 2002), p. 28. 36 Paddy Scannell, ‘Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Public Life’, Media, Culture and Society 11:2 (April 1989), p. 145. 37 BFI, ITM-8314, Item #10, film screenplay by Alan Plater, A Very British Coup (second draft), May 1986, p. 128. 38 BFI, ITM-8314, Item #13, television screenplay by Alan Plater, A Very British Coup, 2 February 1987. 39 Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Penguin, 2010; updated ed.), pp. 771–798. 40 Ellis, Seeing Things, p. 71. 41 Scannell, ‘Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Public Life’, p. 139. 42 Steven Barnett and Emily Seymour, ‘A Shrinking Iceberg Travelling South …’: Changing Trends in British Television: A Case Study of Drama and Current Affairs (London: Campaign for Quality Television, 1999), p. 5. 43 David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), pp. 139–140. 44 Peter Knight, ‘Introduction: A Nation of Conspiracy Theorists’; in Knight (ed.), Conspiracy Nation, p. 6. 45 For my own more extensive analysis of Secret State, see Joseph Oldham, ‘Changing Narratives of Conspiracy: A Review of Hunted, Secret State, Complicit and Utopia’, Journal of Intelligence History 13:1 (2014), pp. 94–103. 46 See, for example, Vincent Dowd, ‘A Very British Coup 35 years on’, BBC News (24 September 2015), www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainmentarts-34317445; and David Stubbs, ‘A Very British Coup box set review: “a startlingly prescient, first-class governmental drama”’, The Guardian (13 August 2015), www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/aug/13/ very-british-coup-political-drama-box-set-review.

6

The precinct is political: espionage as a public service in Spooks (BBC 1, 2002–11)

Although the 1990s proved something of a moribund period for the British television spy series, following the turn of the ­mil­lennium the BBC would experience great success with Spooks (BBC 1, 2002–11), an ongoing espionage-themed drama developed as a new flagship programme for its majority interest channel BBC 1. This series centred on the officers of Section D, a fictional counter-terror unit situated within the real British Security Service (MI5). Spooks made its debut in May 2002, just eight months after the attacks on New York and Washington D.C. of 11 September 2001, when terrorists associated with the group al-Qaeda hijacked four planes and crashed them into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, causing the deaths of nearly 3,000 people. Soon afterwards US President George W. Bush had declared the onset of a ‘war on terror’ with the stated aim of defeating not just al-Qaeda but every terrorist group with global reach. This terminology would come to dominate Western political discourse for the remainder of the decade, offering a geopolitical conflict narrative sometimes characterised as a successor to the Cold War. It rapidly manifested in a series of military engagements in the Middle East, with the UK serving as supporterin-chief of a US-led invasion of Afghanistan from October 2001. At the same time, the ‘war on terror’ label also came to encompass the prospective fear of further terrorist violence on Western soil, an anxiety which, in the British context, arose just a few years after the broad cessation of hostilities over Northern Ireland. Previous academic analysis of Spooks has commonly positioned it as British television’s most high-profile dramatisation of concerns



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surrounding the ‘war on terror’, often comparing it to 24 (Fox, 2001–10), a contemporaneous American spy series which also adopted a counter-terror focus.1 Indeed, at the time of its debut, most surrounding press discourse followed the line offered by the official BBC press pack which positioned the series as a timely response to ‘the biggest threat to national security since the Second World War’.2 In reality, however, by the time of the 9/11 attacks the initial six-episode run of Spooks had already been commissioned and largely planned out, with four scripts drafted. Although the series would come to position itself more strongly as a response to the ‘war on terror’ in later years, this chapter will primarily examine this first series in the context of its original broadcast in summer 2002. This was in many ways a transitional moment, coming before the expansion of military action into Iraq from March 2003, which would instigate a slow decline in British public opinion towards the ‘war’.3 A focus on this phase will help to provide a more nuanced exploration of points of continuity and difference with earlier spy programming, often eclipsed in accounts that prioritise the newness of the ‘war on terror’. Firstly, I examine how Spooks was developed within the independent production sector, increasingly seen as a prime site of b ­ oldness and innovation within the British television industry, yet  was also commissioned for BBC 1 as part of a drive to restore its competitiveness and broad audience appeal. Indeed, this sense of an alliance between cutting-edge developments in drama production and long-standing cultural values is in many ways mirrored in the text itself. I explore how Spooks drew upon many new elements that had been popularised in a deregulated and globalised  television era, including the popular form of the precinct series and a dynamic visual style derived from high-end American drama. At the same time, however, I argue that the series was conceived as an  heir to specifically British traditions of spy thriller from its initial development, a component which remains strong throughout its run. Additionally, I argue that it frequently worked to complicate its procedural counter-terror narratives with a complex and sometimes subversive engagement with contemporary politics, thereby demonstrating the survival of public service broadcasting’s challenging qualities in this more commerciallyoriented television era.

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Whilst the BBC had survived the 1980s with the licence fee as its primary income, it increasingly stood as an anomaly against the new free market-oriented television landscape shaped by the 1990 Broadcasting Act. Faced with a real-terms decline in licence fee income and a crisis of declining viewership in the competitive multichannel age, BBC management responded by creating a complex internal market system, embracing more commercial activities and displaying a greater preoccupation with the battle for ratings. However, John Ellis argues that over time public service broadcasting found a way to re-interpret its ideals for the era of availability. This came through exploring and negotiating the social antagonisms intensified by the marketplace, and thus ‘instead of providing displays of national unity, it deals in displays of national disunity, the better to bring about ways of resolving them … The new public service broadcasting is no longer concerned with imposing consensus, but with working through new possibilities of consensus.’4 This period also saw a boom in the independent production sector, following the 1990 Broadcasting Act’s requirement that the BBC and ITV commission 25% of their programming from outside companies. With many independents either going out of business or merging with rivals in order to survive, however, only a smaller number of ‘super-indies’ would thrive in the long term. One such super-indie was Kudos Film & Television, founded by former Channel 4 commissioning editor Stephen Garrett. Much of Kudos’ early work had been in non-fiction programming, although by the end of the decade it achieved an early drama success with the series Psychos (Channel 4, 1999) written by David Wolstencroft and set in the psychiatric ward of a Glasgow hospital. Although Psychos was not recommissioned for a second series, Kudos was encouraged by Channel 4 to consider new possibilities for a precinct drama. The term ‘precinct drama’ had come to refer chiefly to police and hospital series, increasingly consolidated within the industry due to their similar setting, described by Ellis as ‘an institution which provides a handy flow of individual incidents around and through which the core characters live their particular problems’. This is a specifically televisual form strongly rooted in the serialised possibilities of broadcasting. It typically features a strong personal element derived from soap operas, positioning



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the central cast as a familiar and accessible workplace family and siting drama in their interpersonal relationships. At the same time, however, the institutional space offers greater possibilities for drama at the extremes of human experience, centring on matters of life and death, as well as engagement with key topics of public debate. In this regard, Ellis argues, such programmes ‘offer a full working through of particular narrative options which have been foreshadowed in the talk arena’ of television programming, offering ‘full scenarios in which the audience can experience dilemmas from the inside’.5 By the late 1990s, however, Garrett shared the feeling of many ­commentators that the precinct drama had become a highly predictable form. Seeking a fresh and original approach, he later described how: Bereft of ideas myself, I wandered into a bookshop to see if novelists had found a precinct that perhaps television hadn’t done a whole heap with, or if they had maybe in the past, not recently. And I kept finding myself drawn back to the section in Waterstones dealing with John Le Carré’s work and something just drew me constantly back to the world of spies. And I remembered vividly Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy [BBC 2, 1979] being an absolutely compelling piece of drama, [although] absolutely not a precinct drama.6

This would provide a basis for the concept that would ultimately evolve into Spooks. It is evident, therefore, that from this initial phase the series was conceived as belonging to a distinctively British tradition of spy fiction, one which furthermore had strong prior associations with the BBC due to its earlier international success with Tinker Tailor. As Garrett notes, however, despite its focus on a professional espionage culture, Tinker Tailor can hardly be considered a precinct drama due to both its closed serial form and its focus on an elite, ageing generation who lack the familiar, accessible qualities of the workplace family. This can therefore only be considered a partial influence, but nonetheless a crucial one. It is also evident that, unlike earlier spy series such as Callan (ITV, 1967–72) and The Sandbaggers (ITV, 1978–80), the concept originated at management level rather than coming from a writer, an example of how British television in the deregulated era had shifted from an ‘offer-led’ to a ‘demand-led’ system.7 The task of developing the full series was nonetheless given to established Kudos writer Wolstencroft, who was thereafter credited as its creator.

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By the time Jane Featherstone arrived as Kudos Head of Drama in  2000, an early version of the series was in development for Channel 4. Since 1993 the UK’s fourth channel had been forced to sell its own advertising and thereby subjected to greater commercial pressure. As the concept of a unified general public had fragmented in the multi-channel age, it had increasingly elected to focus on popular programming targeted towards the 15–35-year-old demographic, considered desirable for advertisers due to their typically higher level of disposable income. The original Channel 4 version of the series had been tailored for this youth audience and was retrospectively characterised by Featherstone as ‘sex, drugs, [and] rock’n’roll spies’.8 This proposal would, however, ultimately fall through. This was also a period in which the BBC was regaining some of its previous confidence. Having returned to power in the 1997 General Election, the Labour Party had, despite its underlying acceptance of free-market ideals, highlighted change through aligning itself with the boom in nationally specific creative industries including music, fashion and art popularity known as ‘Cool Britannia’, much of which drew inspiration from the popular culture of the 1960s. The 1960s had also been a ‘golden age’ for the BBC’s own confidence and willingness to experiment, and so a Labour government seemed to offer space to recapture at least some of this spirit for the 2000s. A respite from the battles of the Conservative era was seemingly confirmed when the licence fee was increased to help fund digital expansion, giving the BBC its first real rise in income in two decades. Labour had achieved victory in part through rebranding itself as the more image-conscious ‘New Labour’, and the BBC would itself undergo highly image-conscious modernisation during this period, driven by a mission to re-establish its distinctiveness in the broadcasting marketplace. Upon his arrival in January 2000, new Director-General Greg Dyke made key organisational changes, curbing the internal market, shifting the balance towards creative and production interests, and making the largest increase in spending on programmes in the BBC’s history. BBC 1 was seen as a priority area, and under new Controller Lorraine Heggessey a new wave of dynamic, fast-paced and inventive popular dramas were commissioned including Clocking Off (BBC 1, 2000–03), Linda Green (BBC 1, 2001–02) and Cutting It (BBC 1, 2002–05). Many of these were aimed largely at a younger audience, mirroring Channel 4’s strategy, although for the BBC this was motivated less



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by commercial concerns and more by the existential need to demonstrate its value to the next generation of citizen-consumers. This was a controversial strategy, Lez Cooke describing how it resulted in an arguable loss of clear distinction ‘between “public service” and “commercial” broadcasting’.9 With the licence fee offering the BBC unique market protection even as an advertising recession was undermining its commercial rivals, this was criticised for offering unfair competitive advantage in the area of popular programming. Georgina Born argues, however, that ‘by daring to remain true to, and to modernise for today’s ruthless business environment, the Reithian vision of a necessary mix of popularity and aspiration, Dyke took on an unavoidable confrontation, one central to the BBC’s capacity to flourish in new times.’10 This was the context in which a revised version of Kudos’ proposal was accepted for BBC 1. Kudos’ brief from the BBC was to develop the programme as ‘intelligent action series which really deals with big spy issues and big subjects’.11 This aspiration might be seen to reinstate the more substantive influence from Le Carré, but also demonstrated a desire to recapture the BBC’s long-standing reputation for providing challenging engagements with contemporary national concerns, reasserting a public service ethos within the framework of a popular genre. It is also clear, however, that the programme was simultaneously imagined as an action series. Combined with a tendency to focus on younger, somewhat glamorous characters, in line with the BBC’s youth appeal (and likely inherited from the Channel 4 version), this indicates an aim to offer different sites of appeal to different audiences. Kudos elected to centre their series on MI5, the most iconic humint agency to operate on domestic soil, as opposed to the internationally focused SIS. With extensive location filming now very much the norm in high-end television drama, this was undoubtedly considered the more affordable option. Whilst, as I argued in Chapter 2, the 1970s had seen a limited shift towards fictional depictions of real-life intelligence agencies on British television, MI5 had been largely overlooked, a national security focus dramatised instead through Special Branch’s (ITV, 1969–74) portrayal of the Metropolitan Police unit of the same. By contrast, prior depictions of MI5 had been largely confined to 1980s conspiracy dramas where it had typically been portrayed as a shadowy, malevolent force. That MI5 was now seen to offer suitable material for a

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precinct drama, a strand of programming centred on a familiar and accessible workplace family, is indicative of the service’s changing public profile following the openness drive of the 1990s. Indeed, by 1997 the service had placed its first newspaper advertisement for new recruits, effectively remoulding its image in terms of a high-end professional pursuit like many others.12 Since end of the Cold War, MI5 had also largely reoriented itself from counter-espionage to counter-terror work. Spooks followed this shift in emphasis, making it something of an heir to 1970s counter-terror action series such as Special Branch and The Professionals (ITV, 1977–83). In the absence of a rival geopolitical power, rogue nations and disaffected individuals provided a new existential anxiety through their refusal to accept the supremacy of a ‘new world order’ dominated by Western capitalism, whilst the prospective fear of explosive attacks again provided compelling tension for an action thriller. Occurring partway through production of the first series, the 9/11 attacks came to lend this an unexpected topicality. The existing plotlines were retained and as a result the first series largely avoids a focus on Islamic terrorism; however, the finished episodes would be peppered with allusions to a broader increase in counter-terror activity following 9/11. The effect of the attacks, however, was perhaps felt more in a new tonal seriousness that it imparted to the programme. As Bharat Nalluri, director of the first two episodes, commented: An event like that – 9/11 – if you put it in a movie, people would have gone ‘That’s fantastical, nothing like that could happen’. On September 10th. On September 11th it was a completely different world. And what it did was, you could read these scripts and go, ‘This could actually happen now.’ … And so I think it added much more weight and import to the show as a whole.13

