‘Seeing a conspiracy around every corner’: Paranoia as procedural in Tony Marchant’s The Whistleblowers (2007)

Introduction

The 2000s saw the emergence of a ‘new generation of political thrillers’ on British television, ‘characterised by themes of espionage, conspiracy theories and dirty dealing in high places’ (Wood, 2008). This revived an earlier tradition of conspiracy-themed dramas such as Bird of Prey (1982), Edge of Darkness (1985) and A Very British Coup (1988) which expressed anxieties arising from the political and social transformations of Britain in the 1980s. The new, postmillennial generation of thrillers was spearheaded by State of Play (2003) and The State Within (2006) and has continued largely without interruption to the present with recent titles including David Hare’s Collateral (2018) and Jed Mercurio’s Bodyguard (2018). Such dramas, past and present, typically take the form of closed serials, running anywhere from three to six episodes. This expanded canvas is used to present what Mark Fenster terms the ‘classical conspiracy narrative’, which attempts ‘to unify the seemingly disparate, globally significant elements and events on which conspiracy theory focuses within a singular plot’ (Fenster, 2008: 122). The long-standing appeal of the conspiracy narrative perhaps lies in how it ‘represents a utopian desire to reflect upon and confront the contradictions and conflicts of the contemporary democratic state and capitalism’ (Fenster, 2008: 128). Yet at the turn of the millennium, Peter Knight argued that the operation of conspiracy theory had been significantly transformed in the postmodern cultural landscape. Knight described how ‘a certain kind of world-weary paranoia has become the norm, in both entertainment culture and popular politics…Conspiracy theories are now less a sign of mental delusion than an ironic stance towards knowledge and the possibility of truth’ (Knight, 2000: 2).

One unusual entry in the ‘new generation’ was The Whistleblowers (2007). This too sought to ‘reflect upon and confront the contradictions and conflicts of the contemporary democratic state and capitalism’, whilst also being strongly engaged with this postmodern shift as I will explore. Yet it was notable for adopting a very different narrative model, reworking the topical conspiracy thriller into an episodic procedural series. Rather than using its six-episode run to build an overarching conspiracy narrative, The Whistleblowers instead offers a self-contained short-form conspiracy story in each instalment, with little beyond its central investigating protagonists, Alisha Cole (Indira Varma) and Ben Graham (Richard Coyle), to give continuity to the array of different situations. Conventionally, the conspiracy narrative posits a crisis too big, with institutions too corrupted or compromised, for the kind of regular, reliable closure that characterises the procedural. Indeed, in conspiracy dramas about protagonists from a ‘generic’ world such as police or intelligence, the conspiracy narrative is essentially a crisis of such procedure; an extreme situation exposes generic procedure as inadequate, forcing a protagonist to reassert the value of individual moral judgement (Oldham, 2017: 102–130). This article will explore, however, how The Whistleblowers reworks the genre to reclaim the assertion of individual moral judgement as a reliable component of procedure.

ITV had reportedly hoped for The Whistleblowers to be ‘a returning series on the channel for years to come’ (Manchester Evening News, 2007), potentially as ‘a rival to BBC 1’s glossy hits Hustle and Spooks’ (O’Donovan, 2007), although this did not transpire. If the series was a failed venture, this might be attributed to an uneven tone. Although the format was loosely inspired by the real-life whistleblowing charity Public Concern at Work (PCAW), giving it an unusual verisimilitude, this is held in awkward tension with more heightened conspiratorial conventions. Nonetheless, the series offers a fascinating glimpse into British conspiracy culture of the 2000s, expressing a sense of conspiracy as both ubiquitous and endemic to public life, but also stabilised and contained by the procedural model.

‘A rival to BBC 1’s glossy hits’: Devising the format

The Whistleblowers was commissioned for ITV at a time when the United Kingdom’s original commercial broadcaster was struggling against the intensifying competition of the multichannel landscape. For the first four-and-a-half decades of its existence, ITV had maintained a consistent ratings lead over all domestic competitors, but by the 2000s the range of rival commercial channels had mushroomed and Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky One had proved more assertive at converging on the youth and upmarket demographics favoured by advertisers. ITV was left with an increasingly ageing audience and, as Liz Thomas wrote in Broadcast (2007), ‘a reputation for dreary or out-of-date drama’ such as Kingdom (2007–2009) or Doc Martin (2004–) (Thomas, 2007; see also Johnson and Turnock, 2005).

