Contemporary British Television Drama

James Chapman

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350152502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica de la televisión

The early twenty-first century has seen the emergence of a new style of television drama in Britain that adopts the professional practices and production values of high-end American television while remaining emphatically 'British' in content and outlook. This book analyses eight of these dramas - Spooks, Foyle's War, Hustle, Life on Mars, Ashes to Ashes, Downton Abbey, Sherlock and Broadchurch - which have all proved popular with audiences and in their different ways represent the thematic and formal paradigms of post-millennial drama. James Chapman locates new British drama in its institutional and economic contexts, considers their critical and popular reception, and analyses their social politics in relation to their representations of class, gender and nationhood. He demonstrates how contemporary drama has mobilised both new and residual elements in re-configuring genres such as the spy series, cop show and costume drama for the cultural tastes of modern audiences. And it concludes that television drama has played an integral role in both the economic and the cultural export of 'Britishness'.

1

Spooks

Spooks (2002–11) is the series that marked the emergence of British Quality Television. First broadcast in May 2002, Spooks would run for ten years and notch up a total of eighty-six one-hour episodes.¹ It was a critical and popular success, winning awards for Best Drama Series from BAFTA (2003) and the Royal Television Society (2003) and regularly attracting audiences over 7 million. The BBC’s head of Drama Commissioning Ben Stephenson called it a ‘groundbreaking series … [which] redefined drama on the channel for a new generation’.² Spooks marked the breakthrough for Kudos Productions, which would emerge as one of the major independent drama producers over the next decade. Spooks was not only visually stylish but also topical. Its tales of terror plots, conspiracies and counter-espionage caught the public mood in the wake of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC. The success of Spooks (the title is a British colloquialism for spies) may be attributed in part to its timing: it appeared at precisely the right moment to tap into the Zeitgeist. To this extent Spooks can be read as a vehicle for examining contemporary social anxieties around issues such as terrorism, state surveillance, the protection of civil liberties and the relationship between the security services and the government.

The production of Spooks demonstrates the new political and cultural economies of the British television industry in the early twenty-first century. Kudos Film and Television Productions, founded in 1992, was one of the new independent producers set up following the Broadcasting Act of 1990. Kudos now describes itself as ‘the UK’s most successful and original producer of popular award-winning quality scripted film and television … responsible for era-defining hits Spooks, Hustle, and Life on Mars’.³ However, it did not start out quite so auspiciously. In the 1990s Kudos produced programmes across a range of genres – including an angling magazine (Screaming Reels for Channel 4), cookery programmes (Nigel Slater’s Real Food for Channel 4, Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes for BBC1), presenter-led documentary (Desperately Seeking Something for Channel 4) and children’s fantasy (The Magician’s House for CBBC) – and only established itself in the field of drama with Psychos (1999), a six-part series for Channel 4 set on the psychiatric ward of a Glasgow hospital. Spooks was intended to be different from other ‘precinct-based dramas’ such as the police or hospital series. Kudos Chief Executive Stephen Garrett suggested that a series about the Security Service – popularly known as MI5 – would be ‘a bit like a cop show only bigger’. Garrett also averred that the decision to make a spy drama was informed by the association of the genre with British film and fiction: ‘There is something quintessentially British about espionage. Because of Bond and because of [John] Le Carré’s work, the world associates Brits with spying; we are perceived as having a genuine talent for duplicity, deception and telling lies. It’s something we should be incredibly proud of!’⁴

Even so the commissioning of Spooks was not a straightforward process. Kudos had initially offered the series to Channel 4 which turned it down on the grounds that the spy series had come to be regarded as a moribund genre following the end of the Cold War. The spy series had emerged as a major television genre in the 1960s with a cycle of British-made spy adventure series including Danger Man, The Avengers, The Prisoner, Man in a Suitcase, The Champions and Department S. David Buxton has characterized these series – and their American counterparts such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E., I Spy, Get Smart and Mission: Impossible – as ‘pop’ series on account of their fantastical content and their privileging of visual style in contrast to the psychological realism of what Buxton terms the ‘human nature’ series.⁵ The ‘pop’ series flourished during the 1960s when it was perfectly attuned to the period’s obsession with style over content and the preference for irony. It reached its height with The Avengers, a witty, sophisticated series that quickly abandoned its original realist mode and became increasingly fantastical and parodic over its nine years and six seasons. While the ‘pop’ series persisted beyond the 1960s – exemplified by The New Avengers in the 1970s, C.A.T.S. Eyes in the 1980s and Bugs in the 1990s – the dominant trend in spy drama in the 1970s and 1980s was towards the more realistic mode of series such as Callan, The Sandbaggers, Mr Palfrey of Westminster and the BBC’s acclaimed triptych of John le Carré adaptations: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, Smiley’s People and A Perfect Spy. These series were all characterized by their psychological realism, believable characters and a pervading sense of moral and ideological ambiguity. In the 1980s the spy drama provided particularly fertile ground for writers of ‘quality’ drama including Stephen Poliakoff (Soft Targets) and Troy Kennedy Martin, who scripted both the ‘heritage’ spy adventure series Reilly: Ace of Spies and the exemplary paranoid conspiracy serial Edge of Darkness. Yet by the end of the decade there was a sense that the spy drama had run out of cultural energy. The last major spy series before Spooks – ITV’s expensively produced mini-series of Len Deighton’s best-selling trilogy Game, Set and Match – had failed miserably in the ratings. This may explain why the spy drama was largely absent from British television screens throughout the 1990s. Instead, the representation of television spies turned to comedy, exemplified by The Piglet Files, a workplace sitcom about MI5, and Sleepers, a comedy-drama about two deep-cover Soviet agents forgotten after the end of the Cold War.⁶

