BBC series 'Spooks' feedback and comments

[Wokeman]

Tonight: BBC1 Spooks. Half a dozen white peeps taking control of the Thamas Barrier. Nah! It doesn't make any sense or have any credibility. I didn't remain to see what the purpose of it all was. Giss the cash, or you'll all be blown up! Yeah! Seen it, been there, done it! Or there again, perhaps I missed the point!

[Light Infantree]

Funny, I could have swarn that they were simply just peeps.

The story was very far fetched but in the end good old M15 won the day as usual - where would we be without them.

[paul wright]

I thought the central theme was the secret - even from HM's own Secret Service - document Aftermath - which advocated seizure of worldwide Carbon deposits and the death of 25-30% of the world's population
We know they want more like an 80% population reduction
Quite telling detail though

[Wokeman]

I stressed the 'white' to emphasise they would have had no particular reason or 'cause'. No other reason.

[andyb]

It is not just non-whites who have causes Mike. The cause on the show was about global warming. I think it does subversively get info out there that people wouldn't have seen before.

[Patrick Brown]

I saw the last half hour and it just seemed like the same nonsense the US churn out.

[TonyGosling]

In case people didn't realise this series is aimed at, and avidly watched by, those serving in and families of the British military.

It is hardly suprising then if propaganda techniques are used to skew the storylines towards the prevailing mythology, aka. terrorism being carried out by nasty coloured people from countries that we are in the process of invading.

There is very little in the way of real counterintelligence work such as stopping foreign intelligence agencies operating in the UK. That is what MI5 are supposed to do and are patently failing to, particularly with regard to the CIA and Mossad who can, it seems, do almost whatever they want on UK soil, however illegal.

For most people in Britain, including the vast majority of the military, this will be the only impression they get of life at MI5, and no doubt Ms. Eliza Bullying-Manner wants it to stay that way.

Tony


Creator of TV drama Spooks reveals the secrets of her success
By ANGELLA JOHNSON
12th November 2006
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_artic le_id=415854&in_page_id=1770

