Spooks BBC1, 9pm ALAS, if only the youngest, most impressionable and best-coiffed of Spooks's MI5 operatives, Jo Portman, had forsaken her usual spooking shenanigans for a college reunion with jolly non-MI5 pals. That way, Jo's worst fate would have been, as she put it, "to have a dance, drink cheap wine and probably take a completely inappropriate man to bed".
But MI5 were damnably busy that evening. Thwarting the CIA's attempt to assassinate the outspoken left-wing Venezuelan president during his UK state visit. Stopping al Qaeda recreating the Beslan atrocity by attacking a school. Jo feared her bosses wouldn't react favourably to a request for a night off.
Which was why, dash it, the poor soul wound up horribly dead, her neck snapped by her MI5 colleague, Adam. Poor Adam hadn't wanted to kill her, naturally, but Jo had tearfully begged him to - to put her out of her misery, to spare her a far worse fate.
For the pair of them had been kidnapped by mercenaries for onward sale to al Qaeda. Jo had already been hideously brutalised by her captors and simply couldn't take the nightmare prospect of further torture - during which she'd probably spill the beans on her MI5 buddies - then certain death.
As Jo, Miranda Raison succeeded in almost popping her huge blue eyes out of her head, so convincingly wracked was she by sheer terror. She was also increasingly prey to sensible doubts about her work for the supposed good guys - ie Britain and the US - in this age of extraordinary rendition and Guantanamo Bay. "Not torturing people is the closest to a moral absolute there is," she wistfully observed.
Jo's final moments of life were inutterably sad, desperate and believably agony-ridden. Their air of pained reality thus highlighted the standard Spooksian diet - candyfloss, poppycock and tripe - which, until then, the show's makers had expected us to swallow. Yup, it's taken Spooks six complete series to travel beyond Silly, Idaho, all the way to Unspeakably Preposterous, Arizona. Mighty strange - spooky, you might say. But never so spookily strange as the plot and cast of characters in the average episode of the show.
Last night's chief incredible beezer was the man from Venezuela's London High Commission. Let's call him Senor Cojones. For a diplomat from Latin America, this hombre was very, very, very Latin American, although not particularly diplomatic. As every Latin American man apparently does, he wore at all times a light-coloured linen suit. In addition, he wore his shirt open at the neck, with its collar spread flamboyantly over the lapels of his jacket in trademark Latin-American style.
He also had a pencil-slim moustache and a penchant for denigrating Anglo-Saxon chaps with ornate and fiery Spanish allusions concerning their virility and sexual orientation (generally involving the wilful use of the word "cojones").
The Latin-American outspoken-ness paled, however, when compared to that of Senor Cojones's Venezuelan boss, El Presidente, who - so Spooks would have us believe - stepped off his plane at Heathrow with the words "Britain is a tired and impudent lap-dog." It's not likely, that, is it? It's as likely as MI5 foiling a CIA assassination plot at the last minute by exposing the assassin to cat fur, thereby making him sneeze, due to his allergy to cats.
Spooks: it's nonsense, and good riddance to it. I shall miss Jo and her cute elfin haircut, mind. In an odd sort of a way, I hope Spooks is true to its own form and - against all logic - brings her back to life for a seventh series. But surely even this show's writers wouldn't dare pull such a ludicrous stunt... or would they?
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