Last month, Apple TV+ announced a sixth series of the critically acclaimed, and highly popular, spy series Slow Horses. Since its first screening in April 2022, the show, based on the novels by Mick Herron, has captivated audiences with its darkly comic portrayal of misfits from the UK’s Security Service (MI5) based in Slough House, under the leadership of Jackson Lamb, played by the brilliant Gary Oldman. The series gives a warts and all portrayal of the state of the nation and has even been described, in one review, as ‘undoubtedly the best spy series on television’.

What follows may be unpopular to some, but here goes, nonetheless. Slow Horses might be good, but it’s not the best.

This top accolade falls to another show, described by Terrence Rafferty, in a New York Times review from 2003, as the ‘best spy series in television history’ – The Sandbaggers. The show was produced by Yorkshire Television and aired over three series between 1978 and 1980. It was the brainchild of Ian Mackintosh, a former Royal Naval officer turned writer, who had enjoyed success with the BBC drama Warship. Mackintosh disappeared in an air crash in July 1979, having completed just four scripts of the third series of his cult spy show. The nature of his disappearance, and the gritty realism to The Sandbaggers, has since led to speculation that Mackintosh was part of the spy world. Whether true or not, Mackintosh brought the world of the UK’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or popularly MI6) to the screen in a way that few others have managed.

Britain’s ‘secret service’ was no stranger to the screen when the first episode of The Sandbaggers, ‘First Principles’, aired in September 1978. The world of James Bond, Ian Fleming’s fictional SIS officer of film and novels, offered an image of a womanising, killing machine, doing bad things to the Queen’s enemies. He established a British icon. On the other side, was the writing of David Cornwell, using the penname John le Carré. Le Carré’s world was one of moral equivalency and betrayal, fuelled by the real-world example of Kim Philby, the SIS officer and Soviet spy who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1963. The TV adaptation of le Carré’s most famous work, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, aired in the fourteen-month hiatus between series one and two of The Sandbaggers.

Le Carré’s work, while the antithesis of Bond, is just as difficult for the real-life SIS; themes include betrayal, moral ambiguity, and – especially in his later work – the idea that the guys in the ‘River House’ (the fictional riverside location of le Carré’s modern-day SIS) could sometimes be on the side of the bad guys. Le Carré himself told BBC Security Correspondent, Gordon Corera, he had ‘conflicting memories’ of his former service.

Mackintosh’s idea for a series on SIS’s ‘triumphs and failures’ was certainly different. ‘SIS has been the subject of many series and many plays’, he pitched to producers in spring 1977, but it was never, Mackintosh wrote, seen ‘in real documentary terms’ and never on ‘methods, priorities, internal struggles and power within the Whitehall structure’. In portraying the fictional SIS, working out of drab central London offices, Mackintosh was able to exploit the haziness of the real world. When the show first aired, SIS did not formally exist. It was only later, in 1992, that Sir Colin McColl became the first officially named Chief (or ‘C’). Two years later, the service was given a legal framework under the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, to ‘obtain and provide information’ overseas and conduct ‘other tasks’.

Just like Jackson Lamb or George Smiley (le Carré’s most famous character), the main protagonist in The Sandbaggers is the antithesis of Bond. Neil Burnside is Director of SIS’s Operations (D.Ops). Tough, uncompromising and professional, Burnside (played by Roy Marsden) is a former Royal Marine turned SIS officer at odds with public-school types. He refuses to drink, owing to the need to make difficult decisions under pressure, yet chain-smokes in times of stress, and is a workaholic to the detriment of his private life. He’s also willing to take decisions that cause personal anguish, ordering – and, sorry for the potential spoiler alert – the death of a girlfriend, to protect the ‘special relationship’ with US intelligence. Burnside is responsible for the ‘Sandbaggers’, officially SIS’s Special Operations Section, a highly trained team of officers acting as the service’s ‘fire brigade’ led by Willie Caine, played by Ray Lonnen. Throughout the series, the section engages in derring-do activity. But the anti-Bond status is cemented from the start. ‘If you want James Bond, go to your library’, Burnside tells a Norwegian spy chief in episode one. ‘But if you want a successful operation sit at your desk and think, and then think again’.

There is, as always, artistic licence. The willingness to assassinate is overplayed, and the body count – enough to put the later BBC series Spooks to shame – is high. Nevertheless, the show is a far cry from le Carré; though SIS’s headquarters is just as dilapidated as ‘the Circus’ – some suggested the inside of the fictional SIS reflected the service’s real-world headquarters at Century House. The characters in The Sandbaggers have few moral qualms about their work. Burnside and his team, like many officers then and now, are fiercely patriotic, and the series is always careful to show that the West is always better than its totalitarian counterparts.

Mackintosh’s vision works for many reasons. Once you get around parts of the Yorkshire countryside filling in for Eastern Europe – or even, in one episode, Gibraltar – The Sandbaggers motors because it’s based on intelligent dialogue at the heart of Whitehall, especially in SIS’s headquarters or the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO). As in the real world, the intelligence is often vague. The wrong actions are sometimes taken, yet SIS is not, to borrow descriptions of the 1970s CIA, a ‘rogue elephant’, but answerable to policymakers. The relationship between intelligence and diplomacy is brilliantly highlighted by Burnside’s links to his former father-in-law, the FCO Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Wellingham. Burnside’s relationship with his superiors, notably SIS’s Deputy Chief, Matthew Peele, is always strained. Just like Slow Horses today, The Sandbaggers also said something about 1970s Britain. Contrary to Bond, even SIS is subject to temporary manning standards, budget cutbacks, and economy class air tickets. ‘Our battles aren’t fought at the end of a parachute’, Burnside believes, ‘They’re won and lost in drab, dreary corridors in Westminster’.

Another reason for success was that Mackintosh wasn’t afraid to throw detail at his viewers. From a geeky intelligence standpoint, Mackintosh’s SIS owes more to CIA structure and activity. But there is a real understanding of how intelligence flows around government. SIS’s strength, Mackintosh noted, was ‘its influence through the corridors of power’. This ‘realism’ was also cemented by the abundant use of acronyms. ‘[In] the course of the 54-minute instalment’, one reviewer commented, ‘I jotted down at least one reference each to the K.G.B., MI5, CIA, S.I.S., ‘C’, J.I.S., F.C.O., J.I.C., P.A., P.F.L.P., D.A.S., D.Int, P.S.O., the P.A. to D.Ops, I.K., M.O.D., F.C.S., and even the PS to the PUS’.

Such realism, at a time the agencies officially did not exist, was important. It was only in 1982 that the government begrudgingly allowed official reference to the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC). The Sandbaggers even included the Chief of SIS’s famous green Quink ink. The gritty reality was also pushed by Mackintosh’s willingness to use contemporary geopolitics as a backdrop. The ‘special relationship’ with the CIA, run through their head of station Jeff Ross (Bob Sherman), was all-important. Meanwhile, the end of Cold War détente and renewed tensions with Moscow, reflected the real world of spy vs. spy.

The Sandbaggers certainly has a niche following compared to other fictional spy dramas, but it deserves to be remembered as the ‘best’ spy series even now. Its only rival is, possibly, the Canal+ espionage thriller Le Bureau des Légendes (currently being remade for English audiences by Paramount+) on France’s foreign intelligence service, the Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure (DGSE). Mackintosh brought an air of realism to the world of SIS that was hitherto lacking and has not been seen since in UK television drama. Clever plotlines, an eye to detail and the backroom battles in Whitehall all make for compelling viewing. The Sandbaggers really is the best spy show ever made. Long live The Sandbaggers.