ITV’s oldest rival, the BBC, had also come to adopt more competitive strategies from the turn of the millennium, focusing on dynamic and pacy programming targeted towards a younger and broader audience. By the end of 2001, its leading channel, BBC 1, had moved ahead of ITV 1 in the ratings for the first time in their shared history (Born, 2005: 471–473). The BBC had two notable hits with the glossy thriller series Spooks (2002–2011) and Hustle (2004–2012). The former, which centred on a team of counterterror operatives in the British Security Service (MI5), likely provided further impetus for the BBC to commission conspiracy dramas like State of Play, as well as The Grid (2004), a short-lived transatlantic spy drama co-produced with the American US network TNT. From the middle of the decade, the successful revival of Doctor Who (2005–) came to complement Spooks and Hustle as another long-running BBC flagship series.

One figure who played a key role in the BBC’s drama renaissance was its Head of Drama Commissioning, Gareth Neame. After overseeing the development of series such as Spooks, Neame departed his BBC position to become managing director of Carnival Films, the independent company primarily responsible for the British side of The Grid’s production. Carnival had been founded in 1978 (originally as Picture Partnership Productions) and many of its best-known productions had been in the terrain of ITV period-set drama, most notably Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1989–2004) and Jeeves and Wooster (1990–1993), although it had previously experienced success in the contemporary thriller with the family spy-fi series Bugs (1995–1999) (Oldham, 2018). In his new role, Neame spoke of making Carnival into a ‘big player’ alongside Kudos Film & Television, the ‘super-indie’ responsible for Spooks and Hustle (Holmwood, 2006), whilst also noting ITV’s desire to ‘catch up’ with the BBC in commissioning ‘sophisticated modernising dramas’ (Keighron, 2006). An early example of the latter was Primeval (ITV, 2007–2011), a family science fiction series designed to compete with Doctor Who. In this context, Spooks was another obvious target for a rival.

Seeking an original twist on the state-of-the-nation procedural, Neame was inspired on discovering PCAW. PCAW (renamed ‘Protect’ in 2018) is an independent charity which provides specialist legal and practical advice to workers with concerns about serious malpractice in the public, private and voluntary sectors. Chidi King, a barrister who worked as a senior legal officer at PCAW, describes the background to its creation:

A series of catastrophic yet preventable scandals and disasters in the 1980s alerted the public (and ultimately the legislature) to the importance of whistleblowers. Time and again the inquests into these events revealed that, although workers were aware of the malpractice, no one had dared to blow the whistle. Alternatively, where someone had found the courage to speak up, the concerns had fallen on deaf ears. (King, 2001: 142)

Anna Myers, who later served as PCAW’s Deputy Director, described a ‘quiet revolution’ whereby ‘the term “whistleblower” has evolved from a pejorative epithet meaning “snitch” or “traitor” to one conjuring up the image of a responsible (and brave) employee’ (Myers, 2004: 101). In 2002, Time magazine named ‘the whistleblowers’ as its ‘Person of the Year’, represented by Sherron Watkins, for uncovering accounting irregularities in the financial reports of Enron, Cynthia Cooper, for exposing a US$3.8 billion fraud at WorldCom, and Coleen Rowley, for testifying on the mishandling of information regarding the 9/11 attacks by the FBI.

Believing that PCAW’s remit might provide a series format, Neame approached leading television writer Tony Marchant to work on the project. Marchant had first emerged in the 1990s as part of a generation of writers that also included Jimmy McGovern, Russell T Davies and State of Play writer Paul Abbott. The Times described how his work, which had previously addressed themes such as credit unions in Never, Never (2002) and the fertility industry in The Family Man (2006), ‘tends to be marinated in social issues, questions about morality and what it is to be human’ (Lockyer, 2007: 35). Marchant has been dubbed ‘the conscience of British TV drama’ (Bell, 2007) and as an inheritor of the ‘social issue’ tradition of writers such as Jim Allen and Trevor Griffiths in the 1960s and 1970s (Cooke, 2015: 228; Davies, 2002: 68). Of his prior work, perhaps the closest in theme were Swallow (2001), in which an ordinary woman’s addiction to anti-depressants leads her to become a reluctant anti-pharmaceutical campaigner, and The Mark of Cain (2007), which concerns the abuse and torture of suspected terrorists in Iraq at the hands of British soldiers.

In an article promoting The Whistleblowers, Marchant remarked that ‘the biggest story in the world at the moment – the war in Iraq – is a classic case of the truth emerging out of a well-orchestrated campaign of falsity’ (Marchant, 2007: 38–39). This story, which had unfolded over the preceding years, came with its own whistleblower in the form of Ministry of Defence scientist and former United Nations weapons inspector David Kelly. In 2003, Kelly had been the unattributed source for a BBC news report that the UK government had manipulated and ‘sexed up’ intelligence to make the case for the Iraq War. In the ensuing controversy, however, his name was leaked to the press by the MoD, and Kelly was found dead shortly afterwards, apparently from suicide as a result of the intense pressure. This offered a bleak example of inadequate protections for whistleblowers in the context of a high-profile and politically charged conflict.

