Ros (Hermione Morris) and Adam (Rupert Penry-Jones) in a still (for once) from tonight's episode
There was a time when the phrase "fast-paced dialogue" referred to exchanges spiked unsparingly with witticism and fiery riposte. But ER, and, later, The West Wing, changed all that. "Fast-paced dialogue" became, quite literally, a dialogue between two or more characters moving through endless right-angled networks of corridors at an improbably fast pace. Corners signified a change of subject, doors, a change of scene; and anything resembling a conversation held over five metres away from a freshly-kicked hornet's nest could be translated freely as news of the relevant character's impending demise.
But with Spooks, you get pace of another order altogether. For if what you're getting resembles traditional dialogue - with questions, answers, follow-ups - you'll probably find you've been sitting on the remote and are now watching one of Ronnie Barker's attempts to enter Nurse Gladys' Morris Minor. The action - laced with fragments of colloquy to which James Joyce would be hard-pressed to ascribe narrative coherence - proceeds at such a rate that there seems to be no distinction between the intentionally compressed "last week's episode in a 20-second nutshell" introductions and the rest of a given episode. Blink and not only have you missed it, but everyone in EC1 has been blown up, chief suspects interrogated and alibis confirmed, and all of a sudden it turns out some trusted insider you've only met for 10 seconds (in 10 different scenes) has masterminded the entire thing using only a toothpick and iMac.
The great advantage of this kind of television is that it makes you feel like you're one of the team. Keep up with the action, and you've passed the exams, been vetted and are sitting there ready to construct a five-point analysis of the worst-case-scenario before doing a high-kneed, stretched-palm sprint across the Millennium bridge. Guess events correctly and, well, you can already picture the Home Secretary on the phone to Adam explaining that he's been replaced. Not that you'd really contemplate anything so disloyal. By the end of a good series, you're such good friends with your "colleagues" that you've reconstructed all their life-stories: bonds with Adam (dutiful head-boy of a minor public school), Ros (once sacked from the counter of Superdrug for answering back), Zaf (made good use of his II.i in media studies) and even Juliet Shaw (wouldn't you like to know) are all considerably thicker than water.
And series 5, which concludes this evening, has certainly been one of the best. Despite the farewell to much-loved Ruth (recruited by Harry while shopping in Waterstones) and the annoying attempt to morph Adam's nanny's stolid disapproval into selfless love, the series has just got better and better. For where early episodes used sometimes to fall into the error of dawdling just long enough for the viewer to question the relevance of a glimpsed premise or sketched scenario, series 4 and 5 seem to have burnt through plot-lines - each more implausible than the last - at such a rate that questions simply don't arise.
So hats off to the staff at Kudos - the Spooks production company - and, in particular, to the film editor whom I am reliably informed is one Freddy Krueger esq.
