Jayne Dowle: Spooky ending for TV’s last sign of intelligence

Yes, I realise that I sound like a Spooks geek. A Spookette perhaps? But these days, when there are whole evenings I can see no point in turning on the television at all, except for the news, anything worth watching has to be a bonus.

But it strikes me, however, that perhaps Spooks has actually outlived its usefulness. What need now for drama when so many of the themes it has explored since 2002 – cyber-crime, mysterious deaths of government officials, lone terrorists, anarchists causing mayhem, Americans everywhere – have become not the stuff of imagination, but of very real life? Especially as we found out about its demise just a few days ago, with the rioting and looting which wouldn’t have been out of place in some futuristic nightmare set not so far into the future that we wouldn’t believe it.

In fact, being a sad Spookette, I did spend rather more time than was sensible watching the events of last week unfold and imagining how it would have all made an excellent plot-line. You would have just had to throw in some random lone terrorist with a grudge, and maybe a major event like the Olympics, for it all to have come together nicely and for MI5’s Section D to reach the point of imaginary melt-down.

In fact, I have been developing a side theory for some time that Spooks could never have carried on throughout 2012 because you couldn’t do anything in London next year and be credible without the Olympics looming over it. And being the BBC, you couldn’t set a lone terrorist fictionally amok in the middle of the women’s gymnastics without some very serious repercussions indeed.

I know. I am not that sad. Spooks wasn’t really real life. There was a certain element of ludicrousness which kept it firmly on the side of fiction – and entertainment – for all of its 10 series on earth. And it did become a game to spot just how long each new recruit would last before they bought it. This was made easier because usually the best-looking ones got it first – like poor Jo, the blonde rookie finished off by an accidental bullet from her own colleague Ros Myers. And how many times did battle-hardened Ros almost meet her death? That episiode when the Thames Barrier had a major mishap should have her won an award for Best Under-Water Actress.

But in among the ludicrousness there are been some truly affecting moments; such as when Adam Carter (the very-lamented Rupert Penry-Jones) died in a car-bomb and left an orphaned son, Wes. There can’t have been a mother watching who didn’t sniff when Wes was left alone at boarding school, with both his parents – his mum also being a deceased MI5 agent – killed in the service of their country.

Think what you like but Spooks tapped into our consciousness just at a time when little boys really did begin to lose their parents in conflicts which often have seemed as improbable and unreal as what we watched on a television drama. And often, these parents were sent into conflict by politicians who seemed as flawed as any Home Secretary that Harry Pearce has had to battle with. It is indeed a sorry state of affairs when a concept as twisted as Spooks has to be the mirror by which we examine ourselves, but then again, I suppose we get the drama which we deserve.

The point is, it was intelligent. And it celebrated intelligence, ahem. The plots were silly, but they did make you think. Really hard. And put your own problems into perspective. What was a bad day at the office compared to techie Tariq crashing the main-frame? If you lost concentration for a minute – never mind leave the room to make a cup of tea or anything – you lost the plot, literally. I can’t think of anything else on television, except perhaps Downton Abbey and that has commercial breaks, which has the same effect.

Anyway. I suppose we shall get over it. There are some of us who thought it would never be the same again after the ambiguous “death” of flawed hero Lucas North (Richard Armitage), who fell off the top of a building at the end of the last series. The possibility that he was going off to star in panto, or end up playing the dashing new doctor in Casualty hung over his inevitable exit. It wasn’t right, we were getting too close. And you know what happens when that happens in Spooks. It ended just as it should have done.