The result was perhaps a fundamental shift in the nature of what could be considered plausible. In the 1970s, action series such as The Professionals and serious spy dramas such as The Sandbaggers had existed in largely separate categories. Against the new ‘war on terror’, however, for a drama to feature spectacle and action whilst simultaneously engaging with serious issues need no longer be a contradiction. In May 2002, Spooks was launched as a new flagship series for BBC 1, then in the process of strengthening its brand identity with



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the promotional tagline ‘the one to watch’. Promoted by a huge wave of publicity including a billboard campaign, the opening episode 1.1 ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ was watched by 9.2 million viewers and a 41% audience share, far ahead of all competition, and this success was largely sustained over the whole first series with average ratings of 7.5 million viewers.14 These would have stood as good figures in the era of the broadcasting duopoly, and were therefore an especially impressive achievement in the more competitive multi-channel age. It proved particularly popular with the valuable youth demographic, whilst also seeing its quality acknowledged with the 2003 BAFTA television award for Best Drama Series. Spooks also achieved success on the international market, with Featherstone later noting international sales as an important component for such an expensive series to break into profit.15 In the US it was retitled MI-5 and initially broadcast on Arts & Entertainment, a cable and satellite channel with a long-standing Anglophile identity in the model of PBS, although later it would move to BBC America, a commercial venture that was growing as an outlet for BBC programming in the US. In the context of British terrestrial broadcasting, Spooks was able to appeal to a broad public of different demographics, blending influences derived from the precinct drama, the Le Carré style of serious spy novel, the counter-terror action thriller and challenging issue-led drama, helping to reconstruct something of television’s former culture-in-common. Quickly renewed for a second series and eventually running for ten years, Spooks played a key part in reasserting the BBC’s leading role in television drama for the twenty-first century. ‘It’s MI5 not 9 to 5’: a precinct at the centre of the nation The focus placed upon the precinct setting is the most fundamental conceptual difference between Spooks and the spy series discussed in previous chapters. The tensions at play in this space are effectively summed up in the promotional tagline used for the early series, ‘It’s MI5 not 9 to 5’. On one level this appears to stress that this is not a normal office job, yet on another it highlights how the normal office job is a closer and more meaningful reference point than had been the case for earlier spy series. Yet although more typical precinct settings such as hospitals and police stations provided spaces in which key public issues could be played out, the unusual precinct adopted

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Figure 6.1  Spooks, prod. Simon Crawford Collins. A typical establishing shot of Thames House as used throughout the series.

by Spooks offers a unique opportunity for the lives of its workplace family to intersect more directly with headline issues. Throughout the series Section D are shown to operate from Thames House, the real-life headquarters of MI5 since 1994. In reality the location used for exteriors was the Freemason’s Hall in Covent Garden, but nonetheless the claim to this being Thames House (emphasised by the use of captions over establishing shots, see Figure 6.1) is a new device for demonstrating authenticity unavailable to earlier programmes produced in more classified times. The boundaries between the exterior and interior of Thames House are most clearly explored in an early sequence in the debut instalment ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’, which follows Section Chief Tom Quinn (Matthew Macfadyen) as he arrives for work in the morning. His journey through the entrance lobby and corridors is also shot within the Freemason’s Hall, these spaces sharing the art deco style of the exterior. However, after passing a door marked ‘Private’ with a swipe-card lock, Tom and Junior Case Officer Zoe Reynolds (Keeley Hawes) arrive in the markedly different location of ‘the Grid’, the highly secure suite of offices at the heart of Thames House which serves as the programme’s central precinct. Unlike the corridors and exterior, this was a custom-built set created in a closed University of London building in Kensington.16



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The central part of the Grid set is a large, open-plan office, designed according to a far more modern style than the exteriors. It is furnished with many features typical of an office workplace including desks, desk chairs, lamps, shelves, files, cabinets, telephones and a watercooler, yet all are presented as stylish and brandnew, with the desktop computers all state-of-the-art (see Figure 6.2). The colours are coordinated such that from many angles the space seems dominated by glass, chrome and metal, whilst elsewhere there is predominance of bright, eye-catching primary colours in the mise-en-scène, such as the large conference room which is decorated in dark green with wooden panels. This echoes the high-tech laboratory precincts popularised in the new transatlantic subgenre of forensic police series including Silent Witness (BBC 1, 1996–), Waking the Dead (BBC 1, 2000–11) and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (CBS, 2000–15). Furthermore, influenced by the acclaimed aesthetics of ER and The West Wing, many Grid scenes make use of elaborate Steadicam shots to track around the desks and characters, giving more depth to the set and a greater dynamism to what might otherwise be static conversation scenes. A prominent feature in the Grid’s meeting room, however, is a large carving of an MI5 crest on the wall, the only visible design element in this futuristic precinct that highlights older institutional traditions (see Figure 6.3). Given the inspiration that Wolstencroft claimed to have drawn from the BBC (see Introduction), this might be taken to signify an ideal of public service similar to that of the Corporation, for whom the Reithian tradition remained a touchstone even in its new brand-conscious incarnation. Wolstencraft also noted, however, that the influence from the BBC also contained an inference of New Labour, remarking ‘there was a little bit of sly winking in that.’17 For this highly image-conscious imagining of MI5, therefore, the rebranded incarnations of both the BBC and the Labour Party provided key influences. The possibility of reinventing the spy series as a precinct drama whilst retaining an emphasis action in the exterior world is aided by technological shifts in the digital age. Whilst earlier action series in the Euston tradition were dependent on moving protagonists to locations in the outside world for narrative action to occur, advances in computing, communication and surveillance technologies by the time of Spooks hugely increase the dramatic possibilities of the precinct space itself. Crucial research can be done on

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Figure 6.2  Spooks. The Grid, the programme’s stylish open-plan precinct space, as it appears in the first series.

Figure 6.3  Spooks, 1.6 ‘Lesser of Two Evils’. Head of Section D Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) stands next to the MI5 crest.

computers, whilst instant communication with agents in the field is possible through mobile phones and miniaturised communication technology. This enables characters in different locations and plot threads to communicate with each other instantaneously, a new



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narrative style previously pioneered in Bugs (BBC 1, 1995–99). The extensive surveillance carried out by Section D makes the exterior world hugely visible from the Grid, providing key assistance in the defeat of terrorist plots, and thus Spooks also lies towards the optimistic end of David Lyon’s surveillance genre.18 Indeed, Spooks focuses strongly on the procedural and technical elements of the espionage trade, offering an intelligence-themed parallel to the growing interest in scientific precision in forensic police series. Describing modern spies, the press pack comments that ‘the tricks of their trade are fascinating – from the national network of “backstops” (people to back up the details of their aliases) to the less sophisticated “dead letter sites” – such as hollow tree trunks – where moles can leave messages for officers.’19 With a glossary also provided, this recalls the earlier fascination with procedure created through jargon in The Sandbaggers and Tinker Tailor. Yet in its bid to move beyond the more static, dialogue-driven style of these earlier programmes, procedure in Spooks is often dramatised much more dynamically and visually. Episodes, particularly in the early series, often feature elaborate, lengthy sequences depicting processes such as tailing a suspect, bugging a house, or preparing a false identity and forging documents. These are presented as hugely sophisticated procedures conducted with great attention to detail, rendered through some of the series’ most stylish direction and editing, although to the central characters this is merely routine professionalism. Inhabiting the Grid is a much larger cast than typical for earlier spy series, with the unusual exception of The Sandbaggers, and even by comparison to this earlier series Spooks works harder to present its characters in this intimate and familiar terms of the precinct drama’s workplace. It is notable, in particular, that the audience is encouraged to know all of the central characters by their first name, in contrast to the long-standing tendency of the spy genre to favour surnames as a short form of address. The large cast is also used to present a much greater diversity in age, gender and ethnicity by comparison with the more enclosed white masculine world of The Sandbaggers, implementing the common precinct drama strategy of offering points of identification for a broad variety of audience segments. Glen Creeber argues the growing diversity demonstrated by drama series in this period can be seen to respond to the growing emphasis on the politics of identity within progressive movements, as epitomised in the second-wave feminist slogan that ‘the personal

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is political’. Indeed, he suggests that this can be seen as an alternative ‘means by which “radical” and “progressive” drama is frequently conceived and constructed for a contemporary audience’ following the decline of earlier, more overtly radical traditions of drama.20 The pursuit of multi-ethnic casting in particular, initially with Junior Case Officer Danny Hunter (David Oyelowo) and later various other characters, can be situated within Dyke’s muchpublicised initiative to improve ethnic diversity on either side of the camera and improve the BBC’s reach to minority communities. Indeed, Felix Thompson situates the series ‘in a period in which the BBC has been ever more preoccupied with its role in representing Britain, specifically in terms of diversity’, suggesting that this guides it towards an expanded notion of cultural inclusion even when this runs in counterpoint to narratives of ‘policing boundaries’ and ‘defending the nation, especially from external threats’.21 Head of Section D Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) and Senior Analyst Tessa Phillips (Jenny Agutter), meanwhile, are older officers with experience of conducting intelligence work in both the Cold War and the Northern Ireland conflict. Representing an older generation, they seem to have achieved a better accommodation with the younger officers and modernity than equivalent characters in Tinker Tailor. In spite of this new attention to diversity, however, these characters are nonetheless fundamentally presented as middle-class professionals, with the younger team members particularly prone to sporting smart-casual designer clothes. Whilst it is a common sight to see the central characters engage in ordinary office activities such as drinking coffee from cardboard cups or using the watercooler, overall the Grid is presented as a particularly exotic, glamorous workplace, the emphasis on style and fashion showing lingering traits of the ‘Cool Britannia’ moment even after the optimism of the 1990s had given away to the pessimism and paranoia of the ‘war on terror’. The focus on class tensions which had underpinned earlier models of existential spy fiction, in particular Len Deighton’s novels and Callan (ITV, 1967–72), is here elided therefore in favour of a more aspirational approach. The grand narrative of class struggle, as epitomised by Harry Perkins in A Very British Coup (Channel 4, 1988), seems even further out of sight against the growing emphasis on stylish drama in the deregulated age. As an extension of its workplace family focus, Spooks displays a greater preoccupation with the personal lives of its protagonists



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than prior British spy series. Robin Nelson describes how over preceding decades precinct dramas had increasingly come to adopt ‘flexi-­narratives’, combining ‘the allegedly “masculine” preference for action and narrative resolution’ with ‘the supposedly “feminine” fluidity and open-endedness in story-telling with an emphasis on human interest’.22 A human interest dimension plays a key role in Spooks, most obviously in the first series’ ongoing storyline showing Tom’s attempt to maintain a serious, committed relationship with restaurant manager and single mother Ellie Simm (Esther Hall). Having first encountered her when undercover on an operation, he spends the first three episodes known to her under the cover name of Matthew Archer whilst struggling with the possibility that she might reject him if she knew the truth about his double life. He is then forced to reveal his true identity in 1.4 ‘Traitor’s Gate’ (4 June 2002) when she discovers a gunshot wound he obtained in the line of duty, putting a considerable strain on their relationship. Whereas the conflict between personal and professional lives had received some attention in earlier series such as Callan and The Sandbaggers, Spooks affords this far more screen time and dramatic weight, whilst also extending the dramatic possibilities of the precinct drama with the focus on the inherent deception of spying. Such is the centrality of this storyline that it becomes the site of a dramatic cliff-hanger at the end of the first series. Here Ellie and her daughter are trapped in Tom’s house with a bomb after MI5’s elaborate security features have malfunctioned, leaving him staring helplessly through the window and unable to rescue her as the clock counts down. This increased generic hybridity was another strategy by which the series sought to maximise appeal to different demographics, and Wolstencroft himself acknowledged the new priority placed on the human interest element, remarking that ‘everybody enjoys the stories of the week, and they’re great, but really they’re the rocks to throw at the characters.’23 Additionally, in contrast to the more hardboiled individualistic style typical of much earlier spy fiction, the precinct drama invests emotional interest in a much broader range of characters. In Spooks the younger characters Zoe and Danny also receive particular focus over the first three series (see Figure 6.4). As more inexperienced characters with fewer personal attachments, they contribute an element of lifestyle drama to the series derived from upmarket, youth-oriented programmes such as This Life (BBC 2, 1996–97), as

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Figure 6.4  Spooks, 1.5 ‘The Rose Bed Memoirs’. Zoe Reynolds (Keeley Hawes) and Danny Hunter (David Oyelowo) at home in their shared flat.

particularly evidenced by the stylish, designer flat which they share for most of their tenure on the series. It is with the character of Junior Case Officer Helen Flynn, however, that the series most dramatically subverts convention. Portrayed by Lisa Faulkner, at the time of transmission the bestknown of the cast due her regular roles in the soap opera Brookside (Channel 4, 1982–2003) and the hospital series Holby City (BBC 1, 1999–), the character therefore embodied the familiar precinct drama tradition for the British television audience. Indeed Spooks plays on this association by having Helen provide much of the human element in the opening two episodes, portraying her as an inexperienced admin worker aspiring to be a fully-fledged officer. Episode 1.2 ‘Looking After Our Own’ (20 May 2002), however, features the character’s shocking demise when the villain Robert Osbourne (Kevin McNally) pushes her head into a deep-fat fryer and then shoots her at point-blank range. This scene was a device by which Kudos intended to demonstrate the unpredictable nature of the series, with no character’s safety guaranteed. The death attracted more than 100 complaints to the BBC and 154 complaints to the Broadcasting Standards Commission (the highest number in 2002), although as often in such scenarios the controversy in effect provided further publicity and served as a



