Catch-up TV Triple- Spooks and the Smiley series- why le Carré is wrong to snub the show so.

Spooks finished this weekend, culminating a storyline of intrigue, subverted Cold War tradition, intelligence and action with an episode which drew on double-takes and the embittering of those involved to deliver a stunning, intelligent and un-secondguessable outcome.

Le Carré vocally derided the show about a month ago as juvenile and not at all like the intelligence services that he depicts in his fiction or that he was a part of professionally.

Following on in the vein of arguing against Margaret Atwood's ill-informed assessment of science fiction and attempt to redefine it so she could categorise her work as realist, literary fiction, I'm inclined to disagree with le Carré's assessment of Spooks. I'm also inclined to have a bit of a rant here discussion over just what is so different, in his eyes, between the popular show and the popular books, stopping off at a little point wondering why yet another author is so disinclined to be associated with a sub-genre of entertaining fiction and wants, instead, to be revered as the ultimate high brow incarnation of that sub-genre to the point where it is absorbed into the literary fiction which is all that is worthy of being read in the author's mind.

I'll keep it brief, because I'm tired, I've already written a lot today and I think the less I say on this, the more the few potent facts might be worth. Let's just say the differences (car chases, CSI-style computing, movie-tech CCTV and communications, and agents carrying guns) are far outweighed by the similarities.

First off, you've got the spy masters themselves, George Smiley and Harry Pearce. Okay, so, Pearce isn't as reticent as Smiley. He's still a tough, indiscernible cookie to crack, having carried out operations in Russia and a dozen other European countries. Smiley has carried out operations in Russia, East and West Germany, France and a dozen other European countries, directly and indirectly.

Soviet and Cold War values and sensitivities drive both stories. Apart from some of the more current and contemporary storyline inspiration, such as Somali pirates and such-like, the Russian/ British & American feeling has always underpinned the series even if not explicitly in ever minute of it. The same can be said for Smiley's activities in the books.

Both are about intelligence first and foremost. When computers are nicked, or when intelligence is hacked, The Grid panics. If any information from The Circus was taken, that too would be enough cause for alarm to put everyone on alert. The idea that Spooks didn't treat itself as an intelligence show was rubbish, it just had a different medium to fill- that of TV.

Old nemeses are brought together by both. Smiley vs Karla. Pearce vs Gavrik. Enough said.

Old habits die hard. Almost as if to prove that it wasn't completely out of touch with the old ways, information drops and message conveyances were carried out by real people in real places hiding info in book spines, in the cracks of stone on benches, that sort of thing, in Spooks. Le Carré had his members of The Circus perform similar paper-drops.

So there. I reckon Spooks is every bit the worthy watch as le Carré is a worthy read, because even though we now have gadgets of convenience to do a lot of intel work for us, and even though it's on TV which forces it to drop some of the more illustrative sequences of intelligence-based operations, namely caution and research, they are at heart cut from the same stone. A sharp, flinty, spy slate.