Spooks came about thanks to a happy coincidence. Kudos producer Stephen Garrett was bored by the amount of shows all set in the same kind of precinct - hospitals and police stations - and wanted to find a new precinct that could be home to a drama series. Inspired by the spy thrillers of John Le Carre, he approached writer David Wolstencroft, who had previously scripted Psychos for Channel 4, to see if he fancied having a go at developing a drama based around espionage. Entirely coincidentally, David had already begun researching spies with a view to writing a film script.
Although Thames House is a real government building, the one we see in the series is a completely different building - the Freemasons' Hall in Covent Garden. Coincidentally, it also featured as the home of a different branch of TV spies - CI5 in the 1970s action series The Professionals.
On their first broadcast, Spooks episodes do not have credits at the end. This came out of a joke by David Wolstencroft, who submitted the script for the first episode with his name replaced by the word 'anonymous'. As the show developed, producer Jane Featherstone extended the joke by removing the programme credits - although an agreement was reached with the unions to publish the full credits on the website, and in subsequent repeats.
Only two characters have been in the section from the beginning - section head Harry Pearce and Malcolm Wynn-Jones, the team's data analyst and technician. Malcolm was much more of a background character in early episodes, but he's become much more central - he even went on a field mission himself once, though he much prefers the challenge of painstaking reconstructions of shredded memos.
Harry Pearce is played by Peter Firth, whose acting career spans over 40 years. One of his first major roles was as Scooper in the children's adventure series 'Here Come the Double Deckers', while his other work includes leading roles in Equus (1977), Roman Polanski's 'Tess' (1979), Letter to Brezhnev (1985) and The Hunt for Red October (1990).
In the UK, it's called Spooks, but in America, where the word 'spooks' is more readily associated with the CIA, the series was renamed 'MI5'. Also, the hour-long episodes were re-edited to fit a 45-minute time-slot.
In 2008, we gained an insight into the future of 'Spooks' with a spin-off series called 'Spooks: Code 9'. Starring Georgia Moffett and Joanne Froggatt, the story was set in 2013 in the months after a nuclear bomb was detonated in London. With the remaining government relocated and the country under extreme terror alerts, MI5 recruited a new, younger team of people who want to do their duty for their country. The series looked at the kind of training prospective spies might go through as well as challenging the notion of patriotism in a multi-cultural country like the UK.
The REAL Spooks
Prior to 1992, the identity of the current Director General of MI5 was always a secret. Stella Rimington, the 13th DG, and first woman to occupy the post, was also the first to be revealed to the public, as part of a spirit of new openness. The first DG was Vernon Kell - known as 'K', while his opposite number at MI6, Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming, was known as 'C'. These monikers seem to have inspired the 'M' and 'Q' of James Bond fame, though those roles don't actually exist within the real intelligence services.
Back in 1916, when the original Secret Service Bureau became part of the Directorate of Military Intelligence, the existing departments were identified by the initials 'M.I' (for Military Intelligence). MI1 handled Codebreaking, MI2 covered intelligence to do with Russia and Scandinavia, while the rest of Eastern Europe came under the remit of MI3. MI4 looked after 'Aerial Reconnaisance', and so on. The other MI departments were either dismantled or else their work was absorbed into that of MI5 and MI6, and later the Government Communications Headquarters - GCHQ.
