A star rating of 3 out of 5.
When it comes to screen espionage, rarely does one spy suit all tastes. Some prefer the bombast of Bond, others the shadowy world of Smiley. It’s rarer still to see these two distinct traditions meaningfully collide.
So, it’s a striking proposition to find MI6’s Kate Henderson (Gemma Arterton), the central figure in ITV’s Secret Service, both in peril overseas and navigating the mandarins of Westminster, as she attempts to unmask a Russian asset embedded in the UK government.
This is a series that aims to fuse grounded intrigue and plausibility with flashes of glamour and gunfire, even if it doesn’t quite have the narrative ammunition to sustain five episodes.
The drama comes from newsreader Tom Bradby who, like many in the public eye before him, has turned to thriller-writing as a lucrative sideline. To his credit, the concept (if not the series title) is suitably incendiary, with Kate uncovering the possibility that one of the runners and riders in a party leadership race may have ties to the Kremlin. Can she expose the mole before an ailing prime minister vacates Downing Street?
Yet high-level duplicity isn’t the show’s only concern. Considerable time is given over to Kate’s home life as a mother of two, albeit one who keeps a gun locked in a safe. Arterton commits fully to this duality, though it’s a tension the script only intermittently explores in depth.
Rafe Spall lends solid support as Kate’s husband Stuart, a Whitehall advisor whose ambition is tempered by a certain world-weariness. Meanwhile, Khalid Abdalla (as her evasive superior Zak) and Mark Stanley (as outspoken foreign secretary and leadership hopeful Ryan) occupy the sharp end of the security services and politics.
The most distracting casting choice, however, is the deployment of ITV’s own current-affairs presenters. Once real-life figures such as Robert Peston, Susanna Reid and Ed Balls begin grilling fictional politicians in cameo roles, it becomes harder for seasoned actors like Alex Kingston and Roger Allam to leave much of an impression. Not that Allam, as a familiar type of terse head spook, appears especially stretched.
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Cross-promotion might be easier to forgive if the plot maintained its early momentum. Instead, it gradually sputters, arriving at a solution that appears dutiful rather than dramatic. What begins with real visual flair on the streets of Malta settles into more routine thriller territory.
So, in the end, that promised collision of styles is never quite realised. Rather than meshing 007’s spectacle with Smiley’s sly subtlety, Secret Service ends up feeling – like its title – a little too generic.