Spooks therefore represented something of a risk for Kudos and the BBC insofar as it marked the return of a genre that had seemingly died with the end of the Cold War. Indeed, there is some anecdotal evidence that the television industry did not expect it to be a success. According to Julie Gardner, the future head of BBC Drama Commissioning,

I was working for ITV when Spooks was about to air and there was this brilliant conversation where I said ‘Oh my God, that’s such a good idea, I’d love to do a spy show, Christ, we should’ve thought of that.’ The person I was talking to said ‘It will be terrible; it’s for the BBC, it will be so wordy, it will all be about the Cold War and oh God, it will just be so wordy and dull.’ Maybe … And then episode one [sic] saw a head in a chip-fat-fryer … Okay, it’s not wordy, then, it’s not 1950s Cold War, we’re not doing ‘state of the nation’.⁷

The production of Spooks also benefitted (if benefitted is an appropriate term in this context) from external events. The series had been commissioned before the events of 11 September 2001 when terrorists acting on behalf of the Al-Qaeda organization hijacked three passenger airliners and deliberately crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon building in Washington: a fourth hijacked plane – believed to have been targeting the White House – crashed when passengers attempted to regain control. David Wolstencroft, credited as the series’ creator, averred that 9/11 ‘sidewinded’ Spooks insofar as it ‘perversely made it as relevant as can be’.⁸ The first series of Spooks began shooting in November 2001: scripts were hurriedly rewritten to take account of the ‘War on Terror’. In this sense Spooks could not have been more timely or more topical.

Spooks had impressive production credentials: it is evident that from the outset it was conceived as a high-end flagship drama. At a cost of £900,000 per episode, it was squarely in the upper-cost bracket of British drama production.⁹ David Wolstencroft, who had written Psychos, collaborated in the development of the series with playwright Howard Brenton, returning to television for the first time in fifteen years. Brenton was brought on board for his ‘radical’ and ‘provocative’ outlook: his previous work included The Churchill Play and The Romans in Britain, which had both dealt with the suppression of civil liberties – a theme that would also inform Spooks. The original cast was a combination of experienced actors – Peter Firth as spymaster Harry Pearce and Jenny Agutter as duplicitous Tessa Phillips – and emerging new talents Matthew Macfadyen, Keeley Hawes and David Oyelowo as the team of case officers who comprised the fictitious ‘Section D’ of MI5. Firth would remain a constant presence from the first episode to the last while the rest of the cast would regularly be refreshed. The series also attracted a string of ‘name’ guest stars – including Anthony Head, Tim Piggott-Smith, Robert Hardy, Ian McDiarmid, Martine McCutcheon, Andy Serkis, Richard Johnson and Alice Krige – while Hugh Laurie (as ‘old school’ MI6 Section Chief Jools Siviter), Tim McInnerny (as Joint Intelligence Committee Chairman Oliver Mace) and Gemma Jones (as intelligence analyst Connie James) all had recurring roles.

The success of Spooks in resurrecting the television spy drama may be attributed to several factors. On a formal level, Spooks represented a number of innovations in British television fiction. From the outset the decision was made not to include any onscreen credits: viewers wanting to know cast or production details were therefore obliged to look online (or – it might be suggested more cynically – to purchase the licensed book publications).¹⁰ The ‘house style’ of Spooks was established during the first season by directors Bharat Nalluri, Rob Bailey and Andy Wilson. It was characterized by its fast pacing and elliptical editing, employing devices such as split-screen narration and the technique of ‘ramping’ which accelerates background motion in order to indicate a time-shift instead of a fade or dissolve. It would seem that the innovations in shooting style were to some extent developed on set rather than planned in advance: while early episodes tend to favour a mounted camera, the first season sees a shift towards a hand-held camera that is both more mobile and more intimate. The use of split-screen narration – generally held to have been influenced by the American action-thriller series 24, which began a year before Spooks in 2001, though it had been employed long before that in feature films such as The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) – was only decided upon during post-production. The narration in Spooks is restless and the camera rarely stays still: conversation scenes, for example, are shot with the camera circling around the characters in a 360º arc rather than using the standard technique of shot/reverse shot. The narration of Spooks reflects the motifs of spying and surveillance: characters are often filmed as if from concealed positions (a feature of Sidney J. Furie’s 1965 film of The Ipcress File), events are depicted through grainy CCTV-style footage and each episode ends on a freeze frame. At times the series makes conscious visual references: a meeting between MI5 and CIA officers at the London Aquarium (episode 2.4), for example, is nothing if not an homage to the famous sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936).