The allegedly suspicious circumstances of his passing attracted much commentary, meanwhile, from a letter-writing campaign by doctors casting doubt on the suicide verdict (Halpin et al., 2004; Rouse et al., 2004) to a personal investigation by Norman Baker MP (Baker, 2007; Wheeler, 2006). Journalist Miles Goslett describes how:

since 2003, contradictions and peculiarities connected to Dr Kelly’s death have emerged at every other turn, pointing to the idea that for some reason this hugely significant – and tragic – event was never investigated exhaustively, and certain details about it were simply withheld from the public. (Goslett, 2018: xvii–xviii).

Marchant and Neame liaised with PCAW, meeting Executive Director Guy Dehn who:

Talked us through various scenarios – from major whistleblowers like Sherron Watkins at Enron to an assistant in a local pharmacist whose boss was fiddling the NHS. It was exactly the same premise – having the courage to come out and expose the truth regardless of the consequences. But what a difference in scale! (Marchant, 2007: 36)

Furthermore, Marchant stated his desire to champion whistleblowing ‘as a legitimate form of protest’ (quoted in Bell, 2007). This is a more politically loaded conception of whistleblowing than that understood by PCAW, whose work is aimed more towards forging a shared sense of purpose between employers and employees through amicable internal disclosures, with public disclosure as a last resort. Again, this seems to refer more to the heightened, dramatic world of ‘famous’ whistleblowers. It echoes, for example, the leak of the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of US military involvement in Indochina, to the New York Times in 1971, explicitly positioned by its perpetrator Daniel Ellsberg within the context of his anti-Vietnam War activism. Marchant’s approach also echoes how many British conspiracy thrillers of the 1980s were written by progressive writers working to express ‘radical’ political perspectives (Cooke, 2007: 167–168). Certainly, Marchant’s opening episode for The Whistleblowers would demonstrate an immediate interest in the great political issues of 2007.

‘Our protagonists have to abseil into buildings and not merely work in one!’: Establishing the premise

At the outset of Marchant’s opening episode, ‘Ghost’, Alisha and Ben work as personal injury lawyers, corresponding to the tendency for conspiracy narrative protagonists to be ‘professionals in some kind of knowledge industry’ (Fenster, 2008: 125). One evening they return to their North London home to discover, by chance, that terror suspect Mohammed Agiza (Dhafer L’Abidine) is being illegally held captive in a house on the opposite side of the street and subjected to torture by a rogue counterterrorism unit. When they report this to the authorities, Agiza is simply ‘disappeared’ and police officers place them under a campaign of surveillance and harassment. The lawyers are thus brought to what Fenster terms the ‘narrative pivot’ of the conspiracy narrative, where a protagonist’s perception of the world is fundamentally transformed by the recognition of a new ‘truth’ to the social order (Fenster, 2008: 124–125). When Ben is framed for fraud and suspended, and Alisha resigns in solidarity, the duo mount their own investigation. Eventually, they trace Agiza to a house in the countryside where he is being subjected to waterboarding, and transmit footage of this to a press conference organised by human rights lawyer Daniel Black (Allan Corduner). The exposure of this torture programme is enough to force the resignation of the (unseen) Home Secretary.

‘Ghost’ revisits the topic of torturing terror suspects that Marchant had previously explored in The Mark of Cain, albeit shifting the scenario from the Iraqi warzone to British suburbia. ‘Ghost’ also dispenses with the moral ambiguity of the earlier film. Cain had followed the perspective of the soldiers responsible, contextualising their actions within their dehumanising experiences of war, and offering complex prospects for identification, encouraging the viewer to ‘find the point where the soldiers’ actions become reprehensible’ (Lacey, 2015: 44). By contrast, ‘Ghost’ depicts an institutionalised regime of torture by a sinister security state, unequivocally opposed by the protagonists. This scenario was extrapolated from the controversial anti-terror legislation passed by the New Labour government over the years since 9/11, which granted extra powers to intelligence services and increased the time for which terrorist suspects could be detained without charge. This progressive erosion of civil liberties ‘fostered growing levels of distrust and suspicion between the citizenry and the state’ (Kettell, 2011: 3), but at the 2005 General Election such policies had barely been contested by the opposing Conservative Party, a political consensus that supressed opportunities for subjecting such measures to democratic scrutiny.

