Spooks: sspookily untrue

I wonder just how much damage it does to the average bear watching something like Spooks. I accept it's done well: pretty actors, fancy editing, fast plots and so on. But it's just not true. I mean, a TV show about terrorism that presents the primary threat to Britain not as Islamofascist terrorists but as the enemy within: rich powerful white men who are just itching to run their own fascist dictatorship is just silly. It's wrong. And, being wrong, it misleads. Because people watch this paranoid, chippy class hatred and think it's seeing things under the hood they don't know about. The best of western art is like Holbein's clump of grass: it looks out at the world and shows it how it is. But we forget how to do that and we forget how to look from the world to a piece of art and criticise it as unreal. Iris Murdoch said that it is one of the most damning criticisms one can make of an artwork to say that it is not true. Spooks isn't true. And all the production values in the world don't stop it from being bad.