More lives than 007: Spooks returns for an eighth series

As Spooks returns for an eighth series, the cast talk about how it stays so tense – and topical.

Spooks is a rare British drama: it’s a serious and frenetically paced ratings winner, with a big budget to match. As the eighth series begins on Wednesday, MI5 spymaster Harry (Peter Firth) is being helicoptered in to a disused country mansion by kidnappers – it’s a beginning that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hollywood movie. The following week viewers see a major power station blown up.

What’s most striking about the espionage drama, however, is that it has always been relentlessly topical since it began in 2002. Star Richard Armitage, who plays senior agent Lucas North, thinks that not being afraid to address controversial, pressing themes has long been one of Spooks’s strengths.

Speaking towards the end of a gruelling shoot, he says that the show whose writers pre-empted the banking crisis is still playing the same game: “I opened the newspaper two days ago and there’s a big piece about India’s development of a nuclear submarine, and China and Pakistan getting uneasy about it. That’s just how one of our episodes kicks off,” he explains. To make sure that the programme sounds plausible, too, Armitage says the writers will routinely reshoot scenes a couple of weeks after the actors thought things were in the can, so that the details are up to date.

For viewers, however, the enduring series-long appeal often lies in the way Spooks meshes each episode’s single plot with stories that arch across entire runs. Those grand themes mean that the show’s dialogue, which includes lines such as “I’m going to ignore the home secretary on this one” retains a veneer of plausibility because, quite literally, the entire world order is often at stake.

Characters’ lives, too, are something that Spooks has become renowned for toying with – most famously, Rupert Penry-Jones was bumped off, but Peter Firth’s character Harry is, in the words of several cast members, the only one without whom Spooks as viewers know it could not exist. Series seven ended, however, with the head of Section D in the hands, apparently, of SARV, the extremist Muslim Sacred Army of Righteous Vengeance. Now for this new series there’s a new enemy, known initially only as “Nightingale”. Firth says that Nightingale “is a neo-con organisation dedicated to making a safer world, with a plan to eradicate terrorism”. Needless to say, one man’s “safer world” is another’s dictatorship.

Indeed, Spooks writers have had to make key changes so that the series reflects a new administration in the White House. It has always maintained a sense of realism by giving the Americans a crucial role in British intelligence. Now, for this new series, however, a new broom is in Grosvenor Square, and episode one focuses on whether Sarah Caulfield (Genevieve O’Reilly) will have the nerve to “sweep away the rubbish” of the old guard. One Nightingale agent reminds her, however, that the Democrats have “only got the White House on loan”. For Lucas North, meanwhile, it looks like his relationship with America is not set to be diplomatic.

“There’s a dangerous love interest,” says Armitage, “that starts as a power-based sexual relationship but quickly becomes something that could be dangerously compromising.”

And for Harry, too, there’s a potentially dangerous love interest: GCHQ analyst Ruth Evershed (Nicola Walker) returns, despite having apparently died at the end of series five. Walker says that, in a show that is known for “writing out” its major characters, there’s a risk in coming back. “When you’re killed off you get a great storyline, ” she says. “But my fear is that you come back and then people feel that they have already said goodbye to your character.”

Walker’s fears, however, seem unlikely to be realised: Armitage says that he routinely receives scores of gifts from fans, and when Ruth and Harry were parted, production company Kudos received enough postcards to wallpaper an entire room. “I thought there’d be about 10,” says Walker, “but when I went in there was this whole room and they’d filled it with cards – everything from love letters to poetry.”

But if fans believe in Spooks, what do the real secret services think? “They never talk about it officially,” says Firth, “but I once went to the off licence opposite MI6 – the man serving me said, ‘They love it over there, you know. They’re always talking about you.’ So that’s the off-the-record reaction.”

- Spooks returns on Wednesday on BBC One at 9.00pm

Spielt Folge 8.1 nicht unmittelbar nach 7.8? Und haben wir nicht noch immer Frühjahr 2008?

In Folge 7.8 hat Harry übrigens noch mit einer anderen Dame verhandelt.

denn so schnell wie die Grid-Mitglieder immer von Punkt A nach B und wieder zurück kommen, ist das normalerweise in einer verkehrsreichen Stadt wie London unmöglich.