The spies have it

There's something about a good spy story that pulls me in. Love me a bit of cloak and dagger work; secret identities, intrigue, get the bad guy before he blows up the world. There's been two great, different television series I've followed devotedly over the last five years that have been 'must see tv' for me.


One is Spooks, which has just started its fourth season here in Australia (ABC, Friday nights). I enjoy it for a range of reasons. It has great, taut story lines which frequently manage to echo real life. Main characters get hurt, and die; this means that you can never be sure that a storyline will turn out well in the end. It's a real ensemble piece too, full of low-key, well-rounded quirky characters with emotional depth. Of the current series, I particularly like the character of Ruth, who the BBC website describes as 'brilliant, but completely bananas'.

And it has great eye candy - Matthew McFayden was number one spy for the first two series, and now Rupert Penry-Jones is The Man.

My other favourite spy-fix is Alias. Completely over the top, it never reflects real life, which is why it is so much fun. It had great URST too, until the writers decided to pull Syd and Vaughn apart for a season thanks to her lost year as (if I remember correctly) an assassin. It had a wonderful villian in Sloan, fantastic supporting characters, and yes, very nice eye candy in Michael Vartan. Jennifer Garner is great too, creating a well rounded sympathetic character in very silly situations and equally ridiculous disguises. Her Sydney would find a day in the MI5 office rather tame though.

This is very enjoyable television. Which is why it's disappointing that both programmes have been treated so poorly by Australian programmers. While at least the ABC still screens Spooks in prime time, we are way behind the UK. Series five has already been screened there, but the ABC apparently has no plans to screen it here once the current series four has finished. I think they want to keep the MI5 crew in reserve, ready to call them in should they need it.

But at least that's better than Alias, which completed its run in America a year ago. Channel Seven recently repeated the penultimate series four very late at night over the summer - but series five is nowhere to be seen. Commercial television programmers here are only interested in the latest hot American import, and think nothing of dropping something mid-season, or not showing it at all. Apparently we television viewers have very short attention spans, which is why they can suddenly drop something that people have followed for several years.

Looks like I'll have to resort to Amazon for the series five DVD if I'm to see Syd get her happy ending.