Spooks club 7

Spooks is one of the most exciting British TV shows or recent years. Last year's series of the spy drama was one of the year's highlights. So when the BBC announced a gritty hardedged spin-off Rouge Spooks was being developed for digital channel BBC3, my interest was piqued. Somewhere along the line they had a rethink, retitled it Spooks: Code 9, which is the form it finally hit screens in last week. The advert had me worried- it looked like it had been retooled to fit BBC3's 'yoof' demographic into a kind of 'Spooks meet Hollyoaks'. I decided to reserve judgment til I saw the finished result but now I have. How did it turn out? My God, it's horrible. Basically they've used a near future setting to give an excuse for why all the agent in MI5 are now all seeming under the age of 30 ( most of the previous agents were killed in a terrorist attack), which I suppose is a fairly interesting idea. However the show's a mess- the performances are universally awful (hollyoaks level in fact) the script's embarrassing. The attempts to make it young fresh and hip are painful. Thankfully there's only six episodes in the run, so hopefully we can just pretend it never happened, for everybody's sake.

For the sake of our international readers-who may not know what Hollyoaks is- just take comfort in the fact you're better off that way. Seriously, just trust me.