The production strategy of Spooks was to modernize the television spy drama for the twenty-first century: to this extent it sets out to differentiate itself from serials such as Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People on every level. In contrast to the middle-aged, white, male world of John le Carré’s ‘Circus’, the agents in Spooks are characterized as young, attractive, multicultural and mixed gender. The three male leads of Spooks – Tom Quinn (Matthew Macfadyen), Adam Carter (Rupert Penry-Jones) and Lucas North (Richard Armitage) – are all handsome and heroic in the mould of Ian Fleming’s fictional secret agent James Bond rather than le Carré’s anonymous and ordinary George Smiley (so memorably incarnated by Alec Guinness in the two BBC serials). The unproblematic inclusion of women as part of the team – regular characters included Zoë Reynolds (Keeley Hawes) in series 1–3, Fiona Carter (Olga Sosnovska) in series 3–4, Jo Portman (Miranda Raison) in series 4–8, Ros Myers (Hermione Norris) in series 5–8, Beth Bailey (Sophia Myles) in series 9 and Erin Watts (Lara Pulver) in series 10 – suggests that sexism in the Security Service is a thing of the past: this contrasts markedly with the first episode of ITV’s The Sandbaggers in 1979 where the entry of a woman into the cosy male world is the focus of considerable gender anxiety. Similarly, the inclusion of characters from minority ethnic backgrounds – including Danny Hunter (David Oyelowo) in series 1–3, Zafar Younis (Raza Jaffrey) in series 3–6 and Tariq Masood (Shazad Latif) in series 8–10 – was clearly intended to represent the modern, multicultural face of Blairite Britain. The casting of Spooks therefore positioned the series in relation to the BBC’s strategy for representing cultural diversity. The BBC Annual Report for 2008–09, for example, began with the statement: ‘The UK is an incredibly diverse place, and we aim to reflect this diversity at national, regional and local levels.’¹¹

Spooks also differentiates itself from its predecessors in its production design and its visual style. The clubland world of the ‘Circus’ with its old-fashioned trappings of leather armchairs and wood-panelled offices is reserved in Spooks for ‘old school’ spies such as the upper-class throwback Jools Siviter: instead, MI5 operates from a high-tech facility known as ‘The Grid’ characterized by its sleek modernism. (As the production team was unable to film at the real MI5 building Thames House on Millbank, it used instead the Freemasons’ Hall: it seems more than a little ironic that the headquarters of the United Grand Lodge of England should feature as the bastion of the secret state.) The glossy, high-contrast style of Spooks identifies it as an heir – visually at least – to the ‘pop’ aesthetic of 1960s spy adventure series such as Danger Man and The Avengers. And also like The Avengers, which had presented an image of Britain (or rather England) combining tradition and modernity (vintage cars, stately homes and elegant gentleman’s tailoring co exist with computers, robots and avant-garde fashions), Spooks combines traditional visual signifiers of London such as the Royal Opera House and the Houses of Parliament with the modern face of the city represented by newer landmarks such as the Millennium Bridge and the Thames Flood Barrier. This visual strategy also characterizes other post-millennial British television dramas – including Doctor Who, Hustle and Sherlock – and can be seen as part of a strategy to project a tourist-friendly image of modern Britain for both domestic and overseas consumption.

The promotional discourses of Spooks – exemplified by press releases and interviews with the producers, writers and cast members – were at pains to emphasize its relevance and topicality. According to Gareth Neame, then head of Independent Drama Commissioning for the BBC: ‘In a world where the role of the intelligence services and secret agents is being thrown into greater relief, Spooks is a timely new drama from a first-class creative team and a superb cast. MI5 are in the news every day – they’re in the front line in the war against terrorism. But until now, how they go about it has been hidden.’¹² The existence of MI5 – the organization responsible for domestic intelligence gathering and counter-espionage more formally known as the Security Service – had only been officially acknowledged since the early 1990s: in 1991 the identity of the Director-General of MI5 (Dame Stella Rimington) had been revealed for the first time, and in 1997 the agency launched its first public recruitment campaign. According to Christopher Andrew’s authorized history – publishe...