Of the six episodes produced, ‘Ghost’ is the most directly engaged with the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’ and is therefore the one most overtly situated in the same thematic world as Spooks. Certainly, the visual style has strong similarities, characterised by restless, held-held camera movements and rapid cutting. Describing the deployment of a similar aesthetic in The State Within the previous year, the Radio Times approvingly dubbed this ‘turbo-charged television’, suggesting that ‘readers might be forgiven for thinking they’ve pressed “fast forward” by mistake’ (Dickson, 2006: 29). Yet beneath this sense of vibrancy and excitement we might detect an accentuated version of the aesthetic John Caughie observes in Edge of Darkness, which creates anxiety and uncertainty through ‘constantly confronting us with distraction and an excess of information’ (Caughie, 2007: 99). Furthermore, The Whistleblowers is particularly invested in a surveillant aesthetic, with shots that continually peer at characters through doors and windows and over the shoulders of other watching figures.

The difference between The Whistleblowers and Spooks is more evident at a narrative level; indeed, ‘Ghost’ sees Alisha and Ben taking a stand against counterterror forces. DI Bell (Douglas Hodge), the officer who leads the operation, talks the language of threats to ‘national security’ and the erosion of civil liberties being ‘a small price to pay’, as often articulated by characters in Spooks. However, Bell is shown as cynical and opportunistic, notably when he attempts to detain Ben under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which he openly regards as a handy tool for side-lining anyone considered a nuisance. Spooks did, in fact, explore such anxieties on occasion, with storylines in which its regular characters suffer ethical crises regarding their work and others in which they oppose sinister, conspiratorial forces elsewhere in the state apparatus. Indeed, Barbara Korte argues that the series serves as ‘almost a morality play for post-millennial Britain’ (Korte, 2018: 419). Such crises, though, are aberrations, the series continually returning to its fundamental tenet that the country is ‘protected by people with a sense of responsibility’ who ‘even act as moral guardians of the institution they serve’ (Korte, 2018: 427). Alisha and Ben instead adopt a more sceptical position towards official conceptions of the national interest and the idea that it is necessary (or even possible) to serve as a ‘moral guardian’ on the ‘inside’, a trajectory more typical of the classical conspiracy narrative.

But whilst a traditional conspiracy serial such as Edge of Darkness or State of Play might have extended Alisha and Ben’s investigation into the torture programme over many more episodes, here it is swiftly resolved by the end of the instalment, a single episodic ‘case’ paving the way for others. In the final scene, as the lawyers take questions from reporters, Ben declares, ‘There must be thousands like us. People who know that something’s not right in their office or their firms, and they don’t know what they should do about it, how to get the truth to come out’. He closes the episode by advising that anybody in this position should get in touch. This is perhaps another ‘narrative pivot’, albeit not of the conventional model that initiates an ongoing struggle ‘to restore a properly liberal democratic order’ from a singular conspiratorial plot (Fenster, 2008: 127), but instead the embrace of a mission to maintain a broadly functional liberal democratic order where conspiracy is commonplace but ultimately aberrant and containable. By the beginning of the second episode, ‘Pandemic’, Ben and Alisha have established Graham & Cole, an independent organisation for helping whistleblowers speak out against wrongdoing in state and corporate institutions. This premise provided an unusual means for bridging the gap between Spooks and conventional British conspiracy dramas, enabling a regular procession of episodic short conspiracy narratives centring on ‘guest’ whistleblowers.

Yet although Graham & Cole was partially inspired by PCAW, the television thriller form demanded protagonists who played a more proactive role than the advisory function of PCAW. As Marchant remarked:

It wouldn’t be good enough for our ‘organisation’ to be office bound. Our protagonists needed to investigate and be proactive in busting cases…In Gareth [Neame]’s words ‘Our protagonists have to abseil into buildings and not merely work in one!’. (Marchant, 2007: 36)

Indeed, a certain postmodern quality is evident in The Whistleblowers’ frequent references to conspiracy ‘lore’ from times past, where conspiracies known, alleged and entirely fictional are given equal weight. Thus, for example, at one point in ‘Ghost’ Ben meets Black in a shadowy underground car park, a clear homage to the meetings between Woodward (Robert Redford) and ‘Deep Throat’ in All the President’s Men (1976), the iconic film dramatisation of the Watergate investigation. Not only is this scene shot to resemble the original, with evocative use of chiaroscuro and backlighting, but Ben is unable to resist grinning and quipping, ‘I’m a big fan of All the President’s Men. I’m Robert Redford, obviously’. Thus, in referring to the Watergate scandal, the fictionalised version has supplanted the reality, with Ben more inclined to liken himself to the actor Redford over the historical Woodward whom Redford portrayed.