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guarantor of the series’ ‘daring’ qualities.24 As Charlie Brooker noted approvingly in his end-of-year television review, ‘the moment her head was forced into the deep-fat-fryer, viewers reared on the formulaic, it’ll-be-alright-in-the-end blandness of cookie-cutter populist dramas like Casualty [BBC 1, 1986–] and Merseybeat [BBC 1, 2001–04] sat up and blinked in disbelief: here was a major BBC drama series that actually had the nerve to confound expectation.’25 As a spectacular event in a series drama which provoked nationalscale conversation, this device can be compared to the apparent death of Callan in 1969 which similarly derived its impact from the simultaneous nationwide experience. In the multi-channel broadcasting environment of 2002, however, this provided a more assertive strategy for seizing audience attention, the controversy working to reassert the continued relevance of prime-time BBC 1 drama. The siting of espionage within a precinct setting is key to Spooks’ intervention in the television spy genre, but the effects of this are complex and multi-faceted. On the one hand, it does much to humanise the spy series in identifiably ordinary terms, making it appealing to broader audiences perhaps less interested in the specific intrigue of intelligence work. Yet this ordinariness is offset by the sense of this as an exceptional world in terms of glamour, style and highly specialist procedure, and the stronger dramatic emphasis on secrecy, deception and danger. Whilst the precinct drama is already designed to appeal to a broad audience, such characteristics provide Spooks with additional sites of interest, styling it as a sophisticated and challenging ‘quality’ drama. An overburdened perspective?: the televisuality of Spooks Although the development of the closed serial on film had brought a new prominence to the role of directors in television, episodic genre series would more typically employ different directors on different episodes and therefore generally had less potential for an authorial identity to emerge through the visuals. Nonetheless, seeking to develop a distinctive visual style for their new series, Kudos recruited Bharat Nalluri, a director who had previously made several feature films including the minor Hollywood action movie The Crow: Salvation (2000), to direct the first two episodes and in the process develop a distinctive ‘house style’ for later directors to follow. This style was hugely influenced by high-end American television,

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as particularly apparent in the DVD special feature ‘The Look of Spooks’ in which the cast and crew speak admiringly of series such as ER and The West Wing and editor Colin Green remarks ‘frankly, I think that Spooks is a more American programme than it is a British programme.’26 Yet many of its techniques also correspond to the ‘new wave’ of British drama that emerged in the 1990s, described by Cooke as using ‘fast cutting, unusual shot transitions, hand-held camerawork, montages, fantasy sequences and surreal inserts in an attempt to create a new form of television drama for a new postmodern audience’.27 In particular, Spooks works to combine the two different dimensions of televisuality examined in the previous two chapters. On the one hand, it was produced according to the cinematic style, with single-camera filming now universally deployed for high-end drama. Individual episodes would typically be shot over 13/14 days including extensive location work.28 It was shot on Super 16mm film, a variant on traditional 16mm film which facilitated higher image quality as well as the widescreen image that British television had begun adopting in the late 1990s. Overtly stylish cinematic touches created during the main filming of an episode include tilted camera angles, rapid changes in focus, highly expressive lighting (including on location), hand-held camerawork and elaborate tracking shots. At the same time, however, Spooks engages in a broader revival of the videographic experimentation previously seen in studio dramas such as Bird of Prey 2 (BBC 1, 1984). By digitising the Super 16mm film, the series was to employ advanced digital editing and subject the image to creative manipulation, including the use of captions, slow-motion, ramping (sections of footage briefly speeded up) and, most strikingly, split-screen graphics. The revival of the videographic in the context of drama draws upon the increasingly complex graphics employed by sports, light entertainment and, perhaps most pertinently, news programming, with Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin arguing that Spooks’ remediation of the news encompasses not simply topical concerns and events but also its presentational aesthetics.29 With the news commonly taken to connote witness of the world in its most immediate form, the videographic in effect comes to restore television drama’s longstanding quality of immediacy. Split-screen imagery had already been employed in the police series Trial and Retribution (ITV, 1997–2009) to show different



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perspectives on events, and concurrently 24 also used the technique in the context of a counter-terror spy thriller. Nelson argues that the typical function of split-screen in the latter series ‘is to bring into one moment a kind of real-time summary of the point which each narrative strand has reached and thus to aggregate the narrative and emotional investment’.30 Whilst Spooks sometimes uses the technique with the similar aim of highlighting the synchronicity between events, its most characteristic use of split-screen is instead to showcase different aspects of a single unfolding operation. The first brief use of it in 1.1 ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ occurs as Zoe and Tom first enter the Grid, showing their passing through the entrance pods from three different angles, one of which is presented in pixelated monochrome to simulate a CCTV camera’s view and highlight the surveillant quality (see Figure 6.5). A more extensive example later in the episode depicts a team of MI5 agents discretely tracking a suspected terrorist through central Liverpool, providing a multiple views of the target from different vantage points (see Figure 6.6). The most typical use of split-screen in Spooks therefore provides a highly privileged view of how Section D conducts an intelligence operation, encouraging fascination with the complex logistics in play and again dramatising procedure through dynamic visuals instead of through dialogue.

Figure 6.5  Spooks, 1.1 ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’. The first use of the series’ distinctive split-screen graphics as Tom Quinn (Matthew Macfadyen) and Zoe enter the Grid.

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Figure 6.6  Spooks, 1.1. ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’. A more extensive use of split-screen as MI5 officers tail a terrorist suspect.

The combination of such visual techniques can, to a large extent, be read as simply providing distinction, the traditional deployment of televisuality as described by Caldwell, giving the series an eyecatching quality for channel-hopping audiences in the multi-­channel environment.31 The importance placed on seizing an audience’s attention is indicated by the extensive use of cinematic and videographic techniques in the pre-titles sequence of ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’, a tightly intercut segment in which Danny meets an informant in a safe house, Tom and Zoe are introduced in their homes, and a bomb is detonated in a suburban street in Liverpool. Nalluri later recalled making around 40–50 cuts of the first ten minutes of this episode, demonstrating the importance placed on introducing the pace and characters in a matter designed to be immediately arresting to a new audience.32 A particularly self-­conscious example of style for its own sake, meanwhile comes at the end of the same episode, as Tom, Zoe and Danny hand an American terrorist leader



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over to the CIA in a meeting under a concrete flyover. In the final shot, the central trio, all dressed in dark colours, stride between the concrete walls, moving dramatically towards the camera in formation. The staged quality of this image, with footage displayed in ostentatious slow-motion, is particularly illustrated by how closely it resembles many of the publicity photographs for the first series. Yet it is arguable that the dense and complex imagery which the series adopts as a key characteristic is in many ways not so different from the aesthetic of messiness and fragmentation found in A Very British Coup, where it had instead been deployed to create a disorienting and unsettling effect. Underneath the visual fascination with procedure and self-conscious demonstration of style, this remains perhaps, as Hoskins and O’Loughlin write, an ‘overburdened perspective’ in which the viewer is ‘always on the verge of missing something’ and ‘must learn to watch through glimpses’.33 The difference between the densely packed aesthetic of these dramas and their intended effect might in fact be located not within the texts, but instead in the presumed teleliteracy of the audience. Whilst the aesthetic of messiness could be used to generate an atmosphere of paranoia and alienation in A Very British Coup by virtue of being more unusual and aesthetically radical against the television drama of the time, Spooks was partially addressed towards a younger demographic who had grown up alongside the rapid development of television drama aesthetics over the 1990s and might be presumed to be more accustomed to such complex imagery and hence more receptive to its stylish and thrilling qualities. Again, the multigenerational address of Spooks potentially offers different meanings to different audiences. ‘Big spy issues’: a public service spy drama With a brief from the BBC for an intelligent series engaging with ‘big spy issues and big subjects’, Spooks was developed as a drama which would explore complex political and moral situations surrounding a variety of topical concerns. The way in which the series connects the private world of the precinct drama and the public world of headline issues is perhaps most evident in how it reworks the spy genre’s traditional mission briefing scene. Previous spy series had tended to adhere to the model of the man-behind-the-desk issuing instructions to the agent as in the James Bond stories, with

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Figure 6.7  Spooks. The central characters discuss their response to a crisis in the Grid’s meeting room.

politics effectively collapsed into the single paternalistic perspective of a spy chief such as M and hence erased.34 In Spooks, however, equivalent scenes take place in the meeting room where the officers gather around a long table to discuss the case at hand, different characters contributing information, expertise and opinions (see Figure 6.7). This gives the briefing a more democratic atmosphere that in some ways mirrors the open management style of Dyke’s BBC. Whilst the spy thriller protagonist has traditionally, as Michael



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Denning writes, restored ‘agency to a world which seems less and less the product of human action’, Spooks also restores agency to the decision-making process behind such action, through employing a diverse array of characters to discuss ethics and appropriate procedure, and humanising the dilemmas that they face.35 Spooks’ narratives draw upon a wide array of headline-driven anxieties, with antagonists of specific episodes often inspired by genuine radical political movements. Yet although the ‘war on terror’ has often been framed as a ‘clash of civilisations’ against radical Islam, Spooks does not initially situate its narratives in this particular area. Instead it adopts an approach similar to Special Branch of presenting a diverse array of terror threats from different sources. Although incorporating the terminology of the ‘war on terror’, the series therefore adopts a somewhat looser definition of the conflict rooted instead around antagonisms between different social groups. This is how it contributes to the working through of social divisions, with Section D, a public service spy agency presented by a public service broadcaster, standing in a place of presumed centrality from which it can arbitrate on new possibilities for consensus. It is particularly notable that the first two episodes, both written by Wolstencroft, feature white right-wing extremists as antagonists, specifically evangelical Christian pro-life campaigner Mary Kane (Lisa Eichhorn) in 1.1 ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’, and racist nationalist Osbourne in 1.2 ‘Looking After Our Own’. With these two episodes setting the tone for the series, they seem perhaps calculated to subvert any assumption that a twenty-first-century counter-terror series need be politically conservative or xenophobic, although this prompted David Shayler, a former MI5 officer who claimed to have served as an advisor in the early development of the series, to denounce it as a ‘liberal-left fantasy’.36 Here the diversity of potential extremist threats serves, in some ways, as a negative mirror of the positive diversity found in the workplace family of Section D. Even when narratives focus on more conventionally ‘othered’ threats in later episodes, Spooks often has characters acknowledging the wider contexts and complexities of events, even admitting to the hypocrisies of the post-imperial West. In 1.3 ‘One Last Dance’ (27 May 2002) Kurdish rebels seize the Turkish consulate in London and hold the occupants hostage, a scenario loosely modelled on the

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1980 Iranian Embassy Siege. As Section D plan their response to the crisis, analyst Malcolm Wynn-Jones (Hugh Simon) provides historical context for events, noting the broken promises of the British for a Kurdish independent state following the Second World War. ‘Yes, yes, but that’s all in the past,’ responds Harry impatiently, urging the group to stay focused on the immediate crisis. Scenes such as this are not uncommon, demonstrating a limited openness in their acknowledgement of geopolitical injustices. However, this is subordinated to the demands of the closed thriller narrative, the views of the Kurdish rebels implicitly dismissed by their decision to embrace violent action. This disavowal of ethical engagement is in many ways a continuation of the ‘rejection of politics’ previously articulated by DCI Alan Craven in Special Branch. Yet, whilst the working-class Craven tended to stoically accept the functionary nature of his role with little question, Spooks seems comparatively more haunted by the unaccountable power wielded by its middle-class protagonists. This is highlighted as early as the conclusion of ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ when Tom interrogates Kane. Asked to justify his authority, Tom says ‘I help protect this country from the likes of you.’ This prompts Kane to enquire, ‘Really? And who’s protecting the country from you?’ to which Tom provides no response. Similar comments recur throughout the series, although usually contained within brief moments and not permitted to disrupt narrative closure. Through its willingness to draw attention to this problem, the series signals a more sophisticated attitude to such moral uncertainty as part of its challenging public service qualities, even whilst contained by the conventional action series framework. Nonetheless, Spooks resists the troubling extremes of this as featured in The Sandbaggers, the form of the precinct drama ultimately demanding that the workplace family remain broadly appealing and identifiable. The ambition to deal with complex issues is most clearly illustrated by the recruitment of Howard Brenton as the other major writer on the first series. In contrast to Wolstencroft, a young writer still at an early stage of his career, Brenton was a renowned playwright who over previous decades had written high-profile and often controversial plays such as The Churchill Play (1974), Weapons of Happiness (1976) and The Romans in Britain (1980). In the preface to a 1986 published collection of his work, Brenton defined his worldview as Marxist and wrote that ‘it is glaringly obvious to your



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author that the western world is in thrall to a system that respects nothing but money and power, … that our liberation lies in democratic and socialist movements, and if we are to survive and have a common destiny it will be communist.’37 Emerging from the radical tradition of British drama discussed in the previous two chapters, although having built his career primarily in the theatre, Brenton was a somewhat unconventional choice for a stylish modern thriller series told from the perspective of MI5, particularly given his lack of any original television work over the previous 16 years. His recruitment by Kudos therefore indicates a conscious ambition to incorporate a daring, radical vein into the series’ generic mix. Brenton’s two solo contributions to the first series show a particular fascination with institutional politicking similar to that in The Sandbaggers. Both focus on MI5’s rivalry with SIS (referred to by the more popular moniker of MI6) which, in contrast to the stylish modernity of Section D, is portrayed as more culturally elitist, with Section Chief Jools Siviter (Hugh Laurie) as an Old Etonian who regards MI5 with condescension and is often found in his gentleman’s club or at the opera. This introduces a strain of inter-departmental intrigue which recurs in later series alongside the standard counter-terror narratives. As with Sir Percy Browne in A Very British Coup, aristocratic characters and high-culture environments typically serve as a shorthand for entrenched power elites with cynical or authoritarian tendencies, here positioned against the more modern sensibilities of Section D. In particular, Brenton’s first episode for the series, 1.4 ‘Traitor’s Gate’, seems to query the very premises of the series itself. Here legendary agent Peter Salter (Anthony Head) infiltrates an anarchist group, only to go native and aid them in an attempted attack on the visiting President Bush. Brought into custody at the conclusion and interrogated by Tom, Salter defines his motive for treachery as ‘Crippling, chest-tearing, bum-clenching boredom, with what this country’s become. Buy, sell, image, credit card nirvana. When the Soviet Union was crap you thought, “Yeah, we got something” …. Now there’s nothing. It’s all gone. It’s dead. No one believes in anything anymore.’ With its characterisation of treachery as a response to the perceived decline of Western culture, this scene pays homage to the traitor’s confession at the end of Tinker Tailor, yet here the critique is updated to focus on the excesses and superficiality of twenty-first-century consumerism, implicating the emphasis on

