Secret Service is a spy show lacking intelligence

Owing to its dense undergrowth of secrets and deception, the intelligence business is richly fertile ground for dramatists. So it’s puzzling how often on TV spooks are depicted as one-dimensional, even when they’re double agents. 

In ITV’s shiny five-part series Secret Service, Gemma Arterton plays the head of MI6’s Russian desk with the exasperated tone of a millennial who hasn’t received her Glastonbury tickets. This seems less a personal artistic choice than some kind of collective direction, since the whole cast wears pained expressions of irritation each time someone opens their mouth. It’s as if everyone is convinced that everyone else is an idiot. And perhaps they’re all right. 

An adaptation by the playwright Jemma Kennedy and the ITV News at Ten presenter Tom Bradby of Bradby’s novel of the same name, the show’s premise is that one of the two Labour party cabinet ministers competing to become the new PM appears to be a Russian asset, and nobody is sure which one. No doubt that would seem like a more troubling predicament if it weren’t for the fact that in real life our next prime minister could be Zack Polanski or Nigel Farage, either of whom would be highly satisfactory to the Russians.

In any case, only Arterton appears to be perturbed by the possibility of a Russian puppet running the country. Her boss, the highly suspect deputy chief of MI6 (Khalid Abdalla), is intent on closing down her investigation, and his boss C (the ever wonderful Roger Allam) is all mandarin equivocation. In the first two episodes, we are introduced to a villa-load of Russian agents in Malta. It’s obvious they are up to no good because sinister music plays each time the camera follows one of them.

They look, if anything, more annoyed than their British counterparts. That may just be the effect of having to speak English to each other for no good reason except to practise their linguistic skills and cut down on the subtitles. Just in case you forgot it was ITV, a number of leading news figures, including Bradby and a near parodic Robert Peston, play themselves. 

Away from the brazen channel branding, Arterton happens to be married to the chief adviser (Rafe Spall) of one of the prime ministerial candidates. Neither can tell the other what each knows, so they are condemned to a professional middle-class setting – large kitchen island, goblets of red wine and spoiled kids – of cliched tedium. 

It’s a handsome production, with plenty of golden Mediterranean sunshine and external shots of MI6’s postmodern HQ in Vauxhall, but the first couple of episodes lack wit and tension. Or maybe that’s just cunning spycraft luring us into a false sense of security. 

There was no shortage of wit or tension in The Cage, which began with a prospective suicide and accelerated into a gripping tale of desperate people behaving desperately. Set in a Liverpool casino, it follows the plight of a backroom manager Matty (Michael Socha) and cashier Leanne (Sheridan Smith), who catch each other skimming the takings to fund, respectively, his gambling addiction and her need to find a new home for her family.

Neither realise that the casino is being used to launder drug money by a brutal criminal whose mother is the casino’s owner. Everyone is on the make, in an illusory economy in which nothing adds up and no one but the most ruthless advances. In other words, it’s a metaphor for how we live now, locked in shrinking expectations and chasing fast money that is for ever beyond reach. Except it’s not played as a parable – there are no lectures or heavy-handed messages about the state we’re in.

The writing by former cop and taxi driver Tony Schumacher (The Responder) is as sharp and true to life as the two lead performances. It’s rare today to see a portrayal of working people that isn’t patronising or freighted with tick-box political fashions, from beneath which the characters struggle to emerge. But this is British drama at its best. 

American drama is a different beast. It’s just as drawn to the hustles required to get by, but very often at a more elevated level. Two of the smartest shows currently streaming are set in the country club environs of the super-rich. 

The second series of Your Friends and Neighbours once again satirises the excessive materialism of people who live in houses the size of Luxembourg. But the anti-hero (Jon Hamm at his most effortlessly charming), who sees through the emptiness of his friends and then steals from them, is himself in no rush to flee the luxury lifestyle. It may all be grotesque and meaningless, but it’s also addictively comfortable. 

In the second series of Beef, created by Lee Sung Jin, one of the characters, a rather dimwitted personal trainer at a country club (a perfectly pitched Charles Melton), repeats the phrase “late-stage capitalism” when trying to make sense of his and his fiancee’s shortage of money. 

He doesn’t really understand what it means, but then who does? And anyway, all he wants is more, in a world in which even a billion dollars is never enough. Oscar Isaac (playing the club’s general manager) and Carey Mulligan (his sometime interior designer English wife) turn in two of the most astute performances of their already illustrious careers. Mulligan is terrific as a kind of caustic grifter, determined to get richer and yet contemptuous, in that refined English way, of the bores who’ve made it. If the super-rich are easy targets, few productions ever land a punch. Both these shows do – but what they really dramatise is the self-justifying ability of the very wealthy to make us want to join them.

The most fun drama of the week was Widow’s Bay, a strange mixture of Jaws and Twin Peaks set on a New England clapboard island. It stars Matthew Rhys as the local mayor in yet another stand-out performance, following his charismatic monster in The Beast in Me. 

The mayor has a vision of turning the sleepy resort into a new Martha’s Vineyard, which is undermined by superstitious islanders and a mysterious fog. Capitalism may be in crisis but credit where it’s due: the money swilling around the streamers has brought some first-class writers and actors into television. 

Photographs by Chris Harris/ITV, Element Pictures/BBC