The Beginning

Long-running TV shows have often had surprising origins. The Sopranos began life as a feature film, 24 was originally about a fireman, while Cheers was nearly set in a hotel. For Spooks, it all stemmed from a fateful browse…

Jane Featherstone (Producer, Kudos Film And Television): [Producer] Stephen Garrett was walking through a bookshop and thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to do something on spies?” He approached David Wolstencroft, who’d written (Channel 4 medical drama) Psychos, to start writing a more domestic, character-based piece for Channel 4. But when we started talking to the BBC, Lorraine Heggessey suggested we take it into more of an action-thriller spy area.

Lorraine Heggessey (BBC One Controller, 2000–2005): We were trying to reinvent drama on BBC One, and wanted something with adrenaline and pace and great stories and sex appeal. Spooks was going to be part of this whole relaunch of the channel brand.

Featherstone: David started the script from scratch and wrote the most brilliant first draft that got greenlit at the BBC.

Bharat Nalluri (director, pilot episode): Normally you’d cut that down before shooting but we decided to keep it at length and just get everyone to speak with pace. We squished an hour and 20 minutes into an hour, which you never did on television because people were terrified you’d lose the audience.

Jenny Agutter (Tessa Phillips): It was good writing – people like (playwright) Howard Brenton. I remember first meeting about it and thinking it was terrific. I enjoyed le Carré but this was a whole world I hadn’t looked at or read about.

Nalluri: My pitch was to make it like a movie. From day one, it should have ambition and scale, and we shouldn’t be afraid to give it that shine and gloss, to make it slick and stylish. We gave it a 5.1 movie surround sound mix, which cost us the Earth, and nobody did that.

Heggessey: We were trying to take some of the values of American TV drama and put them on BBC One.

Nalluri: Bizarrely, the show that most inspired me was The West Wing. I liked the energy and dynamism of it. Everything counted because you were on this global scale; so even if it was just the President having breakfast, it was the President’s breakfast. A bit of that kind of pace and energy imbued itself in that first season.

Featherstone: Apart from Lisa Faulkner, the cast weren’t well known at that time.

Nalluri: We wanted to cast Matthew [Macfadyen] straight from the get-go. Keeley [Hawes] and David [Oyelowo] auditioned and stood out a mile. Harry Pearce was probably the hardest character to cast. He didn’t have a lot to do in the pilot. Who is he? What is he? Where’s he going? I’d just seen The Hunt For Red October and thought, “What’s Peter Firth doing these days?”

Peter Firth (Harry Pearce): I remember the first script and the character was in two scenes, which I thought was a bit disappointing, but the content of them was enough to pique interest.

Heggessey: We were using Spooks to relaunch the channel; we had the new ‘dancing’ idents and the signature red of BBC One being “the one to watch”. There was a lot riding on it for us.

Featherstone: There were posters all over town for the first episode – May 30, 2002 – with David Oyelowo in a karate outfit and Matthew [Macfadyen] in spy googles and another of Keeley [Hawes]. I was 30 and I remember thinking, “Oh my god, this is huge! What’s going to happen?”

Heggessey: “MI5, Not 9–5” was a great slogan.

Nalluri: It became a very contemporary word, but at the time we were worried ‘Spooks’ would make people think it was about ghosts or something.

Nicola Walker (Ruth Evershed): I was doing a play at the time and I remember the trailers being on and thinking that awful thing for an actor to think: “Oh, that looks really good, I can’t bear to watch it.” It was the sort of thing I really wanted to be in.

Featherstone: I was a very new producer, David was a new writer, we didn’t have any major stars in it and we were slightly under the radar, so expectations were quite low. I think we expected seven million.

Macfadyen: I remember feeling really wobbly when we were shooting, thinking it was going to be rubbish. It was a real surprise when it did really well.

Featherstone: The morning after it aired I got a call from the BBC with the overnight ratings, and it was 9.7 million. That was a massive turning point in my life, Matthew’s life, Peter’s life…

Nalluri: People got it straightaway. It was just very different.

Featherstone: The next morning Lorraine Heggessey called and said, “I want more episodes for next year,” and that’s when we went up to ten episodes a series. It was amazing feeling. It’s never as good as the first time (laughs).