The allusive aspect is most apparent in the series’ third regular character, Kenny Reed (Daniel Ryan), a surveillance expert who assists Alisha and Ben. Marchant designed this character as an amalgamation of the surveillance experts portrayed by Gene Hackman in The Conversation (1974) and Enemy of the State (1998) (interviewed in The Whistleblowers: Behind the Scenes), thereby building upon an existing network of allusions as the latter Hackman character was already an intentional homage to the former (Pratt, 2001: 243). As with these earlier characters, Kenny’s surveillance equipment is not the slick, sophisticated technology used by MI5 in Spooks but instead home-made gadgetry made according to a DIY ethos, an aesthetic more appropriate to independent protagonists outside of the secret state.

The postmodern allusive turn is a new development for the conspiracy genre on British television, largely absent in 1980s dramas like Edge of Darkness. It exemplifies Knight’s argument that ‘a self-conscious and self-reflexive entertainment culture of conspiracy has become thoroughly mainstream’, with ‘serious’ and ‘entertainment’ versions of conspiracy ‘caught up in a spiralling mutual feedback loop’ (Knight, 2002: 6). In 1985, Fredric Jameson complained that nostalgic pastiche had colonised ‘even those movies today which have contemporary settings: as though, for some reason, we were unable today to focus our own present, as though we have become incapable of achieving aesthetic representations of our own current experience’ (Jameson, 1985: 117). The same could be said of The Whistleblowers which continually filters its engagement with the ‘current experience’ of contemporary Britain and topical issues such as the ‘war on terror’ through playful nods to other contexts, most notably 1970s America.

Suspicion as a ‘routine operating procedure’: Episodic conspiracy scenarios

‘You don’t think you’re taking it a bit far, seeing a conspiracy around every corner?’ asks Alisha’s father Joseph Cole (Paul Freeman) when he visits the couple in the fourth episode ‘Fit for Purpose’. This concisely sums up the narrative model of The Whistleblowers where conspiracies do indeed lurk around every corner, providing a discrete scheme to expose in every instalment. This contrasts with the classical conspiracy narrative’s drive to unify seemingly disparate elements into an overarching plot. Even The X-Files (1992–2003), which blended conspiracy and procedural conventions, subordinated its episodic sense of closure to its overarching ‘myth-arc’ metanarrative. The Whistleblowers, however, depicts a world of perpetual minor-scale plots with no organising vision beyond a tendency towards corruption on the part of authorities. Ben responds to Joseph by declaring, ‘I’m not going to just swallow everything I’m told by the Establishment’. Yet what the series conspicuously lacks, in conspiracy narrative terms, is an overarching vision of this ‘Establishment’.

‘Fit for Purpose’ is, in fact, the only other episode aside from ‘Ghost’ to centre directly on corruption within a state institution. Set primarily around the immigration service of an airport terminal, this was one of three episodes written by guest writers, in this case Tony Saint, who had himself served as an immigration officer for 10 years before breaking into writing. As Marchant commented, ‘it helps if you know the world that you’re writing about’ (quoted in Lockyer, 2007: 35) and Saint had already published a satirical thriller novel, Refusal Shoes (2003), about these experiences. Much of the corruption in in this episode is comparatively low-key, as staff members permit visitors without the correct visas to enter the country in exchange for bribes and even sexual favours, whilst the cynical, disillusioned Section Chief Alan Marshall (Philip Jackson) continually turns a blind eye. This is a culture of, as one immigration officer puts it, ‘See no evil, hear no evil, pick up your paycheck’.

Yet during the episode Alisha and Ben discover that the terminal’s immigration service is being systemically exploited for a people trafficking operation run by Turkish gangsters, with gang warfare spilling onto the streets of London and endangering innocent people. Focusing on dangerous consequences of immigration from the Middle East, this storyline at first appears to rest on a xenophobic paranoia at odds with the more liberal anxieties of ‘Ghost’. However, like many episodes of Spooks dealing with such themes, the episode builds in a liberal alibi. Ultimately the conspiracy goes all the way up to Charles Radford (Richard McCabe), Vice CEO of the UK Immigration Agency, who is deliberately inflaming gang violence so as to discredit the government’s support for Turkey joining European Union.

