Courtesy of BBC

"Suspicion. It's a virus. We are the carriers. We're like rats scuttling through medieval sewers," says Quitman (Matthew Marsh) in Christopher Morahan's In The Secret State (BBC, tx. 10/3/1985). The opening sequence contains a startling shot of a rat bursting out of a bin liner - a key image in a film about degeneration and its beneficiaries.

Veteran director Morahan had triumphed the previous year as producer and joint director of The Jewel In The Crown (ITV, 1984). Actor-turned-writer Brian Phelan adapted the screenplay from Robert McCrum's 1980 novel. McCrum's concerns about the security services, pertinent then, had become yet more relevant by the time of the film's transmission in March 1985.

The drama aired in the same week that Channel Four finally broadcast the documentary MI5's Official Secrets (tx. 8/3/1985), which alleged that MI5 had spied on legal organisations such as CND and had passed the intelligence on to the Conservative government to be used for party-political ends. The IBA had banned the programme, fearing prosecution under the Official Secrets Act. Against the background of the miner's strike, a sustained IRA bombing campaign, and the superpower stand-off in Europe, political sensitivities were acute. Small wonder that the location of the fictional Directorate's database was nervously changed from Cheltenham (as it was in McCrum's novel) to Southampton.

The film tours a jittery Establishment. Whitehall, Westminster, public school, the army, the press: all the key institutions are laid out before us, a flow-chart of self-sustaining privilege. Outside, however, society is crumbling away. Rubbish is left uncollected in the streets; picketers huddle at the entrances to industrial estates; power cuts occur daily. Villains Hatherly and Preger - the twin faces of conservatism - represent two equally dismal reactions to national decline. Little-Englander Hatherly wants to reverse the disintegration, but only so as to impose his narrow idea of national identity. Amoral profiteer Preger, meanwhile, is solely interested in scavenging what he can from the detritus.

Scrupulously even-handed, the film gives us a plotter from the left as well. In another departure from the book, it is strongly hinted that the departmental controller Dangerfield is a communist agent - the irony being that his blue blood makes him unassailable in the very system he is seeking to destroy. Britain gets the traitors it deserves. As Hoskins bitterly remarks when asked if Lister could have been a Soviet spy: "he went to the wrong school for that game."

Keith Shuaib

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