The brains behind the hit BBC spy drama Spooks doesn't care who she upsets - as long as there is no swearing. But then she did start her career as Gazza's PA.
Like any good spy-mistress, she has made a few enemies - some of them rather scary. Jane Featherstone, the creative force behind BBC1's smash-hit drama Spooks, has dodged critical bullets from ruthless opponents including MI5, MI6, sundry retired colonels and Mossad, the Israeli secret service.
The series was condemned from the outset, its portrayal of spies at work and play dismissed as laughably unrealistic. MI5 operatives, it was said, do not wear Armani suits. Nor do they keep rocket launchers in the wardrobe.
The snipers got to work the moment the credits rolled on the first episode in 2002, making call after call, sending e-mail after moaning e-mail to the BBC.
Spooks was said to trivialise the threat to the British state and denigrate the vital work of the Security Services. But these days, Jane Featherstone just shrugs her shoulders and smiles. She can afford to - because, whatever the reception from those supposedly 'in the know', the viewers were on her side from the start, and they have been ever since.
Spooks is not merely popular: the show, which mixes political intrigue with James Bond heroics, has been credited with changing the face of British television drama, rejuvenating the concept of family viewing in the process.
For the first time in years, a mainstream channel can boast intelligent but gripping drama, aimed at everyone between the ages of 14 and 104.
It regularly pulls in audiences of five million and more. Almost uniquely, it contains very little swearing and virtually no sex. When the current series reaches its climax and conclusion tomorrow, almost ten million of us will be watching.
The show has even infiltrated the notoriously difficult American market, where it is called MI5.
The combination of popular and critical acclaim has made Jane, at 37, one of the most powerful women in television. Joint managing director of the independent Kudos Productions, she is also responsible for Hustle, featuring a gang of con-artists, and the retro cop series Life On Mars, both of them hits.
She has been personally involved in every one of the 48 episodes of Spooks so far and, although not a script-writer, is widely viewed as the brains behind its success. The daughter of a retired engineer, her unlikely first job after university was as a personal assistant to drink-sozzled England footballer Paul Gascoigne.
But nowadays, businesslike and blonde and sitting in a huge glass-fronted office in fashionable Clerkenwell in Central London, Jane Featherstone looks and sounds smart enough to feature in one of her own dramas. She projects the suave confidence of those accustomed to the networks of power that feature so heavily in Spooks.
Much of the show's appeal, she suggests, is its sheer topicality. With the Communist threat - once a staple of thriller writers - on the wane, Spooks has turned its arc-lights on a new world of nightmares. It is a very contemporary take on Britain.
Spooks has tackled an anti-abortion conspiracy, a sect of mad Christians and an attempted Right-wing coup. The scripts are stalked by Islamic terrorists, Russian oligarchs, Israeli fanatics and African dictators bent on genocide. Rarely have such people been dramatised in popular entertainment.
At times the show has seemed eerily prescient. Spooks' script-writers had already latched on to the menace posed by international terrorism before the destruction of the Twin Towers thrust the issue into everyday consciousness.
'We make it all up, of course,' she says. 'We are interested in what is going on in the world so we extrapolate information from newspapers, people and the broadcast media.
'Sometimes we get a bit close to the wire. Occasionally the germ of a storyline will make the news two years later. At first the drama seemed so fanciful, so 007. Yet we invent things and then, spookily, they happen further down the road. It's all about timing and luck.'
Only last week, the head of MI5, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, warned that the country faces more than 30 terror conspiracies, all of them serious.
'September 11 happened two weeks before we started filming the first series,' says Jane. 'Before that our plots would have seemed like fantasy, but afterwards the unthinkable became painfully real.'
She admits the show has upset a lot of people. 'They write or phone after every episode. One storyline, in which Mossad agents posed as Al Qaeda operatives, resulted in a call purporting to be from Israeli intelligence complaining about how they were shown.
'They suggested that we should have phoned Tel Aviv to get permission. We had a good laugh at that. But no subject is considered taboo. We aim to throw a light on any issue that has been in the news.
'We certainly don't have favourites. Everyone gets a turn at being the baddie. The Mossad thing was just because we'd had a go at every other intelligence agency. It was their turn.'
Perhaps it was the quality of the drama or the influence of viewing figures, but eventually the real MI5 and MI6 came around to admiring the programme. Jane recalls: 'At first the intelligence services were resistant, and they let that be known through former members who acted as technical advisers on Spooks.
'Then they thought it might help to recruit new spies. They even used the first series to help with their advertising campaign. But they were deluged with people who thought the job involved walking around in Armani saving the planet.'
Spooks has brought stardom to its leading actors. They include Rupert Penry-Jones, who plays the handsome and enigmatic Adam Carter; Miranda Raison as the blonde ex-journalist Jo Portman; and Hermione Norris as the ruthless and uncompromising Ros Myers, who would do anything and kill anyone for what she believes is the 'greater good'.
The team is led by veteran actor Peter Firth as the ice-cool head of counter-terrorism, Harry Pearce.
Aside from its glamour and rumbustious content, there is something appealing about the feel of the show. Spooks combines slick American production values - costing the best part of £1million an episode - with sardonic wit.
There is also a touch of darkness, another distinctively British feature. In the second episode, an MI5 heroine finds her head pushed into a deep-fat fryer. There were shocked complaints, of course, but the audience was hooked.
In recent times, both the BBC and ITV have stuck to a diet of studio-based drama series. In contrast, Spooks and its sister show Hustle are bold and glossy with a cinematic feel. They are tightly structured, reminiscent of long-running American series such as ER or maybe even a Hollywood movie.
One of the first UK dramas to adopt the American practice of using a team of scriptwriters, Spooks is now pioneering a shift to series that run over many weeks.
'We are all going to have to start shifting to US-style 26-part series,' Jane predicts. 'The audience is ready for it. Spooks is picking up new viewers all the time.
'We don't have a history of home-made long-running series in Britain. I suppose that's because we have soaps like Coronation Street and EastEnders to bring audiences back week on week.
'But we have shown that we can take on the Americans and make quality action shows that run for several years.'
There is another factor in the popularity of Spooks, one which has received less attention: Jane and her team have reinvented the sort of family viewing she grew up with. There is little profanity and, although relationships are an important aspect of the drama, they do not involve naked flesh.
'We are probably one of the few shows in the genre which has a ban on swearing,' says Jane. 'It's not necessary. Over the series, the F-word has been used about four times and usually in a life or death situation.
'I have nothing against it per se, but it must be justified. The same applies in Hustle. Good drama doesn't need cursing to make an impact. Of course, that has helped to broaden our appeal across all ages, from teenagers to grandparents.'
Jane's own interest in television was nurtured in an era when family viewing was the norm. 'We were not particularly artistic or media bent,' she says. 'But even as a child I was a television junkie.
'I loved escapist programmes like The Dukes Of Hazzard, Doctor Who and The A-Team, as well as comedy shows like Morecambe and Wise. People say television is bad for children, but I've done all right.'
Between the ages of three and ten, Jane's father's job took her family to India and Germany before they returned to the suburban comfort of Purley, South London.
Jane and her siblings were clearly talented - her older sister Vicky, 39, is artistic director of the National Theatre of Scotland and younger brother Ric, 34, composes music for film and television. But after being involved with an amateur dramatic society as a teenager, Jane realised that she was 'useless' as an actress and aimed for a job making programmes instead.
'The careers advisers laughed and said it was impossible unless I had relatives in the business,' she recalls. And, certainly, her first job after Leeds University was a long way from the studios. At 22, she found herself managing Paul Gascoigne's social diary.
'Initially, I thought it would be a good way of earning money before going off and travelling for six months,' she says.
'It was before Gazza moved to Italy. He was the David Beckham of his time and it was extraordinary fun working for him, but not quite as exciting as some people might believe.
'I sorted his fan mail and arranged his charity appearances, travel, interviews and promotional stuff. He was very nice to me, but difficult to keep track of.'
The job may not have taught her much about casting or directing. But the experience, she reveals, was formative.
'I had to keep everyone happy and learned to be very diplomatic,' she admits. 'And that is what working with writers and actors and commissioning editors is like. It's about juggling high-end personalities.'
The Gazza connection even gave her a first break in television through Chrysalis, which was making a documentary on the footballer.
She went on to work for Hat Trick Productions - then up-and-coming, now phenomenally successful - and was involved with hits such as Drop The Dead Donkey. Then, in 2000, she joined Kudos as head of drama.
Other independent producers are eyeing Kudos's success with envy. Last month the company had dramas on three successive evenings on BBC1: the Jane Eyre prequel Wide Sargasso Sea, Spooks and The Amazing Mrs Pritchard.
Now Jane is putting the final touches to Tsunami, a three-hour BBC-HBO drama portraying the lives of a group of characters in Thailand in the aftermath of the 2004 disaster.
Early in the New Year there will be a second, and last, series of Life On Mars.
New projects, of course, are continually on the boil. 'We're developing three ideas for ITV,' reveals Jane. 'I can't say too much about it, but they are all forward-looking in their own way. You have to think out of the box in this business.'
You can just imagine that's how one of her relentlessly modern Spooks might put it.