Most episodes, meanwhile, focus on the world of corporate conspiracy, albeit often with corrupt politicians implicated. The second episode, ‘Pandemic’, sees Marchant return to the central theme of Swallow: corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. Here, the company Grundy Lear is accidentally responsible for releasing the deadly Corona X virus into the United Kingdom. Firstly, they conceal their involvement, needlessly placing lives at risk and causing several deaths, before plotting to profit from the crisis, exaggerating the threat of a pandemic and pressuring the government into signing a mass vaccination deal worth £500 million of taxpayers’ money. In the fifth episode, ‘Starters’ by guest writer Paul Logue, Griffin Distillers deliberately markets alcohol to underage drinkers, even cynically exploiting a rehabilitation centre for underage alcoholics as a secret source of marketing research material. And in Marchant’s series finale, ‘Environment’, Bruck Waste Disposal has been releasing toxic waste into the atmosphere as part of a waste incineration process, causing locals to develop liver cancer.

A detailed analysis of the third episode, ‘No Child Left Behind’, illustrates how tightly wedded to the headlines such storylines could be. This instalment focuses on the contentious issue of privatisation in education and was written by Steve Thompson, drawing from his own experience as a former teacher. Here Alisha and Ben investigate William Allen School, a state comprehensive where all discipline has broken down, culminating in the suicide of clinically depressed teenager Jamie Hillcott (Lathaniel Dyer). However, they soon come to realise that they are being manipulated as part of a smear campaign against the school by the Durrell Foundation, a body which manages several local City Academies. Alisha and Ben instead shift their investigation onto the nearby St Justin’s School, one of Durrell’s Academies, from which Jamie had previously been expelled. Although superficially in a better condition than William Allen, St Justin’s transpires to be under a far more sinister form of mismanagement.

City Academies had been established by New Labour in the Leaning and Skills Act 2000. The initial Academies were conversions of failing comprehensive schools in deprived areas, removed from local authority control and opened to support from government-approved sponsors. Intended as a means of harnessing private sector initiative, Academies ultimately proved highly controversial for many reasons, almost all of which are incorporated into the depiction of St Justin’s. Here the Durrell Foundation enforces a curriculum with creationism taught as science, alluding to criticisms of such practice at two Academies sponsored by the evangelical multimillionaire Sir Peter Vardy’s Emmanuel Foundation (Harris, 2005; Hinsliff, 2005). When Alisha visits St Justin’s, Principal Helen Millard (Amelia Bullmore) watches her over CCTV, echoing how Emmanuel’s King’s Academy took the controversial step of installing cameras in classrooms. Later, Ben infiltrates the school as a physics teacher, the ease of which is enabled by lax security procedures. ‘Teach first, checks later’, remarks Robert Deedes (Nicholas Palliser), the Durrell Foundation’s on-site representative who runs the school’s ‘business side’. This alludes to concerns that, as Academy teachers were not required to register with the General Teaching Council, children would be less protected (Parkinson, 2005).

Alisha and Ben ultimately discover that children with difficulties like Jamie have been profiled and expelled in a deliberate campaign to cut expenses and keep St Justin’s in the top 20% of the league tables, reflecting accusations that Academies had been ‘cherry-picking’ students, keeping out those with poor test results or learning difficulties. When Ben complains to Millard, she replies briskly, ‘We’re in a marketplace. If our results start to fall then parents will walk away in droves…Like it or not, education is a business now’. This articulates widespread suspicion that Academies constituted a backdoor privatisation of education (Bedell, 2008). When Alisha and Ben expose the scale of the corruption, including that Durrell has pocketed of £18 million of state subsidy, Durrell’s allies in the government are embarrassed into dropping their support. Yet as Ben warns, ‘Politicians are pretty robust. They won’t abandon their scheme quite so easily’. As an instance of the ‘affective residue of suspicious unease and fear’ that the classical conspiracy narrative’s resolution ‘cannot fully dissipate’ (Fenster, 2008: 142), this was not without justification. By 2007, both major UK parties had committed themselves to further expanding the Academy scheme, making this another contentious issue with parliamentary scrutiny essentially suppressed by consensus.

In positing a ‘conspiracy around every corner’, this procedural format offers a worldview that might be considered even more paranoid than the classical conspiracy narrative. That conspiracy seems to infest every corner of public life, from immigration to education, from alcohol consumption to waste disposal, is far from reassuring. Yet what is missing is an overarching sense of an organising vision. Caughie describes how the conspiracy narrative of Edge of Darkness ‘does not confine the villainy to actions, but locates it ultimately in a vision.’ There the vision ‘is inextricably identified with the United States and particularly tied to Reagan’s Star Wars project’ a 1980s successor to the role played by Freemasonry, Catholicism or socialism in earlier conspiratorial narratives (Caughie, 2007: 84). The Whistleblowers, by contrast, keeps its villainy at the level of ‘actions’, or at least small-scale, comparatively banal visions.