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style and image in Blair’s Britain and indeed in Spooks itself. Here, as before, Tom has no response to offer, although the subsequent suicide of Salter enables procedure to resume as before. When Spooks returned for a 10-episode second series the following year, perhaps inevitably Kudos elected to devote one episode to exploring the sensitive topic of domestic Islamic extremism. Whilst often positioned as a central anxiety of the ‘war on terror’, the resulting scrutiny placed on the loyalties of Muslim communities in Western countries was also widely criticised for its xenophobic undertones. It is notable therefore that Brenton, with his radical reputation, was assigned to write this episode, suggesting Kudos’ ambition to temper the episode’s thriller narrative with a more progressive, socially-conscious approach. The resulting episode, 2.2 ‘Nest of Angels’, centred on the recruitment of young suicide bombers in a Birmingham mosque. A premiere broadcast on the digital channel BBC 3 (2 June 2003) attracted around 1,000 complaints, largely as the result of a coordinated plan by Muslim groups to challenge media representations of the religion, although in an academic analysis Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin argue Brenton’s script to be more nuanced than its critics gave it credit for, suggesting that it provided a dramatisation of ‘the impossibility, in the aftermath of 9/11, for Muslims to satisfactorily demonstrate their allegiance to the nation’.38 With the episode then watched by 7.8 million viewers and a 33% audience share on its main BBC 1 broadcast the following week, as with the death of Helen this illustrates the continuing power of the unified cultural experience of traditional broadcasting, this time for engaging with deeper cultural debates. Although limited in scope due to the closed structure of the episodic thriller, ‘Nest of Angels’ might be positioned as a precursor to later, more serious social issue drama examining conflicts of loyalty in Britain’s Muslim community, such as Peter Kosminsky’s Britz (Channel 4, 2007). Meanwhile Spooks expanded its diversity into this area by adding Muslim MI5 officer Zafar Younis (Raza Jaffrey) to its workplace family from the end of the third series (2004), indicating that admittance to this precinct is potentially open to anybody who elects to accept the new image-based consensus. By the time that the second series began transmitting in June 2003, British engagement with the ‘war on terror’ had escalated with the onset of the Iraq War in the previous March. This offensive



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was highly contentious, however, and the BBC was drawn into the fray when journalist Andrew Gilligan alleged that the government had manipulated intelligence in order to exaggerate the case for the war. This had sparked a hostile confrontation between the government and the BBC of an intensity unseen since the fall of Thatcher, culminating in the suicide of Gilligan’s main source Dr David Kelly in July. An inquiry chaired by Lord Hutton was established to investigate the circumstances surrounding Kelly’s death, in the process opening up the worlds of both broadcasting and intelligence to scrutiny. In the end, the Hutton report exonerated the government of improper conduct but was highly critical of the BBC’s journalistic practice. Although widely perceived as a one-sided whitewash, this led to the resignation of Dyke as the first Director-General whose tenure was cut dramatically short in politicised circumstances since Alasdair Milne in 1987, placing the BBC once again in a vulnerable situation.39 Yet even in his absence, the BBC 1 renaissance which Dyke had instigated continued to remain strong, and Spooks would eventually amass 86 episodes over a total of ten series. In spite of the ambition towards seriousness and complexity, however, over the years of its original transmission a body of journalistic and academic criticism would accuse the series of contributing to media exaggerations of the terror threat and becoming complicit with the agenda of the Blair and Bush governments. In some ways, this is simply another iteration of Philip Schlesinger, Graham Murdock and Philip Elliott’s 1983 critique of The Professionals as a closed text (see Chapter 2). Ultimately, an episodic thriller series aligned with the forces of law and order demands regular narrative closure, thereby diminishing possibilities for deeper engagement with oppositional politics, no matter how much writers such as Brenton might strive to incorporate them.40 In the case of Spooks, however, such criticism often focuses as much on the visual style as on narrative strategies. Hugh Ortega Breton, for example, describes a paranoid style of presentation whereby ‘ambivalence is rejected, malevolence is projected, suspicion is validated and a clear distinction between persecutor and victim subject positions is produced’, a key example being how ‘melodramatic devices such as the use of light and shadow, slow motion and music are used to distinguish terrorists, giving them a sinister but stylish aura’.41 Hoskins and O’Loughlin, meanwhile,

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problematise the pace, arguing that ‘a television style of relentless immediacy prohibits reflection on the themes represented, in the process reinforcing assumptions and mythologizing institutions’ connected to the ‘war on terror’.42 In this line of argument, the ambition to explore ‘big subjects’ seriously, whilst clearly evident, is ultimately overwhelmed not just by the closed structure of the episodic series but also by its stylish and fast-paced presentation. Against a backdrop in which the image-conscious New Labour had led the country into a controversial war, so the American-inspired stylish aesthetics of Spooks arguably overpowered the challenging and radical currents of public service broadcasting. Conclusion As a popular ongoing drama series appealing to a broad audience, Spooks played a key role in reasserting the value of the BBC and terrestrial television broadcasting at the start of the twenty-first-­ century, contributing to a schedule that established BBC 1’s first ever ratings lead over ITV 1.43 It initiated a highly productive relationship between the BBC and Kudos, paving the way for later popular series including Hustle (BBC 1, 2004–12) and Life on Mars (BBC 1, 2006–07). These cemented the Kudos’ reputation as the foremost producers of British thriller programming whilst providing some of BBC 1’s most popular dramas of the decade. A few years later, however, Spooks was surpassed as BBC 1’s primary flagship series by an in-house revival of Doctor Who (BBC 1, 2005–). Often overshadowing Spooks in retrospective accounts of BBC drama in this period, the success of the new Doctor Who has been universally attributed to its broad, cross-generational family audience. Three years earlier, however, the first series of Spooks had built its success upon a similar appeal to multiple demographics, although as a postwatershed series its address was not quite as broad. (Nonetheless Kudos would later rework their distinctive model of twenty-firstcentury spy series for children with MI High (BBC 1, 2007–11)). The generational divide at the centre of Spooks’ address might instead be drawn around the shift represented by the 1990 Broadcasting Act. On the one hand, it is evidently a product of the more competitive and globalised television landscape which the act had shaped in the British context, adopting a rich, stylish televisuality and a glamorous, aspirational quality derived from US



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television. On the other, however, it sites itself within a specifically British tradition of spy thriller associated with Le Carré, anticipating how the new Doctor Who would similarly adapt an iconic British concept to help assert the BBC’s relevance in the contemporary world. Its success in appealing to diverse audience segments in the multi-channel age, meanwhile, is deeply rooted in the context of traditional broadcasting, with the shared national experience of watching Spooks and reacting to its shocking moments and controversial storylines reconstructing the culture-in-common that many thought might be irrevocably lost in the twenty-first century. Through reinventing the on-screen representation of the world of the secret state, therefore, the BBC was able to provisionally assert a role for itself in the 2000s. The form of the precinct drama proved an effective device for restoring agency to headline anxieties and humanising the spy genre to a new degree, whilst through implicitly rendering intelligence as a public service activity the series worked to engage with topical debates, challenging perspectives and lingering radical currents of British drama. Overall, however, these elements are strongly contained not just by the affirmative impulses of the episodic series (as was the case in Special Branch in the 1970s) but also by the emphasis on style and image. Whilst A Very British Coup had provided the culmination of a paranoid narrative about the thwarted hopes of socialism in the 1980s, Spooks is very much a spy series for the New Labour era. Much as New Labour had ‘tamed’ the radical elements of old Labour into a glossy package aligned to a free-market agenda, so Spooks streamlined challenging currents of traditional public service programming into a slick, reconstructed procedural series. The series can be seen to contribute to the working-through of new social conflicts in the manner described by Ellis, but this is ultimately achieved through establishing boundaries between those who accept a new form of consensus according to the vision of New Labour and can be accepted on the inside of the national precinct regardless of other facets of their identity, and those who violently reject it and must be policed no matter how valid their critique of the system. Over the course of its run, however, the simultaneous broadcast experience which had been central to Spooks’ popular appeal began to diminish in an era of increased on-demand viewing. Indeed the reason that 2.1 ‘Nest of Angels’ had attracted huge controversy

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before its BBC 1 transmission was the product of a scheduling strategy adopted from 2003 to 2009, whereby each episode of a year’s run (barring the first and last) were broadcast on the BBC’s new digital channel BBC 3 (launched on 9 February 2003) a week before the main transmission on BBC 1 as part of a strategy to incentivise viewers towards digital take-up. By the end of the decade, the Corporation’s on-demand viewing service BBC iPlayer was taking off in popularity, signalling the declining power of the broadcast moment and its ability to stimulate particularly concentrated debates and controversies, which had been central to the early cultural impact of Spooks. Notes  1 See, for example, Christian William Erickson, ‘Thematics of Counterterrorism: Comparing 24 and MI-5/Spooks’, Critical Studies on Terrorism 1:3 (December 2008), pp. 343–358; Andrew Hoskins and Ben O’Loughlin, Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 140–152; and Hugh Ortega Breton, ‘Screening for Meaning’; in Philip Hammond (ed.), Screens of Terror: Representations of War and Terrorism in Film and Television since 9/11 (Suffolk: Arima Publishing, 2011), pp. 223–242.  2 BBC Television Publicity, ‘Spooks: MI5 not 9 to 5’ (London: BBC, 5 May 2002), p. 2, www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2002/05_ may/07/spooks_presspack.pdf. For an overview the first series’ press coverage, see Paul Cobley, ‘“It’s a fine line between safety and terror”: Crime and Anxiety Re-drawn in Spooks’, Film International 7:2 (2009).  3 Steven Kettell, New Labour and the New World Order: Britain’s Role in the War on Terror (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011).  4 John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), p. 87.  5 Ibid., pp. 122–123.  6 Stephen Garrett; interviewed on ‘Spooks: Season 1’ (DVD, Contender Entertainment, UK, 2003); special feature, ‘The Origins of Spooks’.  7 Ellis, Seeing Things, p. 132.  8 Jane Featherstone; interviewed on ‘Spooks: Season 1’ (DVD, Contender Entertainment, UK, 2003); special feature, ‘The Origins of Spooks’.  9 Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London: Palgrave/ BFI, 2015; 2nd ed.), p. 189. 10 Georgina Born, Uncertain Visions: Birt, Dyke and the Reinvention of the BBC (London: Vintage, 2005), p. 473.



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11 Jane Featherstone; interviewed on ‘Spooks: Season 1’ (DVD, Con­ tender  Entertainment, UK, 2003); special feature, ‘The Origins of Spooks’. 12 Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Penguin, 2010; updated ed.), pp. 771–798. 13 Bharat Nalluri; interviewed on ‘Spooks: Season 1’ (DVD, Contender Entertainment, UK, 2003); special feature, ‘The Terror Question’. 14 Jason Deans, ‘ITV hopes goes West as Spooks steals in’, The Guardian (Tuesday 14 May 2002), www.theguardian.com/media/2002/may/14/ overnights?INTCMP=SRCH; and Jason Deans, ‘Spooks to return as BBC 1 spies a hit’, The Guardian (Tuesday 28 May 2002), www.theguard​ ian​.com/media/2002/may/28/bbc.broadcasting?INTCMP=SRCH. 15 Stephen Armstrong, ‘A twist in her tail’, The Guardian (Monday 5 December 2005), www.theguardian.com/media/2005/dec/05/independ​ entproductioncompanies.mondaymediasection. 16 David Wolstencroft, Bharat Nalluri and Jane Featherstone, audio commentary on Spooks episode 1.1 ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ (DVD); on ‘Spooks: Season 1’ (DVD, Contender Entertainment, UK, 2003). 17 David Wolstencroft; quoted in Jeff Dawson, ‘The Spies have it’, Radio Times (31 May – 6 June 2003), p. 19. 18 David Lyon, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), pp. 139–140. 19 BBC, ‘Spooks: MI5 not 9 to 5’, p. 2. 20 Glen Creeber, Serial Television: Big Drama on the Small Screen (London: BFI, 2004), p. 12. 21 Felix Thompson, ‘Coast and Spooks: On the Permeable National Boundaries of British Television’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24:3 (June 2010), p. 431. 22 Robin Nelson, TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values and Cultural Change (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), p. 39. 23 David Wolstencroft; interviewed on ‘Spooks: 2’ (DVD, E1 Entertainment, UK, 2004); special feature, ‘Creating Season 2’. 24 ‘Spy show draws record complaints’, BBC News (17 July 2003), http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/3073921.stm; John Plunkett, ‘BBC spy drama spooks TV watchdog’, The Guardian (31 July 2002), www.theguardian.com/media/2002/jul/31/broadcas​ ting.bbc1?INTCMP=SRCH. 25 Charlie Brooker, ‘The grim reality of TV’, The Guardian (21 December 2002), www.theguardian.com/media/2002/dec/21/broadcasting.arts?IN TCMP=SRCH. 26 Colin Green; interviewed on ‘Spooks: Season 1’ (DVD, Contender Entertainment, UK, 2003); special feature, ‘The Look of Spooks’. 27 Cooke, British Television Drama: A History, p. 189.

