Just before Christmas I managed to get my hands on a box set of the complete series. It's something I'd been wanting to see ever since Greg Rucka recommended it in the first issue of Queen & Country (which you can download here¹). If I ever saw the DVDs in any shops (which wasn't often), it was always from the end of the series, but I managed to luck out and find the complete set for £25 in the Zavvi at Piccadilly Circus.

There are details in this show which made my not-so-inner London geek stupidly chuffed. First was the opening scene, where the main character, Neil Burnside (played by Roy Marsden), walks down Regent Street and into the tube station at Piccadilly Circus. The thing that made me so chuffed about this, because I love little coincidences like that, is that there's a frame with the very building where I bought the DVD in the background of one shot (along with a police phone that's not there anymore).

Episode two has one of my regular buses getting a whole lot of screen time, which isn't necessarily interesting in itself, but there's a point where he gets off the bus in Whitehall, and walks past a bus stop which lists my other regular route, the 168. What's interesting to me, being the London geek that I am, is that the 168 doesn't go anywhere near Whitehall anymore, nor does it go anywhere near Trafalgar Square, Embankment Station, Blackfriars, Ludgate Circus or Farringdon Street. It now avoids those areas all together, and goes south of the river to Old Kent Road. I realise very few other people would be interested in that, even if they do use the same routes, but there are loads of London bus routes that haven't changed in 100 years, so to discover one where the route has changed so dramatically is one of those odd little titbits that makes urban life so interesting for me. Like I said, it's the sort of stupid little thing that makes me chuffed.

The show really is just as brilliant as everyone who's seen it says, though. It's superbly written, and very compelling. For a spy show, it might seem lacking in action by today's standards, but the writing is so good it could work as an equally compelling radio drama (if only radio drama was as well written). I was really disappointed when the third season was over, with no more to come, until I discovered the reason why. Creator Ian Mackintosh mysteriously disappeared without a trace, and even though some of the episodes were written by other people, ITV took the interesting decision not to continue the series without his input.

I'd be really interested to see how a series about MI6 might compare today, but it seems unlikely anyone will make something in direct competition with Spooks, even though that's about MI5 instead. (Although, given the rivalry between the departments, rivalrous programming seems quite appropriate!) If you're a fan of shows like Spooks, you should definitely try and catch The Sandbaggers.

¹I stopped reading Queen and Country early on, not because I didn't like Greg Rucka's writing but because I thought that Steve Rolston's artwork (which I do like) was inappropriately cartoony for the subject matter. Does anyone out there have the books and want to lend them to me, by any chance?