Code 9’s recruits look to the future of Spooks

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 08/08/2008

As BBC3 offers a spin- off with almost nothing in common with its namesake, Matt Warman asks if the channel is just cashing in.

Few of BBC1’s programming brands are bigger than spying drama Spooks. Since its launch in 2002, the glossy espionage show has developed both a mass audience and a cult following, and has become one of the corporation’s most resilient ratings winners. More than 6million viewers routinely tune in, so it should come as no surprise that on Sunday on BBC3 it becomes the latest in a long line of successful shows, from Doctor Who to Casualty, to get its own spin-off. This one’s called Spooks: Code 9.
    
The aim, says star Georgia Moffett, who has also been seen recently in Doctor Who, is “to introduce a younger, 16-24-year-old audience to a new show that has some of the qualities that have made Spooks so appealing, but also very much stands in its own right”. Code 9, however, has little in common with its namesake except that, as Moffett puts it, “it is about MI5 – we are playing spooks”.

Set in 2013, Code 9’s action centres on how Britain, and MI5 in particular, would cope in the aftermath of a nuclear strike on London. Amid a new age of ID cards and checkpoints, the series suggests that the secret services would be forced to recruit younger, university-aged agents in a desperate bid to infiltrate the ranks of ever-younger terrorists and anarchists. The new show’s executive producer, Karen Wilson, says that “because it’s set in the near future, Code 9 allows us to sort of suspend your disbelief slightly more than a normal Spooks episode”. The opening show focuses on an assassin who poses a serious threat to national security at a mere 14 years old. As Moffett says, “It’s definitely TV world.”

For both the BBC and the production company Kudos, however, there’s an obvious appeal in spin-off series. Wilson says that it was indeed the corporation that came to them with the idea for the show, and maintains that “they wanted to explore the series’s wide appeal with a younger audience on BBC3”. It’s that logic, too, that explains the existence of Torchwood, the successful Doctor Who spin-off starring John Barrowman, and was also in part behind the Holby City police spin-off HolbyBlue (although that was cancelled last week).

Viewers, initially at least, do tend to watch shows that have something in common with their existing favourites – both HolbyBlue and Torchwood made impressive debuts. Moffett adds that both Spooks and Code 9 are made by Kudos. When asked if she thinks the company is aware of the commercial advantages of linking two rather different series, she replies that “they’re not stupid”. Andrew Knott, star of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys and another MI5 agent in Code 9, says that the appeal “usually comes from people wanting to see their favourite characters in another way”.

In the case of Doctor Who, however, there is a long-established tradition that writers can tap into, and a heritage of merchandising that provides lucrative revenue for the BBC’s commercial subsidiary BBC Worldwide. Any profits that are made are then ploughed back into the BBC’s programme-making.

But cynical viewers might suggest that Code 9 is simply trying to tap into Spooks’s successful brand. Moffett says that one alternative title for the show was simply Liberty, which implies that the producers subsequently decided that, at least, associating the new show with Spooks would give it a helping hand. Other working titles were Rogue Spooks, and Spooks: Liberty.

Surprisingly, Wilson is sanguine at the suggestion that her employers are simply cashing in. “I don’t expect anyone to approach a spin-off series and say really positive things about it,” she says. “There is understandably negativity around it. Setting it in the future makes this feel vastly different, but it is a difficult balance.”

None of this, of course, necessarily impacts on the quality of the drama in Code 9. Indeed, it was created by David Wolstencroft, who also created the original Spooks. Wilson suggests that his involvement has given her team the creative force to solve the problem of “how we could convincingly bring the agents’ ages right down”.

Moffett, the 22-year-old daughter of former Doctor Who Peter Davison, who herself has a wealth of acting experience, says that “Code 9 has had more passion than any other job that I’ve done. We all put a lot of effort in during our own time, and I’ve not really known that before.” There’s no getting away from the fact, however, that, as Moffett says, “It’s slightly misleading in terms of the word Spooks.” If the name helps Code 9 to get just 20 per cent of a Spooks audience, though, BBC3 will have a major hit on its hands.

Spooks: Code 9 starts on BBC3 on Sunday at 9.00pm

Original article here.