There has beeen a short (4 part) series on UK TV called Secret State. It appears to have been rubbished by the critics but, watching it, I was reminded of the Costa Gavras film"Z".

I read a rather scathing essay on Gavras once which said:

"Costa-Gavras is the world’s premier agitprop film-maker. He casts well. He has a good sense of drama and timing. He has a decided talent for political melodrama, for the mood, for the visual creation of atmosphere. Like all toilers in the vineyards of political agitation he suffers from a marked decomposition of reality into pure good and pure evil, but he seems to take to this naturally, happily, at no great psychic cost. He is uncomfortable with all those wishy-washy shades of gray as a matter of temperament, and even ordinary, everyday black and white are usually not clear-cut enough for him. Onward he drives, in his quest for an ever more sable night, an ever more luminous day."

Well, that's probably true of Secret State but I am't agin that.

It is of course a fairy story. The plane of a Tony Blair look-alike Prime Minister is lost returning from the US where the PM has been negotiating with big-oil over a Gophal type accident in the UK. His deputy PM, an honest man, takes over and finds himself embroiled in a conspiracy invoving all the usual suspects: big-oil, the banks, the (now his) secret state (MI5, MI6), the armed forces, the Press and, of course, the US + senior members of his own political party jockeying for position.

All of these groups have an agenda of one sort or another and, for all their ends, it becomes convenient for Britain to involve itself in a tit-for-tat retaliation. They all conspire to suppress the truth (loss of the plane was most probably an accident) and show that the Iranians had plotted the Tony Blair character's death. Like"Z" the story involves the PM's gradual unravelling of the conspiracy.

There is a deeply unpleasant banker involved who is the Chairman of the Royal Caledonian Bank. This is so obviously a tilt at the Royal Bank of Scotland (currently, in large part, the property of the British Government) whose Chairman bankrupted it, took a £22 million golden handshake and left the mess for the British taxpayer to sort out to the tune of many, many billions.

Rather like"Z" the end is ambiguous - in a rousing speech from the Dispatch Box of the House of Commons, the PM calls for the dissolution of Parliament and leaves. The final shot is the delivery of the vote's result. Has he won or lost? We never find out.

As I say, panned by UK critics but, if anyone is interested in a bit of political agitprop, the 4 episodes are available from here for the next 28 days:


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dmk

Thanks.
I think i like the idea to share agit video links ... info ... whatever.