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28 David Wolstencroft, Simon Crawford Collins and Bharat Nulluri, audio commentary on Spooks, Episode 1.2 ‘Looking After Our Own’ (DVD). 29 Hoskins and O’Loughlin, Television and Terror, p. 140. 30 Robin Nelson, State of Play: Contemporary ‘High-end’ TV Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 141. 31 John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1995). 32 David Wolstencroft, Bharat Nalluri and Jane Featherstone, audio commentary on Spooks, Episode 1.1 ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’ (DVD); on ‘Spooks: Season 1’ (DVD, Contender Entertainment, UK, 2003). 33 Hoskins and O’Loughlin, Television and Terror, p. 142. 34 Joseph Oldham, ‘The Man Behind the Desk and Other Bureaucracies: Portrayals of Intelligence Leadership in British Television Spy Series’; in Christopher Moran, Mark Stout and Ioanna Iordanou (eds), Spy Chiefs I: Intelligence Leaders in the Anglosphere (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017). 35 Michael Denning, Cover Stories: Narrative and Ideology in the British Spy Thriller (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 14. 36 David Shayler, ‘Must spy harder’, The Guardian (15 May 2002), www. guardian.co.uk/media/2002/may/15/bbc.davidshayler. 37 Howard Brenton, ‘Preface’; in Howard Brenton, Plays: 1 (London: Methuen, 1986), p. xiv. 38 Peter Morey and Amina Yaqin, Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 165. 39 Report of the Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly (C.M.G) (Hutton Report) (London: T.S.O, 2004); Kettell, New Labour and the New World Order, pp. 61–62; and Born, Uncertain Vision, pp. 453–465. 40 Schlesinger, Philip, Graham Murdock and Philip Elliott, Televising ‘Terrorism’: Political Violence in Popular Culture (London: Comedia, 1983), pp. 82–83. 41 Ortega Breton, ‘Screening for Meaning’, pp. 230, 233. 42 Hoskins and O’Loughlin, Television and Terror, p. 154. 43 Born, Uncertain Vision, p. 473.

Conclusion

Twenty-nine years after their third adaptation of a John le Carré novel, A Perfect Spy (BBC 2, 1987), the BBC would eventually return to this author’s literary espionage world with an dramatisation of his first post-Cold War work, The Night Manager (BBC 1, 2016). The commissioning of this serial was doubtless at least partially encouraged by the international acclaim received by the previous BBC le Carré adaptations, most notably Tinker Tailor Solider Spy (BBC 2, 1979), and in surrounding discourse the new serial was presented as a return by the Corporation to an area in which it had previously achieved great success. However, The Night Manager contrasted with the earlier adaptations in several key regards that reveal much about changes within the British television industry over the preceding decades. As a lavish £20 million production with international film star Tom Hiddleston in the leading role, this epitomised the increasingly complex co-production arrangements that had come to dominate ‘quality’ television on the international market. Also playing key roles in this production were The Ink Factory, an independent company set up by two of le Carré’s sons, Character Seven, a new venture from Kudos Film & Television founder Stephen Garrett, and AMC, the US cable channel responsible for two of the most highly acclaimed American ‘quality’ drama series of recent times, Mad Men (AMC, 2007–15) and Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–13).1 Whilst in the case of the previous le Carré television adaptations power had fundamentally resided with the BBC and co-production arrangements had been largely confined to co-financing, Elke Weissmann traces how over subsequent decades such transatlantic

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collaborations had increasingly shifted more power towards US partners.2 The involvement of The Ink Factory and Character Seven, meanwhile, continued the leading role of the super-indie in British television drama production as discussed in Chapter 6. The Night Manager thus stands as an example of the complex collaborations between production partners typical of ‘quality’ television on the international market in the early twenty-first century. At the conclusion of the second edition of his history of British television drama, published the year before The Night Manager was broadcast, Lez Cooke noted the likelihood that the concept of ‘national’ television drama would become increasingly untenable in the future.3 Despite the prolonged hiatus in the BBC’s productive relationship with le Carré, the production of The Night Manager was nonetheless in line with recent trends in espionage-themed dramas on British television. The preceding years had seen a number of notable original serials in this vein, including Tim Rob Smith’s London Spy (BBC 2, 2015) and Hugo Blick’s The Honourable Woman (BBC 2, 2014), the latter of which was a particularly lavish production featuring extensive location filming in the Middle East and another Hollywood star in the form of Maggie Gyllenhaal. The BBC would also harken back to its prior success with serialised Cold War spy thrillers through several historical dramas in the loose style of the earlier le Carré serials, including adaptations of William Boyd’s Restless (BBC 1, 2012) and Alan Judd’s Legacy (BBC 2, 2013), and Toby Whithouse’s original serial The Game (BBC 2, 2015). Channel 4, meanwhile, in addition to its own attempt to reconnect with its heritage in Secret State (Channel 4, 2012, see Chapter 5), proved more successful in remodelling the conspiracy genre into a thriller aimed specifically at younger audiences in collaboration with Kudos in the form of Dennis Kelly’s darkly comical Utopia (Channel 4, 2013–14). A number of revealing trends are apparent across these productions. All are glossy ‘quality’ dramas created through co-production arrangements with super-indies and/or overseas broadcasters, most commonly pay-per-view channels in the US in essentially a new incarnation of the PBS distribution deals of the 1970s and 1980s. In this regard, they responded to the existential challenge posed by a new wave of US ‘quality’ drama, the most acclaimed of which was now emerging not from the main networks but instead from subscription services, with the recent AMC successes preceded by



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HBO series such as The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007), Six Feet Under (HBO, 2001–05) and The Wire (HBO, 2002–08). In line with the celebration of the television auteur in such productions, there has been a strong shift in British spy dramas away from the precinct-based procedural model of Spooks (BBC 1, 2002–11) back towards the ‘novelistic’, whether through adaptations of existing novels by authors such as le Carré, or original serialised drama by television writers in the vein of Bird of Prey (BBC 1, 1982) or Edge of Darkness (BBC 2, 1985). Positioning themselves as challenging productions, these serials typically adopt a self-conscious moral complexity ranging from the anxiety of existential spy novels to the overt paranoia of the conspiracy genre; indeed in an era of increasing generic hybridity it is arguably becoming ever more difficult to clearly distinguish between the spy and conspiracy genres at all. These serials also utilise their high-end production resources to present highly stylish aesthetics, pitching themselves as self-­ consciously artistic and often adopting a deliberately slow-paced style akin to Tinker Tailor. It seems likely that in establishing the co-production arrangements underpinning many such dramas, the BBC would have been able to command respect based on its prior high reputation in both literary adaptations and controversial, socially-conscious programming, as well as the lingering sense of the spy genre’s British literary heritage. An odd effect of the BBC’s willingness to collaborate with cable channels such as AMC (The Night Manager) or SundanceTV (The Honourable Woman), however, is that such high-end prestige productions are presented in a pay-per-view context in the US, pitched to an educated, affluent ‘quality’ audience who could afford a cable subscription, but free-to-air in the UK (at least for licence fee payers) according to traditional public service ideals of equal access to all programming, including ‘quality’ drama. A long-standing suggestion for how the BBC might be made to adapt to the globalised, market-oriented television landscape has been for it to be reinvented as a pay-per-view subscriber channel, enabling it to preserve its ‘quality’ status on the international market but at the expense of the principle of universal access and wide popular appeal to the UK population. Indeed, this had been articulated by the Peacock Report back in 1986 as a desirable long-term strategy, and the return of the Conservatives to power in 2010 through their leading role in a coalition government threatened to skew broadcasting more harshly

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back towards free-market ideals, with the licence fee frozen for a period of six years.4 It is tempting to speculate that the BBC may, on some level, be partially rehearsing the potential role of a subscription channel, through again mining its own heritage in combination with leading forces on the international television market. The renewed sense of television spy dramas as primarily ‘product’ for the global marketplace brings the genre, in a very loose sense, back to its roots in the ITC adventure series of the 1960s. The evolution undergone by this ‘product’ in the intervening decades, however, has rendered it almost unrecognisable. If it is possible to trace a coherent generic strand, as this book has aimed to do, then its development over time is perhaps best characterised in terms of a series of interactions with other changing elements in both British television and the wider socio-political sphere. These include evolving conceptions of the nation, traditions of public service broadcasting, aesthetics of immediacy and notions of ‘quality’ television drama. As the most iconic version of the television spy drama in the 1960s, the ITC adventure series, along with ABC’s The Avengers (ITC, 1961–69), fully embraced the formulaic and Fordist tendencies of episodic series in the US network era in order to maximise global distribution. However, Callan (ITV, 1967–72), a more modestly resourced series aimed more towards a domestic audience, took advantage of this specificity and incorporated elements of deeper psychological drama, class tension and influence from the existential spy thrillers of le Carré and Len Deighton. As it progressed, it also innovated in serialisation strategies, which enabled a broad national audience to become invested in the ongoing story of its troubled protagonist. In the 1970s, the genre saw increasing moves towards ‘realism’ through the more grounded depictions of real-life intelligence agencies. Special Branch (ITV, 1969–74) reworked many of the conventions of the spy genre into a procedural police series and strongly focused on the theme of maintaining national security rather than presenting adventures overseas. Following its 1973 revamp with 16mm location filming, it increasingly came to invest in a national space shown to be under attack from the existential threat of terrorism. Later, The Sandbaggers (ITV, 1978–80) adapted the spy series into a tense office drama, exploring the bureaucratic battles underpinning espionage work and demystifying these structures of power.



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Through productions such as these, the British television spy series over much of its first two decades was primarily associated with ITV, but from the turn of the 1980s the BBC progressively began to seize the initiative in this terrain. Firstly, their production of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy went back to the roots of the existential thriller tradition by adapting le Carré himself. In so doing it brought a new literary credibility to the television genre, further legitimated by the recruitment of Alec Guinness to play George Smiley and a new interest in location filming invested in the expressive potential of locations. It was also hugely formative in presenting complex generic narratives in the form of a closed serial, self-consciously pitched as a ‘quality’ production aimed at the discerning viewer. This proved not only successful in the UK but also contributed to a growing presence of high-quality BBC productions on the international marketplace. Following this there came a new interest in developing the original ‘television novel’, many of which adopted a paranoid narrative loosely derived from Tinker Tailor in order to interrogate the contemporary state-of-the-nation under the divisive policies of the government of Margaret Thatcher. During this time relatively economical productions such as Bird of Prey and original prestige productions such as Edge of Darkness demonstrated a more sophisticated treatment of genre conventions, articulated through narratives showing the collapse of standard procedure. As I have argued, this mirrored the BBC’s own loss of certainty against the abandonment of the social-democratic consensus and the advance of the free-market economy. With its more overtly socialist politics, A Very British Coup (Channel 4, 1988) marked something of a climax for these anxieties. Ironically, even as its climax mounted an appeal for a reconstruction of consensus, two years later British television would be fragmented further by the 1990 Broadcasting Act, with the independent production sector, which had been empowered by Channel 4 productions such as A Very British Coup, increasing in strength and boldness over the 1990s. By the 2000s, such super-indies were playing a key role in a strategy to revitalise BBC 1. In this context, Spooks was devised as a new state-of-the-nation drama in the form of a procedural spy series, drawing together the counter-terror approach of Special Branch, the institutional politicking of The Sandbaggers and Tinker Tailor, and even elements of the radical politics and aesthetics of 1980s serials. However, these were largely

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subordinated to a new emphasis on style, mirroring the increasingly image-conscious BBC and the political culture of the New Labour government. Yet although Spooks had reconstructed the episodic spy series, in the years following its cancellation in 2011 many of the characteristics which had been central to its identity have seemed conspicuously absent from its successors. Notably, there has been no successful long-running episodic spy series to replace it, still less anything adopting such a specifically televisual form as the precinct drama, with the more ‘novelistic’ closed serial having instead become more dominant. Similarly, in the increasingly globalised age, there has been a pronounced absence of any spy drama as profoundly invested in the importance of the national space or in espionage as a public service activity. Particularly revealing in this regard is Hunted (BBC 1, 2012), a series devised by Kudos as a potential ongoing replacement, but which indicated the shift to the international through the involvement of US cable broadcaster Cinemax, American former X-Files writer Frank Spotnitz and AustralianAmerican actress Melissa George. Most striking, however, is the focus on a private intelligence company called Byzantium, the series sharply breaking away from a public service-oriented national intelligence service as in Spooks to a private security organisation with no national affiliation, hired to do the bidding of wealthy clients. As a result, Hunted seems to reorient the spy series from its traditional investment in the state into a new form defined by free markets and globalisation almost at the complete expense of ethical citizenship. If Spooks had been very much a spy series for the image-conscious public service of the New Labour era, this seems to almost epitomise the shift to the new Conservative-led coalition’s stronger free-market philosophy both on- and off-screen. However, a rapid ratings decline on BBC 1 over the first series perhaps suggested that this was too much of a leap for British viewers, and led to the BBC’s withdrawal and the series’ indefinite postponement.5 The overall historical narrative of this book has focused on how creative boldness in the spy and conspiracy genres has shifted between episodic series and ‘novelistic’ serial forms, and so the shift away from the series and towards the short-run serial might simply be read as part of this continuing ebb and flow. It may be the case that Spooks had provided such a thorough and definitive instance of the nation-centred spy series that other programmes have had to



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differentiate themselves simply to establish a separate identity. It is also notable, however, that many areas of Spooks’ success which I identified in Chapter 6 were situated primarily within the national broadcasting context. Here the series helped to reassert BBC 1’s reach to a broad popular audience in the fragmented multi-channel age, capturing the public imagination with its twists, cliff-hangers and, perhaps most importantly, contribution to national debates and the working-through of topical issues. But, as John Ellis observed in 2000, one vision of the oncoming ‘era of plenty’, defined by potentially limitless choice of viewing possibilities, threatens to consign ‘the whole process of working through and the practice of public service broadcasting to the dustbin of history’.6 As spy dramas seem progressively pitched more towards an international audience and guided by the ‘quality’ priorities of overseas pay-per-view channels, their novelistic or cinematic values arguably come increasingly at the expense of specifically televisual elements. These include a shared national experience arising from the concentrated broadcast moment, and the resulting ability to address a national culture-in-common and contribute to its working-through of topical concerns. As the demonstration of ‘quality’ becomes ever more of a priority in high-end television drama, it is perhaps an open question as to whether such programming in the future will have anything to say for or about the nation. Notes 1 Maggie Brown, ‘BBC’s new £20m spy thriller “the most radical ever” le Carré adaptation’, The Guardian (12 February 2016), www.theguardian. com/tv-and-radio/2016/feb/12/bbcs-20m-spy-thriller-le-carre-adaptation. 2 Elke Weissmann, Transnational Television Drama: Special Relationships and Mutual Influence between the US and UK (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 141–148. 3 Lez Cooke, British Television Drama: A History (London: Palgrave/BFI, 2015; 2nd ed.), p. 249. 4 Report on the Financing of the BBC [Cmnd 9824] (Peacock Report) (London: H.M.S.O., 1986). 5 Joseph Oldham, ‘Changing Narratives of Conspiracy: A Review of Hunted, Secret State, Complicit and Utopia’, Journal of Intelligence History 13:1 (2014), pp. 94–103. 6 John Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000), p. 162.

