Secret City
Foxtel, Showcase, Sundays 8.30pm
IT MAY be the most profound question affecting Australia’s future – but you won’t hear anyone taking about it during the election campaign.
How do we reconcile the fact that our biggest trading partner is China, and our biggest strategic ally is the United States?
And when these two behemoths disagree, how do we as a minnow survive?
Ever wondered why we’re buying all those subs? Give you a clue: it’s spelt C-H-I-N-A.
It’s an issue at the heart of “Secret City“ a worthy attempt by Australia to step up into the international spy drama class.
It’s a bit like one of those airport novels … girl self-immolates in Beijing to protest against China, bloke chased by Chinese security forces jumps off a bridge into Lake Burley-Griffin where he later washes up, gutted.
Passing is professional nosy parker Anna Torv, surely too well-dressed and good-looking to be a journo – but there you go.
Disconcertingly, she has a habit of looking pensive and then walking off when people don’t answer her questions. Hard to see how she made it to the top of the The Daily Nation, the paper with a fat balding editor where she shows all the boys how it’s done.
“Human interest stories are for people interested in humans – I do politicians,” she explains.
And while we have yet to see Anna’s character “do” a politician, she’s surely had a crack at almost everyone else in Canberra, in the first 90 minutes of the show, anyway.
Her ex-partner (in the biblical sense) is a transgender intelligence analyst (I fear we may have just jumped the shark) who threatens to give her the inside line on stories, but then never does.
So she cosies up to a convenient copper, who doesn’t give her any answers either. Just as well too, or it would have been a short series indeed.
There’s a hairy hipster toyboy she uses as a bed-warmer on occasion as well, for reasons that remain opaque.
Enter Attorney-General Jacki Weaver, who swears like a trooper and seems to be pulling the strings of the entire government. She’s one to watch, that one.
The Chinese are the new Russians … and why not? They put us under cyber-attack hundreds of times a year, and God knows their security types are sinister looking enough. And inscrutable with it.
The show’s producers have spent a Rajah’s ransom on this, and promoting it too. Canberra looks as great as an invented dormitory suburb can look.
There’s going to be a lot happening over the next little while, and this one should have enough twists and turns to keep us all interested.
– Jason Beck
