This well-trodden format was a case of derring don’t
Britain’s “darkest hour” has had so much light shone upon it that it’s becoming a misnomer. We shall never surrender the right to tell and retell the story in dramas, documentaries and films. But still, Secret Agent Selection (BBC Two) is a curio. Essentially it was SOE: The Gameshow, the Second World War as knockout entertainment.
The model was all those outdoor endurance contests, but in period dress. A diverse cross-section of guinea pigs laid down their mobiles and tried retroactively to qualify for the Special Operations Executive. All the usual attributes were called for: physical prowess, mental agility, a good team ethic, plus the ability to convince in Forties fashions and haircuts, and answer to their surnames.
The SOE’S tough training programme has apparently “spent 60 years under lock and key” so all this was presented as jolly new. But televisually much of it felt like yesteryear’s powdered egg. Were it not for his trim blond moustache, property developer Dan Dewhirst – who is into kung fu and getting on everyone’s nerves – might have marched straight off the set of The Apprentice (what the show didn’t tell us is that Dewhirst also works as an actor and model).
There were plenty of women, much as in the real SOE – which, we were told, would recruit anyone as long as they were good enough. Research scientist Lizzie Jeffreys, though only five feet tall, sprang over a wall twice her height in the assault course and breezily confirmed she would kill under orders. Unfortunately another female contestant gave the barbed wire obstacle a wide berth for fear of catching her hair. By the end of the first episode, the eliminees consisted of three women and a migraine-prone drag performer who admitted he’d struggle to make the Brownies.
Interleaved between the challenges, fascinating historical segments (voiced by Douglas Henshall) told of SOE operatives who had passed the test and proved their mettle. This provided sober glimpses of what might have been if the programme hadn’t gone down the interactive route.
Inviting the likes of bankers and coppers, translators and drama teachers to measure themselves against the past, Secret Agent Selection is a very contemporary contribution to our nostalgia for vanished certainties. They could have completed the picture by filming the whole thing in black and white. Overall, it was stilted, but quite spiffing.
The great British scriptwriter Jimmy Mcgovern once put it to me that we would all have been much less hooked on The Killing if it weren’t subtitled. I thought that harsh, but for two series Marcella (ITV) has robustly tested Mcgovern’s theory. The creation of Hans Rosenfeldt, who brought us The Bridge, it has imported the Nordic noir template into English: vastly afflicted female detective wrestles with her demons while hunting down a serial killer fired by a higher purpose.
In the penultimate episode it was revealed that the serial killer was none other than the new artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe. Nobody saw Jane Colletti (Michelle Terry) as the guilty party coming, and yet there’s a reliable rule for culprit-spotting in crime drama: if a high-status cast member hasn’t had much to do, they done it.
By that score, Terry was staring us all in the face. After the vicious catfight with Marcella (Anna Friel), she had her big moment in the interview room when Colletti subtly transmuted from a caring mother into a crazy preemptive vigilante purging society of future paedophiles. Asked about the location of one of her victims, she said, “The Thames” and even sniggered.
Having just rescued her own son from Colletti’s clutches, Marcella shouldn’t really have been conducting this interview. But in Nordic noir they eat conflicts of interest for breakfast. It’s bonkers, but let’s face it, Marcella has rejoiced in its own full-pelt absurdity. And Friel has the big eyes to do bonkers. In this final episode her peepers were set in full saucer mode when, after disinterring her past under hypnosis, she went about making Sara Lund and Saga Norén look like a pair of vicars’ wives.
Assaulting and handcuffing a colleague who had just saved her from suicide, maiming her face, abandoning her children – you name it, Marcella was at it. You might think she’d done enough to earn some forced gardening leave, if not prison, but the final minutes seemed to promise an undercover identity and a new police role in a third series. Perhaps it would be more plausible with subtitles.
Secret Agent Selection Marcella