altariel | Tinkers, tailors, soldiers, spies (Reply)

We are watching The Sandbaggers, a 1970s spy drama about Neil Burnside, the Director of Operations at SIS, starring Roy Marsden, and a bunch of other people that make you go, "ooh that's him from thingie". The Sandbaggers are the special ops agents of SIS. As is typical for its time, the show is very set-bound, all about the decisions taken along corridors of power. It's all intelligent conversations in small rooms, and around bits of London. It's a bit like Yes, Minister without the jokes.

Now, Callan is a lot like this too (I'm convinced Neil Burnside's office set is the same one as Hunter's in Callan). They were both made and transmitted at around the same time. Small rooms, conversations, sneaking round London landmarks. And, like any Cold War spy series, it's largely about a small number of people on both sides of the ideological divide: the spy club is a small one, transcending national boundaries. The spooks have more in common with each other than with the man in the street; they are the hollow men.

There is a difference of focus between the two shows though. The Sandbaggers is, I think, more obviously about the clash of ideologies. The conflict is between opposed bureaucracies, opposed systems. In Callan, the conflict is primarily internal to David Callan himself: the clash of conscience. How far will he go for his masters, against his better judgement and his better nature. Is Callan more like his smelly friend, the thief Lonely, or more like Hunter, the man behind the desk. This is also, of course, class conflict in David Callan's case: "I didn't go to Harrow, or Eton, but people do still trust me," Callan says in one episode. Callan is the outsider desperate to integrate himself with the system, and not sure he likes the price.

These two different conflicts - ideological and individual - are unified superbly in George Smiley; this is what makes the Smiley books/series the best Cold War spy drama.

What about the post Cold War period? Season 4 of Spooks is well underway, and its subject matter this season is more obviously post 9/11, post 7/7. I think the drama - the conflict - in this season has derived chiefly from individual struggle, the crisis of conscience, or lack of it (I haven't seen most of the first two seasons, please don't spoil me too much). Oh yes, they still sit in council in small rooms, and have conversations on the Embankment and Primrose Hill, but you don't feel the International Spy Club at play and work so much any more. The most interesting episodes so far have been about the internal strife caused by doubt over national/cultural identity, either (links to spoilers) specifically dramatized or deriving drama from the spooks trying to determine where those loyalties lie in others. (I have to think more about this.)

But the best episode of the series so far was on BBC4 last week, and is on BBC1 this week, and it's a Cold War episode. I guess we have fluency in the dramatic language for that.