Spooks revives the Avengers genre

By FIONA RAE

Spooks had quite a rep by the time we started seeing it down here. After delays last year because of late delivery of season two, we were finally to see the series that caused a spike in applications to MI5 in Britain.

Even so, it's best not to believe the hype all the time - surely the Americans have got the market cornered on the whole secret agent/anti-terrorist/CIA action series thing?

Well, no. Spooks (TV One, 9.30pm) has proved to be thoroughly gripping in a very British sort of way, even though it has borrowed just a teensy bit from 24 and Alias. After all, it was Britain that brought us The Avengers; it was about time they revived the genre for the 21st century.

Spooks is about as realistic as The Avengers, but that doesn't stop the ensemble cast of Matthew MacFadyen (Tom), Keeley Hawes (Zoe), David Oyelowo (Danny) and Peter Firth (Harry) making it real, although early on in the series I did have trouble accepting someone as young as Tom could be a top intelligence officer - or that he would have told his girlfriend's little daughter that he was a spy and she had to keep it a secret. Putting your identity, and future, in the hands of a 5-year-old seemed just a tad reckless.

However, as the Spooks bedded in and jumped from series one to two, and Tom jumped from one bed to another, finally landing in Christine from the CIA's, the stories have become more and more interesting and multilayered.

A canny mix of issues, action and the personal reached their zenith around the episode where Tom was undercover at a British army base after receiving information that an officer was planning a mutiny. The episode served to make a point about free speech, while the tense episode which featured the team undergoing an exercise, culminating in Tom pointing a gun at two officers, tapped into terrorism paranoia in London.

The personal toll on the agents, and Tom in particular (having grown into the role, MacFadyen is riveting), sets the scene for tonight's finale in which Tom apparently goes rogue. He has, after all, lost two girlfriends to the job (even if one, the doctor, came over all Fatal Attraction on him), seen people killed (the controversial deep-fat-fryer incident, the customs officers last week and a few others) and had his agents put in danger.

Tonight, it starts with a kiss: the relationship with Christine puts them in an even more compromising position than the ones they've been engaging in. It's classic spy thriller stuff; there are so many twists you're not sure who's working for whom or what they're really up to. Is it an elaborate training exercise? Has Tom gone traitor? Is it all based, like a Hitchcock movie, on a McGuffin?

There's quite a shock ending, and I'm glad to see Spooks is being replaced with State of Play, which comes extremely highly recommended. That's just as well; nothing else will do.