This is, perhaps, at least in part a consequence of The Whistleblowers emerging at a time of relative political stability by comparison to its 1980s predecessors. The ‘crisis of procedure’, dramatised in serials like Bird of Prey and Edge of Darkness, expressed anxieties emerging from a transformative political moment which saw the political left pushed into retreat and British politics remoulded according to the radical free market agenda of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives. Although a long run of Conservative governments had given way to New Labour in 1997, this was an incarnation of Labour which had also come to embrace free market solutions; hence the consensus on topics like City Academies. As a result, fear of corporate conspiracy linked with political corruption remained a prevalent anxiety, but one that is arguably on some level more routine, banal and expected. Peter Knight describes how, in the 21st century, in response to the overload of information in a rapidly changing and globalised world, ‘a hermeneutic of suspicion has become a routine operating procedure’ (Knight, 2002: 8). With its procedural format, The Whistleblowers renders this sense of a ‘routine operating procedure’ quite literally, making conspiracy perhaps just a little safer and less threatening.

‘Could you? Or, more truthfully, would you?’: The weekly whistleblowers

‘At the heart of each episode is the whistleblower themselves’, remarked Marchant (Marchant, 2007: 37). Indeed, The Whistleblowers gains much of its dramatic impact through a succession of guest characters from various professional backgrounds (but rarely from a ‘knowledge industry’), each wrestling with fundamental dilemmas of personal ethics set against institutional loyalty and job security. Dramatic possibilities were provided by the fact that ‘there is no unique profile of a whistleblower. Concerned employees come from all walks of life, occupy all levels of position and can be found in any sector’ (King 2001: 145–146). Marchant aimed to

explore the moral and emotional conflicts of a whistleblower – speaking out may lose them their jobs, their families or their lives. But not speaking out may also cause loss of jobs, the ruin of families and danger to other innocent lives. (Marchant, 2007: 37)

‘Fit for Purpose’ features the most straightforward rendition of the ‘standard’ whistleblower narrative implied by the series’ publicity. When Assistant Immigration Officer Sarah Kendrick (Sarah Smart) realises that an illegal Turkish immigrant involved in a gun battle in central London had passed through the terminal in which she works, she asks Graham & Cole for help. Alisha and Ben advise Sarah on possibilities for going public with her story, highlighting her legal protections under the PIDA 1998 in an example of the series’ attention to factual detail. Following the story’s publication, however, Sarah encounters the potential negative consequences of whistleblowing; she is suspended from her job and summoned to a disciplinary tribunal, whilst also enduring attacks from the tabloid press. It ultimately takes the moral awakening of another, more senior whistleblower to tip the scale, when her superior Marshall is persuaded to testify in Sarah’s favour at the tribunal. This is enough to clear Sarah and she elects to take a private settlement from the Immigration Agency in return for her silence, a moral compromise which is presented sympathetically.

Other episodes incorporate more narrative twists into the whistleblower’s story. In ‘Pandemic’, scientist Professor Lewington (David Threlfall) is reluctantly implicated in Grundy Lear’s plot when he is tricked into believing that he is responsible for the release of Corona X. Alisha and Ben are alerted when he calls them anonymously as ‘the grim reaper’s assistant’ before losing his nerve and withdrawing his cooperation. The complex ethics of whistleblowing are then considered as Alisha and Ben are torn on whether to continue investigating Grundy Lear without his consent, to which Lewington’s wife Polly (Kerry Fox) responds that ‘it’s not his choice to make’. As scientist struggling with moral agency in a sinister world of spin and disinformation, Lewington bears some resemblance to David Kelly, most obviously when he attempts suicide partway through the episode through an overdose of medication. Lewington is rescued from the attempt by Polly and ultimately persuaded to speak out against Grundy Lear, but in a final twist is assassinated in the street before he can testify.

In ‘No Child Left Behind’, Graham & Cole are initially approached by Sean Knowles (Andrew Buchan), a teacher at William Allen who claims to be blowing the whistle on his own school. However, Alisha and Ben swiftly become suspicious of Knowles and, revealing a certain flexibility to their high-minded ethics, ask Kenny to place him under surveillance. This dubious action is retroactively legitimated when they discover that Knowles is being employed to assist with Durrell’s smear campaign. Fortunately, Alisha and Ben eventually manage to cultivate a new whistleblower for the real scandal, as dissatisfied St Justin’s teacher Pam James (Sara Powell) is eventually willing to go public with her knowledge of Durrell’s corruption.