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Folsom, Robert G., Nigel West (foreword), The Life and Mysterious Death of Ian MacKintosh: The Inside Story of The Sandbaggers and TV’s Top Spy (Washington D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012). Gamble, Andrew, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994; 2nd ed.). Giddings, Robert and Keith Selby, The Classic Serial on Television and Radio (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Hammond, Philip (ed.), Screens of Terror: Representations of War and Terrorism in Film and Television since 9/11 (Suffolk: Arima Publishing, 2011). Hennessy, Peter, The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945–2010 (London: Penguin, 2010; 2nd ed.). Hewison, Robert, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London: Methuen, 1987) Hill, John, British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Hill, John, Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). Hofstadter, Richard, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966). Hoskins, Andrew and Ben O’Loughlin, Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Hunter, Allan, Alec Guinness on Screen (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1982). Isaacs, Jeremy, Storm over 4: A Personal Account (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989). Johnson, Catherine and Rob Turnock (eds), ITV Cultures: Independent Television over Fifty Years (Maidenhead; New York: Open University Press, 2005). Kennedy Martin, Troy, Edge of Darkness (London: Faber, 1990). Kettell, Steven, New Labour and the New World Order: Britain’s Role in the War on Terror (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011). Knight, Peter (ed.), Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America (New York: New York University Press, 2002). Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, N.C.; London: Duke University Press, 2003). Langford, Barry, Post-classical Hollywood: Film Industry, Style and Ideology since 1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010). le Carré, John, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold [1963] (London: Sceptre, 1999). le Carré, John, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (London: Pan Books, 1975 [1974]). Lyon, David, Surveillance Studies: An Overview (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).



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McCabe, Janet and Kim Akass, Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond (London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007). Miller, Jeffrey S., Something Completely Different: British Television and  American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). Miller, Toby, Spyscreen: Espionage on Film and TV from the 1930s to the 1960s (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Miller, Toby, The Avengers (London: BFI, 1997). Mittell, Jason, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture (New York; London: Routledge, 2004). Moran, Christopher, Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Moran, Christopher, Mark Stout and Ioanna Iordanou (eds), Spy Chiefs I: Intelligence Leaders in the Anglosphere (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2017). Morey, Peter and Amina Yaqin, Framing Muslims: Stereotyping and Representation after 9/11 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011). Mullin, Chris, A Very British Coup (London: Serpent’s Tale, 2010 [1982]). Nelson, Cary and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). Nelson, Robin, State of Play: Contemporary ‘High-end’ TV Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Nelson, Robin, TV Drama in Transition: Forms, Values and Cultural Change (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Penguin Books, 2000 [1949]). Page, Bruce, David Leitch and Phillip Knightly, Philby: The Spy Who Betrayed a Generation (London: Andre Deutsch, 1968). Palmer, Jerry, Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre (London: Edward Arnold, 1978). Pixley, Andrew, Callan: Under the Red File (London: Network, 2014). Potter, Jeremy, Independent Television in Britain. Vol. 4, Companies and Programmes, 1968–80 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990). Ryan, Johnny, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future (London: Reaktion Books, 2013). Ryan, Michael and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1988). Sampson, Anthony, The Changing Anatomy of Britain (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982). Sandbrook, Dominic, State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970–1974 (London: Allen Lane, 2010).

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Schlesinger, Philip, Graham Murdock and Philip Elliott, Televising ‘Terrorism’: Political Violence in Popular Culture (London: Comedia, 1983). Seaton, Jean, ‘Pinkoes and Traitors’: The BBC and the Nation, 1974–1987 (London: Profile Books, 2015). Sisman, Adam, John le Carré: The Biography (London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2015). Taylor, Ian and Laurie Taylor (eds), Politics and Deviance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). Thomas, Hugh (ed.), The Establishment: A Symposium (London: Blond, 1959). Thompson, Robert J., Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1997). Van Zoonen, Liesbet, Entertaining the Citizen: When Politics and Popular Culture Converge (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Weissmann, Elke, Transnational Television Drama: Special Relationships and Mutual Influence between the US and UK (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). Williams, Raymond and Alan O’Connor (ed.), Raymond Williams on Television (New York; London: Routledge, 1989). Wright, Patrick, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London: Verso, 1985). Wright, Peter, with Paul Greengrass, Spycatcher: The Candid Autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer (Richmond, Victoria: Heinemann Australia, 1987). Young, Hugo, One of Us: A Biography of Margaret Thatcher (London: Pan, 1993; final ed.).

Journal articles and book chapters Bianculli, David, ‘Quality TV; A US TV Critic’s Perspective’; in McCabe and Akass, Quality TV, pp. 35–37. Braun, Edward, ‘“What truth is there in this story?”: The Dramatisation of Northern Ireland’; in Bignell, Lacey and MacMurraugh-Kavanagh (eds), British Television Drama: Past, Present and Future, pp. 110–121. Brunsdon, Charlotte, ‘Problems with Quality’, Screen 31:1 (Spring 1990), pp. 67–90. Cobley, Paul, ‘“It’s a fine line between safety and terror”: Crime and Anxiety Re-drawn in Spooks’, Film International 7:2 (2009), pp. 36–45. Corner, John, ‘Finding Data, Reading Patterns, Telling Stories: Issues in the Historiography of Television’, Media, Culture & Society 25 (March 2003), pp. 273–280. Eco, Umberto, ‘Narrative Structures in Fleming’; in Eco, The Role of the Reader, pp. 144–172. Originally published as ‘Le strutture narrative



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in Fleming’, in Oreste del Buono and Umberto Eco (ed.), Il caso Bond (Milan; Bompiani, 1965). Erickson, Christian William, ‘Thematics of Counterterrorism: Comparing 24 and MI-5/Spooks’, Critical Studies on Terrorism 1:3 (December 2008), pp. 343–358. Fairlie, Henry, ‘The BBC’; in Thomas (ed.), The Establishment, pp. 191–208. Gardner, Carl and John Wyver, ‘The Single Play: From Reithian Reverence to Cost-Accounting and Censorship’, Screen 24:4–5 (1983), pp. 114–124. Hallam, Julia, ‘Introduction’; in Finch (ed.), Granada Television: The First Generation, pp. 1–24. Hill, John, ‘From Five Women to Leeds United!: Roy Battersby and the Politics of “Radical” Television Drama’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 10:1 (2013), pp. 130–150. Hill, John, ‘Radical Television Drama: Introduction’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 10:1 (2013), pp. 106–111. Hofstadter, Richard, ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’; in Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, pp. 3–40. Jameson, Fredric, ‘Cognitive Mapping’; in Nelson and Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, pp. 347–357. Johnson, Catherine and Rob Turnock, ‘From Start-up to Consolidation: Institutions, Regions and Regulation over the History of ITV’; in Johnson and Turnock (eds), ITV Cultures, pp. 15–35. Kennedy Martin, Troy, ‘“Nats go home!”: First Statement of a New Drama for Television’, Encore 48 (March/April 1964), pp. 21–33. Knight, Peter, ‘Introduction: A Nation of Conspiracy Theorists’; in Knight (ed.), Conspiracy Nation, pp. 1–17. Lamb, Ben, ‘Narrative Form and the British Studio 1955–63’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 34:3 (2014), pp. 357–368. le Carré, John, ‘To Russia, with Greetings’, Encounter (May 1966). MacKintosh, Ian, ‘MacKintosh’s Outline for The Sandbaggers’ [1977]; in Folsom, Ian MacKintosh, pp. 165–175. Oldham, Joseph, ‘Changing Narratives of Conspiracy: A Review of Hunted, Secret State, Complicit and Utopia’, Journal of Intelligence History 13:1 (2014), pp. 94–103. Oldham, Joseph, ‘The Man Behind the Desk and Other Bureaucracies: Portrayals of Intelligence Leadership in British Television Spy Series’; in Moran, Stout and Iordanou (eds), Spy Chiefs I: Intelligence Leaders in the Anglosphere (forthcoming). Ortega Breton, Hugh, ‘Screening for Meaning’; in Philip Hammond (ed.), Screens of Terror: Representations of War and Terrorism in Film and Television since 9/11 (Suffolk: Arima Publishing, 2011). Palmer, Jerry, ‘Thrillers: The Deviant Behind the Consensus’; in Taylor and Taylor (eds), Politics and Deviance, pp. 136–156.

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Petley, Julian, ‘A Very British Coup’, Sight and Sound 57:2 (Spring 1988), pp. 95–97. Scannell, Paddy, ‘Public Service Broadcasting and Modern Public Life’, Media, Culture and Society 11:2 (April 1989), pp. 135–166. Seaton, Jean, ‘Reith and the Denial of Politics’; in Curran and Seaton, Power Without Responsibility, pp. 103–119. Sexton, Max, ‘The Origins of Gritty Realism on British Television: Euston Films and Special Branch’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 11:1 (January 2014), pp. 23–40. Thomas, Hugh, ‘The Establishment and Society’; in Thomas (ed.), The Establishment, pp. 9–20. Thompson, Felix, ‘Coast and Spooks: On the Permeable National Boundaries of British Television’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24:3 (June 2010), pp. 429–438. Wark, Wesley K., ‘Introduction: Fictions of History’, Intelligence and National Security 5:4 (1990), pp. 1–16. West, Nigel, ‘Foreword’; in Folsom, Ian MacKintosh, pp. ix–x. Willman, Skip, ‘Spinning Paranoia: The Ideologies of Conspiracy and Contingency in Postmodern Culture’; in Knight (ed.), Conspiracy Nation, pp. 21–39.

Newspaper and magazine articles Ansorge, Peter, ‘GBH: What the papers said’, The Independent (24 July 1991). Armstrong, Stephen, ‘A twist in her tail’, The Guardian (5 December 2005), www.theguardian.com/media/2005/dec/05/independentproductioncomp​ anies.mondaymediasection. Banks-Smith, Nancy, ‘The return of Callan’, The Guardian (9 April 1970). BBC News, ‘Spy show draws record complaints’ (17 July 2003), http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/3073921.stm. A, ‘Spooks: MI5 not 9 to 5’ (London: BBC, 5 May 2002), www.bbc.co.​ uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2002/05_may/07/spooks_presspack. pdf. Bell, Jack, ‘Playing the war game’, The Daily Mirror (27 May 1970). Boyle, Roy ‘The real-life spy – gunning for greenfly’, Daily Express (14 August 1978). Bradshaw, Peter, ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – review’, The Guardian  (15 September 2011), www.theguardian.com/film/2011/sep/15/tinker-tailor-​ sold​ier-spy-film-review. Brooker, Charlie, ‘The grim reality of TV’, The Guardian (21 December 2002), www.theguardian.com/media/2002/dec/21/broadcasting.arts?INT​ CMP=SRCH.



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Brown, Maggie, ‘BBC’s new £20m spy thriller “the most radical ever” le Carré adaptation’, The Guardian (12 February 2016), www.theguardian.com/ tv-and-radio/2016/feb/12/bbcs-20m-spy-thriller-le-carre-adaptation. Catchpole, Charles, ‘Sir Alec to star in TV serial’, Evening Standard (18 July 1978). Clayton, Sylvia, ‘Precise style in sombre spy series’, Daily Telegraph (9 April 1970). Cushman, Robert, ‘Sir Alec’s assignment’, Radio Times (8–14 September 1979), pp. 84–93. Dawson, Jeff, ‘The Spies have it’, Radio Times (31 May–6 Jun 2003), pp. 16–20. Day-Lewis, Sean, ‘Fact & fiction mix in spy outbreak’, Daily Telegraph (29 January 1980). Deans, Jason, ‘ITV hopes goes West as Spooks steals in’, The Guardian (14 May 2002), www.theguardian.com/media/2002/may/14/overnights?​ INTCMP=SRCH. Deans, Jason, ‘Spooks to return as BBC 1 spies a hit’, The Guardian (28 May 2002), www.theguardian.com/media/2002/may/28/bbc.broad​ casting?INTCMP=SRCH. Dettmer, Jamie, ‘TV drama is Spycatcher in disguise’, Sunday Telegraph (8 May 1988), p. 3. Dixon, Ilona, ‘Electric Bell’, Radio Times (4–10 May 1985), pp. 4–5. Dodd, John, ‘What makes Callan tick’, The Sun (9 April 1970). Dowd, Vincent, ‘A Very British Coup 35 years on’, BBC News (24 September 2015), www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-34317445. Ennis, Jane, ‘Vanished: The original Sandbagger’, TV Times (26 January–1 February 1980), pp. 2–3. Fairlie, Henry, ‘Political commentary’, The Spectator (22 September 1955), pp. 5–7. French, Philip, ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – review’, The Observer (18 September 2011), www.theguardian.com/film/2011/sep/17/tinker-​tailorsoldier​-spy-review. Hattersley, Roy, ‘Let’s pretend politics’, The Listener (23 June 1988), p. 9. Hitchens, Peter, ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Travesty’, The Mail on Sunday (21 September 2011), http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2011/09/ tinker-tailor-soldier-travesty.html. Household, Nicki, ‘A terminal case’, Radio Times (17–23 April 1982), pp. 21–22. Jackson, Martin, ‘Callan, the killer for hire …’, The Daily Express (11 July 1970). Knight, Peter, ‘My goodness, Sir Alec in a BBC serial!’, Daily Telegraph (21 August 1978). Kretzmer, Herbert, ‘I spy a vain bit for realism’, Daily Mail (19 January 1980).