[TonyGosling]

Beware: George Bush's secret agents can now arrrest us in our own country

By Alun Jones QC, lawyer of the NatWest Three
11th November 2006
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/newscomment.html?i n_article_id=415877&in_page_id=1787

The Government last week cravenly surrendered control of the independence of our criminal justice system to the United States.

It rejected a final chance to make two key amendments to the Extradition Act 2003 - a dereliction of duty that means American secret agents can now arrest us in our own country.

Extradition used to be about fugitives. People committed a crime in country A and fled to country B to avoid justice.

Obviously, as crime became transnational, complications arose. More than one country had a legal right to try a suspect.

Also, the international community created through the UN the concept of "international crimes" so grave that any country had the duty to prosecute or extradite any person accused of torture, hostage-taking, hijacking etc, found within its territory.

On the whole, countries respected the practice that crimes were normally tried in the country where the evidence was found, or the damage caused. The "War Against Terror" and the US reaction to financial scandals such as Enron and Worldcom changed all that.

The US now regards itself as free to request the extradition of UK citizens whose alleged crimes, in any traditional view, would be investigated here, and tried here if the evidence justified it.

I regularly meet US and Continental criminal lawyers. It is a shaming experience. They treat our subservience to the US with incredulity and even derision.

I now regularly advise businessmen and industrialists fearful they might be the subject of extradition requests.

One of these men is accused in the US of a transnational case of fraud in which the US attorney is threatening him, through his UK solicitor, that unless he returns voluntarily to the US and pleads guilty, in which case he will receive two years' imprisonment without parole, he will be the subject of an extradition request and 'all bets will be off'.

We should not be too prissy. We would not be offended, necessarily, if a US prosecutor treated a US fugitive like this.

But this man is English - he is accused of criminal conduct committed in substance in the UK, where no one has sought to prosecute him even though the US allegations have been made public. There are other predictable and disturbing developments.

