Add Secret Service to your watchlist

Despite its instantly forgettable title, there’s a lot to enjoy about the ITV thriller Secret Service: pots of political intrigue as it becomes clear a Russian asset has penetrated the highest corridors of British power; Night Manager-inspired scenes of dastardly oligarchs sunning themselves in Mediterranean climes; the always excellent Gemma Arterton perfectly cast as the frazzled mum whose shooter and choice of passports in her wardrobe quickly establish her other life as a spy-running officer for MI6; and, most delightfully, as the seen-it-all chief of service, Roger Allam being Roger Allam.

So I’m prepared to forgive the title, the soup of many familiar TV parts, even the fact that it’s co-adapted by Tom Bradby – yes, the Tom Bradby – from his novel of the same name (honestly, how does anybody new in TV ever get a job?) So that isn’t even my beef, but, yes, I do have one.

Because not content with writing the book and turning it into primetime drama, Brady regularly turns up on screen as our resident ITV newsreader, waving his hands and bringing us urgent headlines, ie doing all the things we already know him best for in real life.

And he’s not alone. Susanna Reid and Ed Balls appear in their usual breakfast TV chairs, this time to hold a fictional foreign secretary’s feet to the fire over immigration. “How to marry that with inflation?” asks Susanna. Next thing you know it’s Robert Peston on the phone announcing himself as “Robert Peston”, while Romilly Weeks clearly got the short straw, merely fronting a press huddle while the same foreign secretary puts a spade in the earth. By the end of five episodes, we have seen more journalist cameos than Comic Relief.

Of course, this is nothing new. Every stalwart TV news anchor from Walter Cronkite to Bob Friend has appeared in similar form, and back in the 1990s, it was possible to construct an entire parlour game around “Richard Whitmore bingo” – being the first to shout when the newsreader turned up in his customary suit and tie, to punctuate a BBC drama with some sombre headlines.

The difference is that by then Whitmore was retired, the broadcaster’s thinking that to have present-day newsreaders taking part could be confusing. Cut to 2018, and Jed Mercurio’s hit BBC drama Bodyguard saw fictional news events being explained by then real-life political editor Laura Kuenssberg, and Keeley Hawes’s home secretary grilled by “Andrew Marr”, played with Peston-like accuracy by Andrew Marr.

By the end of five episodes, we have seen more journalist cameos than Comic Relief

Why do it? If the thinking is it helps create a believable media world, I can only say the reverse is true. We immediately step out of the narrative to say, “Why is Robert Peston doing a parody of himself?” Possibly these journalists believe it cements their status as go-to authorities in a chaotic world or, more honestly, as Marr admitted at the time, they’re just starstruck by the prospect of a primetime drama with its big catering truck.

The former editor of Today Sarah Sands claimed she had no problem with the BBC’s news stars making fictional forays. That’s the same Sarah Sands who described her tenure on the flagship Radio 4 show as a time “when plain facts were never so urgently needed”, something all TV news bosses have been repeating, pretty much every day, ever since.

That means, surely, leaving one group of people whose job is solely that of presenting us with unvarnished truths, those urgently needed plain facts, that have come from real life, not from a dramatist’s pen. Haven’t they all got important jobs to go to? There’s plenty enough drama in the real world, more’s the pity.