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Kretzmer, Herbert, ‘The Sandbaggers’, Daily Mail (4 March 1980). Livingstone, Ken, ‘A very popular coup’, Evening Standard (5 July 1988), p. 18. Mullin, Chris, ‘When the threat of a coup seemed more than fiction’, The Guardian (7 March 2006), www.theguardian.com/politics/2006/mar/07/ past.comment. Murray, James, ‘Bring back those simple spymen!’, Daily Express (29 January 1980). O’Connor, John J., ‘Edge of Darkness, award winning series’, New York Times (8 October 1986). Plunkett, John, ‘BBC spy drama spooks TV watchdog’, The Guardian (31 July 2002), www.theguardian.com/media/2002/jul/31/broadcasting. bbc1?INTCMP=SRCH. Rafferty, Terrence, ‘Spies who were cool and very, very cold’, New York Times (12 October 2003), www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/arts/televisionspies-who-were-cool-and-very-very-cold.html. Romney, Jonathan, ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’, The Independent (17 September 2011), www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/re​ views/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-15–2356404.html. Shayler, David, ‘Must spy harder’, The Guardian (15 May 2002), www. guardian.co.uk/media/2002/may/15/bbc.davidshayler. Stubbs, David, ‘A Very British Coup box set review: “a startlingly prescient, first-class governmental drama”,’ The Guardian (13 August 2015), www. theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/aug/13/very-​british​-​coup-​political​-​ drama​-​box-set-review. Williams, Raymond, ‘What happened at Munich’, The Listener (14 September 1972). Wilson, Harold, ‘Callan lives’, Evening News (14 May 1970). Woolley, Benjamin, ‘Power politics’, Radio Times (2–8 November 1985), pp. 82–85. Wootton, Adrian, ‘John le Carré at the NFT’, The Guardian (5 October 2002), www.guardian.co.uk/film/2002/oct/05/features1.

Archival sources BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham (hereafter BBC WAC), R CONT 20: John le Carré: 1970–74. BBC WAC, R CONT 21: John le Carré: 1975–79. BBC WAC, T48/368/1: Drama Writer’s File: John le Carré: Post 1979. BBC WAC, T65/38/1: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Producer’s File: 1977–82. BFI National Archive, Special Collections, London, ITM-8314: Very British Coup.



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Barnett, Steven and Emily Seymour, ‘A Shrinking Iceberg Travelling South …’: Changing Trends in British Television: A Case Study of Drama and Current Affairs (London: Campaign for Quality Television, 1999). H.M.S.O., Broadcasting in the ‘90s: Competition, Choice and Quality [Cmnd 517] (white paper) (London, 1988). H.M.S.O., Report of the Committee on the Future of Broadcasting [Cmnd. 6753] (Annan Report) (London, 1977). H.M.S.O., Report on the Financing of the BBC [Cmnd 9824] (Peacock Report) (London, 1986). T.S.O., Report of the Inquiry into the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly (C.M.G) (Hutton Report) (London, 2004).

Index

Note: literary works can be found under authors’ names, screen adaptations under titles. Page numbers in bold indicate detailed analysis. 16mm film 9, 11, 13, 29, 46–50, 57–58, 60, 69, 74, 77, 84–86, 88, 96, 116, 118, 122–123, 143–144, 178, 196 1990 (1977–78) 104 24 (2001–10) 163, 179 35mm film 19–21, 28, 30, 47, 57 3 Days of the Condor (1975) 103 9/11 (September 11 2001 attacks) 162–163, 168, 186 ABC (American Broadcasting Company, written as ABC-US) 21, 36 ABC (Associated British Corporation) 17–21, 25–26, 29–30, 35–36, 196 Adam Adamant Lives! (1966–67) 73 adventure series 5–6, 8, 16–17, 19–21, 24, 28, 30, 33, 35, 37, 41–42, 45, 47, 49, 57, 66, 73, 75, 91, 156, 196 Adventures of Robin Hood, The (1955–59) 5 Afghanistan War (2001–14) 162 Aldrich, Richard J. 3, 6, 64 Allason, Rupert 49, 68

All the President’s Men (1976) 103, 126 AMC (American Movie Classics) 193–195 Angry Brigade 52–53 Ansorge, Peter 85, 135 Armchair Theatre (1956–74) 16–21, 25, 36, 47–48, 80 Arts & Entertainment Network (A&E) 169 Associated-Rediffusion 17, 36 Associated Television (ATV) 17, 19 Avengers, The (1961–69) 6, 19–21, 25, 28, 36, 57, 73, 196 BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) 40, 74, 125, 135, 143, 169 Baron, The (1965–66) 5, 19–20 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 1–4, 7, 10, 12–14, 16–18, 28, 47, 49, 55, 59, 68, 70, 73–87, 92–93, 98, 105–107, 112–114, 117–119, 121, 125–128, 132–136, 142, 147, 152–154, 156–157, 162–169, 171, 174, 176–177, 181–182, 186–190, 193–199



Index 211

BBC America 169 Computer Literacy Project 112 English Regions Drama 108, 119 iPlayer 190 Beiderbecke Affair, The (1985) 134 Benn, Tony 134 Bennett, Tony 6 Berlin Wall 24, 67, 154 Bernstein, Carl 103, 137 Bianculli, David 21 Big Flame, The (1969) 7, 48 Bill Brand (1976) 138 Bird of Prey (1982) 12, 107–114, 115, 117–119, 122, 127, 139–140, 156, 195, 197 Bird of Prey 2 (1984) 12, 107, 114–117, 122, 149, 178 Birds Fall Down, The (television, 1978) 78 Black September Organization (BSO) 51, 55 Blair, Tony 157–158, 186–187 Blake, George 23, 48 Bleak House (television, 1985) 86 Bleasdale, Alan 113, 126, 155 Blick, Hugo 194 Blunt, Anthony 98 Bond, James (character) 4–6, 19, 21–24, 26–27, 30–32, 45, 62–63, 112, 181 Bond, Julian 81 Booker, Christopher 35 Born, Georgina 14, 167 Boyd, William 194 Boyle, Andrew 82, 98 Boys from the Blackstuff (1982) 113 Breaking Bad (2008–13) 193 Brenton, Howard 184–187 Brideshead Revisited (television, 1981) 79, 81–82, 84, 86, 95–96, 127 Britton, Wesley 8 Britz (2007) 186 Broadcasting Act (1980) 132

(1990) 13, 154, 158, 164, 188, 197 Brooker, Charlie 177 Brookside (1982–2003) 133, 176 Brunsdon, Charlotte 127 Buchan, John 3 Bugs (1995–99) 156, 173 Bull Week (1980) 108 Burgess, Guy 22 Bush, George W. 162, 185, 187 Buxton, David 5, 21 Caldwell, John Thornton 114, 122, 180 Callaghan, James 104 Callan (1967–72) 11, 16–17, 25–43, 46–49, 51–52, 55, 58, 66, 69, 73–74, 80, 98, 139, 165, 174–175, 177, 196 Cambridge University 22 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 120, 134, 136 Campbell, Duncan 126, 137 Campbell, Martin 122, 145 Cardwell, Sarah 74, 77, 88, 96 Casanova (television, 1971) 106 Casualty (1986–) 177 Cathy Come Home (1966) 7, 47, 144, 149 Caughie, John 9, 18, 47, 75, 77, 85, 91–92, 97–98, 106, 110, 122–123, 144, 148 Cawelti, John G. 6 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 6, 35, 62–63, 67, 102–103, 147, 181 Champions, The (1968–69) 35 Chandler, Raymond 22 Channel 4 10, 13, 132–133, 135–136, 142–143, 152, 154–155, 158, 164, 166–167, 194, 197 Chapman, James 5–6, 24, 41 Character Seven 193–194 Chessgame (1983) 93 Childs, Ted 51

212

Index

Cinemax 198 civil service 64, 92, 95, 106–110, 132 class 4, 9, 11, 16–18, 20–24, 27–28, 36–38, 42, 47–48, 54, 93, 110, 113, 138–139, 144, 158, 174, 184, 196 classic serial 12, 73–79, 81–88, 92–93, 95–96, 98, 106, 118–119, 122, 136 Clemens, Brian 57–58 cliff-hanger 38–42, 109, 175, 199 Clocking Off (2000–03) 166 Codename (1970) 73 Cold War 2, 4, 11, 13, 17, 23–24, 37, 45–46, 49, 52, 54, 59–60, 67, 102–103, 107, 120, 154, 162, 168, 174, 193–194 Collin, Reginald 36, 38, 48 Communism 4, 7, 23, 69, 82, 102, 185 complex narratives 12, 74, 80–81, 84, 86–93, 98, 118, 147, 197 Computer Programme, The (1982) 113 computing 12, 54, 107–108, 111–116, 140, 147, 156, 159, 171–172 Comrades (1986) 136 consensus 104–106, 127, 131–132, 150–153, 155, 157, 164, 183, 186, 189, 197 Conservative Party 20, 41, 96, 103–104, 111, 117, 138, 141, 153, 155, 157, 166, 195, 198 contingency theory 110 Cook, John R. 106, 119 Cooke, Lez 6, 29, 49, 73, 105, 167, 178, 194 ‘Cool Britannia’ 166, 174 Corbyn, Jeremy 158 Corner, John 8, 13 Coronation Street (1960–) 39 Creeber, Glen 42, 173–174 Crime and Punishment (1979) 78 Crow: Salvation, The (2000) 177

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2002–15) 171 Cunliffe, David 59 Cutting It (2002–05) 166 Dallas (1978–91) 40 Danger Man (1960–68) 5, 19–21, 24–26, 45 Defence of the Realm (1986) 105 Deighton, Len 16, 22–24, 27–28, 31, 42, 63, 93, 174, 196 Ipcress File, The (1962) 22–23 Denning, Michael 3–4, 6, 8–9, 24, 28, 69, 81, 182–183 Department S (1969–70) 35 Detective, The (television, 1985) 116–117, 124, 127, 134 Dickens, Charles 75, 78, 83, 86 Dr. No (film, 1962) 6, 19 Doctor Who (1963–89, 2005–) 39, 104, 115, 188–189 Donati Conspiracy, The (1973) 104 Doomwatch (1970–72) 104 Doyle, Arthur Conan 40 drama documentary 9, 47–48, 54, 144–149 Dyke, Greg 166–167, 174, 182, 187 Eco, Umberto 63 Edge of Darkness (1985) 12, 107, 119–126, 127, 134, 145, 147–148, 154, 156, 195, 197 Elliott, Philip 55, 58, 187 Ellis, John 51–52, 133, 154–155, 164–165, 189, 199 Elstree Studios 19, 45, 57 End of the Line, The (1970) 79–80, 88 ER (1994–2009) 157, 171, 178 ‘era of availability’ (television) 133, 135, 152–154, 157, 164 ‘era of exposure’ (intelligence) 6–7, 59, 102–103, 111 ‘era of plenty’ (television) 199 ‘era of scarcity’ (television) 133, 154, 157



Index 213

‘Establishment’, the 11, 13, 22–23, 27, 35–36, 45, 49, 70, 97–98, 103, 110, 132, 135, 138–139, 153 European Economic Community (EEC) 108, 110 Euston Films, 49–53, 57–58, 69, 84, 88, 94, 97, 119, 122–123, 171 Executive Action (1973) 103 ‘Existential’ spy thriller 9, 11, 16–17, 21–25, 28, 30, 35, 39, 42, 45, 58, 63, 67, 69, 74, 103, 154, 174, 195–197 Fairlie, Henry 7 Falklands War (1982) 117 Family at War, A (1970–72) 78 Faulkner, Lisa 176 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) 102 Featherstone, Jane 166, 169 Feely, Terence 26–27, 36 Fennell, Albert 57–58 Ferris, Paul 116–117 Fielding, Steven 126 film noir 24, 31, 123–124 Film on Four 133–136 First World War 3, 126 Fleming, Ian 4–5, 8, 22, 60 Casino Royale (1953) 4 Flight from Treason (1960) 25 Folsom, Robert G. 59–61, 67 Forsyte Saga, The (television, 1967) 75–76, 81 Fortunes of War (television, 1987) 86 Gamble, Andrew 12, 104, 138 Game, The (2015) 194 Game, Set and Match (television, 1988) 93 Gangsters (1975–78) 108 Gardner, Carl 76 Garnett, Tony 7, 47–48, 54, 84, 105, 121, 144–145, 149 Garrett, Stephen 164–165, 193

G.B.H. (1991) 155 GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) 111, 126 General Election (1964) 20 (1970) 41 (1979) 96, 104, 111 (1983) 153 (1987) 136, 153 (1997) 157, 166 George, Melissa 198 Get Carter (1971) 48 Giddings, Robert 81 Gielgud, John 83, 86 Goodliffe, Michael 36–37 Grade, Michael 135–136 Granada Television 17, 77–79, 81, 83–84, 86, 92–93, 96, 118 Great Expectations (film, 1946) 83 Greene, Graham 60 Greenham Common 120, 124 Greenslade, Dave 114 ‘Grid’, the (precinct setting in Spooks) 170–174, 179, 182 Guardians, The (1971) 104 Guinness, Alec 12, 83–86, 89, 93, 197 Gyllenhaal, Maggie 194 Hallam, Julia 78 Hammett, Dashiell 22 hardboiled fiction 22, 24–26, 28, 34–35, 123–124, 175 Hard Times (television, 1977) 78–79, 83 Hare, David 85 Hattersley, Roy 143 HBO (Home Box Office) 195 Heath, Edward 41, 103 Heggessey, Lorraine 166 Hennessy, Peter 4, 46 Hepburn, Allan 6 heritage 75–76, 79, 95–96, 127 Hewison, Robert 76, 96 Hibbin, Sally 134, 136–137, 139 Hiddleston, Tom 193

