Spooky!

I haven't watched Spooks, the BBC's overwrought show about MI5, for ages. However, I noticed that this week's episode would pit the spycatchers against a hedge fund grandee bent on bringing down the UK financial system, so I thought I'd give it a go.

As the man who went to the James Blunt concert said, "that's an hour of my life I won't get back". I wish I could describe how the hedge fund was planning to do the dirty deed. For most of the show, it seemed to involve shorting the stock of a fictional bank. Right at the end, though, after the villain of the piece had been conned by one of the MI5 operatives, he was persuaded to "reverse his position". As far as I could tell this reversal again involved selling the stock, and he was duly wiped out for his trouble when the Government stepped up to support the bank. Maybe I missed something, though I swear I managed to stay awake for the whole thing.

If the financial strategy was incomprehensible, the details were laughable. The term "insider trading" was thrown about like confetti, but never once used properly. The climactic "reversing of position", which if I recall involved £16 billion, took less than five seconds. The Chancellor of the Exchequer (a woman, so don't you dare call her Darling) took all the big policy decisions on the fly, without any visible presence of advisors or Cabinet colleagues. The hedge fund villain turned out to be an unreconstructed Communist, not some testosterone-fuelled ex-costermonger as most hedge fund types are assumed to be. Most unbelievably of all, he was conned into changing his position when he was seduced by one of the regulars on the show, a woman who manages the amazing feat of making Sarah Jessica Parker look like Charlize Theron.

I've always been puzzled by why television has never been able to produce a worthwhile drama series about the financial world. (There was a preposterous and short-lived attempt in Canada in the 1990s, called "Traders"). One explanation, I suppose, is that programme-makers assume the business is not interesting unless there's criminality involved -- a view which may well suit the public mood at the moment. However, it would be nice if producers would at least ensure that they portray the financial world with at least a modicum of accuracy. I can't believe that credit default swaps are any harder to explain than the wildly obscure diseases that House treats every week.