In ‘Starters’, Alisha and Ben are initially alerted to the case by Alan Thorpe MP (Robert Pugh), chairman of a Parliamentary Select Committee on alcohol marketing. Like Lewington, however, Thorpe later backs out of his own case when subjected to blackmail from Griffin. Again, the breakthrough only comes when a high-ranking person within the institution has a crisis of confidence, in this case Griffin’s top lobbyist Chris Clayson (Adrian Dunbar) after his 13-year-old daughter is hospitalised with alcohol poisoning. This is, however, not in the more heroic terms of ‘going public’, but instead on a confidential disclosure basis, as he sneaks secret documents out of his office to be photocopied. This references another classic whistleblowing trope: the invention of the photocopier had hugely increased possibilities for leaking documents, as famously in the case of Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (Feldstein, 2006: 111).

Finally, the whistleblower in ‘Environment’ is Bruck’s plant manager Lance Rix (Ian Puleston-Davies), who is ultimately killed whilst driving along a country road at night to reveal all he knows about the cover-up. This echoes the famous case of Karen Silkwood, a chemical technician who raised concerns about practices in a US nuclear facility, and who similarly died in a mysterious a car accident on the way to meet a journalist in 1974. Yet given the series’ interest in postmodern homage, a more pertinent influence is perhaps how Silkwood’s death is presented in the film dramatisation of her story, Silkwood (1983), with Rix likewise blinded by the headlights of a car close behind. Yet whilst this occurs in the closing moments of Silkwood, the procedural format of The Whistleblowers enables Alisha and Ben to continue the investigation in Rix’s name. Overall, the whistleblower-of-the-week narratives are perhaps the most interesting feature of the series, offering an unusually grounded ‘ordinary’ perspective for the genre, albeit almost always subordinated to the twists and reversals of the thriller.

Conclusion

ITV’s hopes that The Whistleblowers would continue is evident in the cliff-hanger ending to ‘Environment’, with Alisha and Ben both arrested whilst taking part in a protest, yet a second run never appeared. When considering why, it is notable how little press attention it received on broadcast. The Radio Times, for instance, regularly afforded feature articles to Spooks, promoting the first and second series on the front cover in 2002 and 2003. The debut of The Whistleblowers, conversely, attracted nothing more than a small feature in the ‘Today’s Choices’ panel for 27 September 2007 ( Radio Times, 2007: 108). Newspaper reviews were similarly limited, ranging from the negative, such as Gerard O’Donovan in The Telegraph who complained of ‘the clunking allusions to Watergate and All the President’s Men’ (O’Donovan, 2007), to the mildly entertained, such as Robert Hawks in The Independent who described how ‘it was all rather familiar and comforting, which may not be the plan, but did make it fun’ (Hawks, 2007). In fact, its debut was hugely overshadowed by the simultaneous debut of Secret Diary of a Call Girl (2007–2011) on ITV2, a different (and more successful) venture by the broadcaster in appealing to a younger audience with edgier content. Although ITV and Carnival later collaborated on the more traditional serialised conspiracy drama Midnight Man (2008), thereafter the genre would largely remain the preserve of the BBC (and to a lesser extent Channel 4) (Oldham, 2014).

The Whistleblowers might be thus be considered a strange oddity. It is easy to see why it did not seize the public imagination, its varied influences from the ‘serious’ and ‘entertainment’ schools of conspiratorial thinking often pulling in different directions, the ‘serious’ engagement with whistleblowing ethics and verisimilitude from the input of PCAW sitting in uneasy tension with a generic tradition in which protagonists ‘abseil into buildings’ instead of simply working in them. The series’ use of a procedural format, meanwhile, transforms the vision of conspiracy from totalising worldview to a landscape of relentless small-scale conspiracy as ‘routine operating procedure’. Mirroring how its BBC rival Spooks depicts MI5 as consistently able to vanquish a wide range of terror threats, The Whistleblowers offers a curiously stable worldview, showing that it is possible for experts like Graham & Cole to defeat a potentially endless array of conspiracies on a weekly basis, without ever doing anything so ‘radical’ as to fundamentally alter the nature of the social and political world.

Viewed from the vantage point of over a decade later, it is striking how this stability seems the product of a society that, for all the anxiety and cynicism arising from the ‘war on terror’, has yet to experience the long-term aftermath of the 2007–2008 Financial Crisis. The following years would see suspicion of political and financial corruption play a significant role in the drastic response of Brexit, whilst Parliamentary politics reached its most sharply polarised state since the early 1980s, shattering the cross-party consensus of the 2000s on issues like security and privatisation. In depicting suspicion as ‘routine operating procedure’, The Whistleblowers provides a glimpse into a time when paranoia itself seemed safer, a moment when even the classical conspiracy narrative could be contained within a procedural format.