Three weeks ago, a foreign businessman, resident with his family for several years in England, was arrested on an extradition warrant alleging conspiracy to export night-vision goggles from the US to a Middle Eastern Muslim country.

The US prosecutor's brief description of his conduct shows that the entire case arises out of a "sting" perpetrated by the US Department of Homeland Security.

Evidence was obtained, in London, by US undercover agents, audio-taping and videotaping conversations with the accused man.

The sting, of course, is standard US practice. In English law, the US investigators are guilty of the criminal offence of incitement committed in London.

The American extradition statement does not disclose whether the UK authorities knew about this (in which case they too would be guilty) or whether (the outrageous alternative) US agents are running amok in London on frolics of their own, and then demanding extradition.

The much-publicised case of the NatWest Three is the clearest example of America's prosecutorial arrogance.

The US claimed jurisdiction over this case because seven 'wire transfers' were made between Texas and London in the disputed transaction.

Any single electronic communication over a state or national border in the US entitles a US court to claim the right to try a person for an alleged fraud committed anywhere in the world.

Why does our law permit this?

In March 2003 David Blunkett signed a treaty concluded in secret with the US in which he gratuitously threw away UK citizens' rights.

He allowed that, while it would be necessary for us to provide evidence showing a person should be extradited from the US, the US did not need to do the same to secure extradition from the UK.

He then put through Parliament the Bill that became the new Extradition Act 2003 later in the year.

The Government misled Parliament blatantly in 2003.

This Act allowed the Home Secretary to designate countries that did not have to provide evidence and so Blunkett designated America.

The Act itself contains some apparently strong safeguards for British citizens - or so Blunkett said. One is that a person shall not be extradited if to do so would be "incompatible with his human rights".

The most obvious safeguard for a UK citizen would appear to be Article eight of the European Convention. A person is entitled to the privacy of his home and family life.

There shall be no interference with this right unless it is necessary for, among other purposes, the prevention of crime.

So far, so good. The NatWest Three argued that it was not "necessary" to interfere with their right, as the Serious Fraud Office had decided not to prosecute here, and their employer did not claim to have been defrauded.

But in the High Court, the Attorney General contradicted the assurances given to Parliament.

He said that such was the importance of extradition in itself as a means of combating crime, it would always 'trump' the right to home and family life. The High Court effectively accepted this argument.

BUT the truth is that if the American prosecutors want to prosecute a UK citizen for a fraud committed mostly in the UK, they can get him by producing a piece of paper with a bare allegation of misconduct.

The courts and government cannot protect him even if he has been investigated and exonerated here. This has caused consternation in the City and at the Confederation of British Industry.

The first amendment Parliament rejected last week was designed to oblige the US authorities to provide evidence in support of an extradition request, as we must do to them.

The second was to write in a requirement that, unless there were exceptional reasons, the court could not extradite to another country over an allegation of a criminal act that took place partly in this country.

This is not revolutionary. This principle used to govern all extradition relations within Europe, and is still applied by almost every other European state today.

In Parliament last week, attempts were made to discover the Government's reasons for opposing the two amendments. Home Office Minister Joan Ryan was, literally, incoherent, to the astonishment of observing journalists.

In the Commons, John Reid thuggishly accused the Conservatives of helping paedophiles.

Ludicrous as this was, when the amendment went back to the House of Lords for the last time, the Conservatives, visibly sheepish, caved in, having previously supported the changes. The Liberal Democrats held firm, but the Government won.

Mr Reid held out one hope, however. The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, was going to agree some guidelines with his American counterpart about where transnational cases should be tried - the very same Lord Goldsmith whose own reservations about the legality of the Iraq war evaporated when he went to Washington, shortly before David Blunkett, in the historic month of March 2003.

We all know we have subordinated our foreign policy to the Americans. We have also now subcontracted an important part of our system of justice to them as well. No free nation should behave like this.

[AntiZionistAntiNeocon]

[Hazzard]

Why on earth does anyone bother to watch this garbage?

I can boastfully say ive not sat down and watched more than 5 senconds of it.

It is nothing but propaganda, not much different than Americas rediculously horrible CSI series which attempts to create some kind of invincible untouchable glorification of their police force.

The show is fiction, and anyone who watches it and believes its realistic obviously has no clue how things really work in this decrepid world. Will probably find that things are going to get alot worst before they get better and not have an inkling why or how.