214

Index

High Noon (1952) 137, 158 Hill, John 105, 126–127, 144, 150 Hill Street Blues (1981–87) 118 Hodges, Mike 48, 50 Hofstadter, Richard 102, 110 Holby City (1999–) 176 Holmes, Sherlock (character) 40 Holocaust (1978) 84 Honourable Woman, The (2014) 194–195 Hopcraft, Arthur 77–78, 83–84, 88, 138 Hoskins, Andrew 178, 181, 187–188 House of Cards (television, 1990) 155–156 Humint (human intelligence) 3, 112, 167 Hunted (2012) 198 Hunter, Allan 83 Hustle (2002–12) 188 Hutchinson, Ron 12, 107–108, 114, 119 Hutton Inquiry (2003–04) 187 IBA (Independent Broadcasting Authority) 133 independent production sector 12–13, 132–134, 136, 154, 163–164, 193–194, 197 Ink Factory, The 193–194 In the Secret State (television, 1985) 116–117, 127, 134, 139, 156 Ipcress File, The (film, 1965) 24, 31, 34, for novel see Len Deighton Iraq War (2003–11) 163, 186–187 Irvin, John 1, 77–78, 83, 122 Isaacs, Jeremy 133, 135–136 ITA (Independent Television Authority) 17, 36 Italian Job, The (1969) 119 ITC (Incorporated Television Company) 19–20, 28, 35, 41, 45, 47, 50, 156, 196

ITV (Independent Television) 4–5, 9–12, 16–17, 28, 36, 40, 48, 58, 67, 73, 75, 77–78, 86–87, 107, 132–133, 135, 154, 156, 164, 188, 197 ITV Playhouse (1967–83) 48 Jackson, Mick 143, 145 Jameson, Fredric 142 Jewel in the Crown, The (television, 1984) 86, 118, 127 Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) 139 Judd, Alan 194 Kellner, Douglas 7 Kelly, David 187 Kelly, Dennis 194 Kelly’s Heroes (1970) 119 Kennedy Martin, Troy 12, 119–123, 134, 136, 144 Kershaw, John 36, 38 Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) 142 Kinnock, Neil 138, 143, 153 Knight, Peter 103, 157 Kosminsky, Peter 186 Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve 151 Kudos Film & Television 164–167, 176–177, 185–186, 188, 193–194, 198 Labour Party 13, 20, 77, 79, 104, 131, 134, 136–139, 143, 152–153, 155, 157–158, 166, 171, 188–189, 198 Langford, Barry 103 Law and Order (1978) 84 le Carré, John 1, 8, 16, 23–24, 31, 35, 42, 45, 60, 63, 69, 74, 79–80, 82–83, 87–88, 93, 98, 119, 165, 167, 169, 189, 193–196 Call for the Dead (1961) 23 Night Manager, The (1993) 193 Perfect Spy, A (1986) 93, 193 Smiley’s People (1979) 93



Index 215

Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The (1963) 23–24, 39, 67, 79, 154 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974) 1, 12, 68, 73–74, 80–82, 84, 88–91, 93–95, 97, 185, 197 Legacy (television, 2013) 194 le Queux, William 2 Licking Hitler (1978) 85 Life on Mars (2006–07) 188 Linda Green (2001–02) 166 Lionheart Television International 121 Loach, Ken 7, 47–48, 54, 85, 105, 121, 136, 144–145, 149 London Spy (2015) 194 London Weekend Television (LWT) 58, 81–82 Lyon, David 156, 173 ‘M’ (James Bond character) 26, 30, 63, 182 Mackintosh, Ian 59–61, 63, 67–68, 93, 104 Maclean, Donald 22 Mad Men (2007–15) 193 Magnum for Schneider, A (1967) 25–29, 34 Major, John 153 Man in a Suitcase (ITV, 1967–68) 35 Man of the World (ITV, 1962–63) 19–20 Massiter, Cathy 117, 138 Masterpiece Theatre 76–77, 136 Maugham, W. Somerset 60 Mayor of Casterbridge, The (television, 1978) 77 Merseybeat (2001–04) 177 MI5 (British Security Service) 1, 3, 7, 11, 13, 45–46, 52, 63, 117, 134, 139–140, 154–155, 158, 162, 167–171, 175, 179, 183, 185–186 MI6, see SIS (Secret Intelligence Service) MI High (2007–11) 188

Miller, Jeffrey S. 75 Miller, Toby 5 Milne, Alasdair 126, 142, 187 Minder (1979–94) 122 miners’ strike (1984–85) 117 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) 138 Mitchell, James 25–26, 36 Mittell, Jason 8 Monocled Mutineer, The (1986) 126 montage 48, 143–149 see also drama documentary Morey, Peter 186 Mullin, Chris A Very British Coup (1982) 133–134, 136–139, 150, 158 Munich massacre (1972 Summer Olympics) 51 Murdoch, Rupert 118, 141 Murdock, Graham 55, 58, 187 My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) 133 Nalluri, Bharat 169, 177, 180 Natural Lies (1992) 155 Nearly Man, The (1975) 77, 83, 138 Nelson, Robin 175, 179 New Avengers, The (1976–77) 57–58 Night Manager, The (television, 2016) 193–195 Nixon, Richard 102, 126, 151 Northern Ireland Conflict 52, 103, 122, 162, 174 Old Men at the Zoo, The (television, 1983) 119 Oliver Twist (film, 1948) 83 Olivier, Laurence 83, 86 O’Loughlin, Ben 178, 181, 187–188 Omega Mystery, The (1961) 25 Ortega Brenton, Hugh 187 Orwell, George Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) 111, 156

216

Index

Out (1978) 84 Oxford University 22, 82, 93 Palme, Olaf 41 Palmer, Jerry 34, 106 Panorama (1953–) 117 Parallax View, The (1974) 103 Paramount Pictures 82–83 ‘Paranoid narrative’ 106–107, 109–111, 121, 124, 127, 149, 189, 197 ‘Paranoid style’ 102, 110, 123, 142–143, 148, 159, 187 Peacock Committee (1986) 125–127, 135, 154, 195 Pebble Mill Studios 108, 113–115 Perfect Spy, A (television, 1987) 93, 193 Philby, H.A.R. ‘Kim’ 22, 35, 80–81 Phillips Oppenheim, E. 2 Pincher, Chapman 137 Pirie, David 155 Plater, Alan 134–138, 142, 145, 150, 152 Play for Today (1970–84) 49, 77, 85, 114 PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) 51 ‘Pop series’ 21 see also adventure series Porterhouse Blue (television, 1987) 135 Postmodernism 142, 155, 158, 178 Potter, Dennis 77, 106, 119–121, 134, 136 Powell, Jonathan 77–79, 81, 83–84, 86, 88, 94–95, 106, 118, 122 Precinct drama 13, 123, 163–165, 168–171, 173, 175–177, 181, 184, 189, 195, 198 Price, Anthony 93 Prisoner, The (1967–68) 35 Professionals, The (1977–83) 58, 122, 168, 187 Profumo Affair 6, 23, 48

Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) 52, see also Northern Ireland Conflict Psychos (1999) 164 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS, US broadcaster) 68, 76–77, 84, 87, 118, 121, 125, 136, 169, 194 Public Eye (1965–75) 26, 36, 39 public service broadcasting (concept) 2–4, 7, 10, 12–14, 18, 29, 73, 76, 78–79, 105, 107, 112, 118–119, 121, 125, 127, 133, 152, 155, 157, 163–164, 167, 171, 183–184, 188–189, 195–196, 198–199 ‘quality’ drama 10–11, 76–79, 118–119, 121, 123, 127–128, 156, 177, 193–197, 199 Quantel Paintbox 115 Radd, Ronald 25, 30, 36 ‘radical’ drama 7–8, 13, 84, 105, 121, 125–126, 128, 136, 142, 144, 149, 157–158, 174, 185–186, 188–189, 197 Radio Times 1, 83–85, 87, 117, 120 Reagan, Ronald 120, 156 ‘realism’ in spy fiction 8–9, 11, 21, 23–24, 45–46, 58–59, 63–64, 69, 73, 93, 168, 196 in television drama 7–9, 11, 16, 18, 20, 36, 46–50, 54, 97, 123, 196 Red Army Faction 51 Reilly, Ace of Spies (television, 1983) 119 Reith, John 2, 73–76, 167, 171 Restless (television, 2012) 194 Roots (1977) 84 Rosenberg, Bruce A. 6 Royal Navy 59–60, 67, 93 Rumour (1970) 48 Ryan, Johnny 112 Ryan, Michael 7



Index 217

Saint, The (television, 1962–69) 5, 19, 21 St. Elsewhere (1982–88) 118 Sampson, Anthony 108 Sandbaggers, The (1978–80) 11, 46, 59–69, 70, 74, 87–88, 93, 97, 102, 104, 113, 165, 168, 173, 175, 184–185, 196–197 Sandbrook, Dominic 74 Schlesinger, Philip 55, 58, 187 Seaton, Jean 3, 55, 125 Scannell, Paddy 2, 39, 152, 155 Second World War 3–4, 59–60, 81, 163, 184 Secret Society (1987) 126 Secret State (2012) 158, 194 Security Service Act (1989) 154 Selby, Keith 81 serialisation closed serial form 12, 49, 67, 73–78, 81–82, 84, 87–94, 96, 98–99, 106–110, 113–114, 118–120, 125, 127, 131–136, 138, 143, 152, 156, 165, 177, 194–195, 197–198 in episodic series 11, 17, 40–43, 66–67, 118, 164–165, 174–176, 196 Shayler, David 183 Sigint (signals intelligence) 112, 139 Silent Witness (1996–) 171 Singing Detective, The (1986) 119–120, 123, 125–127 Single play 7, 16–20, 25, 42, 47–49, 59, 76, 79–80, 85, 97, 106, 108, 114–115, 119, 133 SIS (Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6) 3, 11, 23, 35, 45–46, 59–66, 70, 93, 167, 185 Sisman, Adam 63, 82 Six Feet Under (2001–05) 195 Skinner, Ann 134, 137 Skreba Films 12–13, 134, 136 Smiley, George (le Carré character) 12, 23, 80–83, 88–89, 91, 93–98, 197 Smiley’s People (1982) 93, 118

Smith, Tim Rob 194 Sopranos, The (1999–2007) 68, 195 Soviet Union 4, 22, 37, 52, 61–62, 67–69, 82, 91, 104, 120, 185 Special Branch (Metropolitan Police) 11, 46, 48–49, 52–53, 57, 137, 167 Special Branch (television, 1969–74) 11, 46, 48–49, 50–58, 69–70, 98, 105, 109–111, 122, 124, 167–168, 183–184, 189, 196–197 Special Operations 6, 11, 46, 60–63 Special Operations Executive (SOE) 60 Spillane, Mickey 22 Spooks (2002–11) 1, 10, 13, 70, 162–190, 195, 197–199 Spotnitz, Frank 198 Spy Trap (1972–75) 73 Spy Who Came in from the Cold, The (film, 1965) 24, 31, 82–83 for novel see le Carré, John Starsky and Hutch (1975–79) 58 Stars Look Down, The (television, 1975) State of Emergency (1975) 104 Suez Crisis 22 SundanceTV 195 Surveillance 12–13, 107, 111–112, 116–117, 139–140, 147, 156, 171, 173, 179 Suspect (1969) 48 Sweeney, The (1975–78) 46, 57, 66, 77, 84, 91, 119 Talking to a Stranger (1966) 106 Teddington Studios 29–30, 36, 48 televisuality 114–116, 122, 177–181, 188 Tender is the Night (television, 1985) 86 terrorism 1, 11, 51–55, 58, 69–70, 109–110, 162–163, 168–169, 173, 179–180, 183–184, 185–187, 196–197

218

Index

Thames House (MI5 headquarters, 1994–) 170 Thames Television 36, 38–41, 43, 48–51, 57, 80 Thatcher, Margaret 12, 96, 98, 104–105, 107–108, 113, 117, 120, 123, 125–126, 131, 133–134, 138–139, 141–142, 145, 152–153, 158, 187, 197 This Life (1996–97) 175 Thompson, Felix 174 Thompson, Robert J. 121 Threads (1984) 145, 147 Thundercloud (1979) 67 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (film, 2011) 74, 91 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (television, 1979) 1, 10–12, 68, 70, 73–99, 112–113, 118–119, 122–123, 145, 165, 173–174, 185, 193, 195, 197 for novel see le Carré, John Trial and Retribution (1997–2009) 178–179 Tripods, The (television, 1984–85) 115 ‘Troubles’, the see Northern Ireland Conflict Tyrant King, The (1968) 48 Up the Junction (1965) 47, 144 USSR see Soviet Union Utopia (2013–14) 194 Very British Coup, A (television, 1988) 11–13, 123, 131–153, 154–159, 174, 181, 185, 189, 197 for novel see Mullin, Chris videographic 12, 107, 114–116, 122, 149, 178–179 see also televisuality Vietnam War 49, 102 Waking the Dead (2000–11) 171 Warden, The (television, 1951) 75

Wark, Wesley K. 3, 10 ‘war on terror’ 13, 158, 162–163, 168, 174, 183, 186–188 Warship (1973–77), 59 Watergate conspiracy 102–103, 126, 151 Waugh, Evelyn 79, 82 Wearing, Michael 108, 113, 122 Wednesday Play, The (1964–70) 7, 47–49, 80, 144 Weissmann, Elke 77, 118, 193–194 West, Nigel see Allason, Rupert West, Rebecca 78 West Wing, The (1999–2006) 157, 171, 178 Whitehead, Ted 117 Whithouse, Toby 194 Wilde Alliance (1978) 59 Williams, Raymond 51, 103–104 Willman, Skip 110, 151–152 Wilson, Harold 20, 40–41, 134, 139, 150 Wire, The (2002–08) 195 Wogan, Terry 87, 92 Wolstencroft, David 1, 164–165, 171, 175, 183–184 Woodward, Bob 103, 137 Woodward, Edward 11, 25, 30, 34, 40–41 Woollacott, Janet 6 World in Action (1963–98) 47 Wright, Patrick 96 Wright, Peter 66, 139 Wuthering Heights (television, 1978) 78 Wyver, John 76 X-Files, The (1993–2002) 157, 198 Yaqin, Amina 186 Yes Minister (1988–88, titled Yes Prime Minister from 1986) 108 Yorkshire Television (YTV) 59–60 Z-Cars (1962–78) 119