Little Drummer Girl, BBC1, Sunday at 9pm
Another Sunday night and another BBC1 drama launch.
I haven't been counting, but it seems like there is more drama on terrestrial television than ever before.
Presumably it's a reaction to the success of Netflix and box set viewing, because both BBC and ITV have been cranking the stuff out.
The latest is Little Drummer Girl, an adaption of a John Le Carre 1980s novel, made by the BBC in cooperation with US channel AMC.
The story follows Israeli spymaster Martin Kurtz as he tries to kill Palestinian bomb maker Khalil who has been blowing up Jewish targets in Europe. Most of the first episode is taken up with elaborate efforts to recruit Charlie, an English actress, as an agent.
It opens in West Germany in 1979 where an attractive woman, who's been recruited by the Palestinians, arranges the placement of a suitcase bomb in a Jewish family's home in an elaborate scheme.
She smiles at the father from the getaway car as his eight-year-old son is blown up.
Kurtz arrives from Israel and finds a signature placed in the device (a twisted piece of wire) showing Khalil was the bomb maker.
Kurtz convinces his Mossad boss that it is pointless to pursue the failed policy of sending hitmen after Khalil and it's time to find another way, getting an agent inside his team and then liquidating the key PLO activist.
It's not clear why Charlie is chosen, but she is lured by a honey trap handsome man to Athens where Kurtz ends episode one by telling her: “I am the producer, writer and director of our little show … and I’d like to talk to you about your part.”
So we enter the heart of the spy thriller as a battle of Israeli and Palestinian wits begins.
It was a pacey and tense opening, while Michael Shannon was brilliant as Kurtz the playmaker.
****
Mediterranean with Simon Reeve, BBC1, Monday at 8pm
Simon Reeve ended his four part journey around the edge of the Mediterranean by meeting migrants on either side of the Morocco/Spain border.
None of the African men, either outside or inside the EU, were fulfilling the dreams of European riches they had when they left home.
In Morocco, Reeve met three migrants in a makeshift wild camp outside Ceuta, a Spanish protectorate at the tip of Morocco, across the sea from Cadiz.
The men, originally from sub-Saharan Africa, hated the way there were living but were convinced life as an undocumented immigrant in Europe would be much better.
Ceuta is home to just 80,000 people in seven square miles of Africa but if you can get over its enormous, razor-wire fences you are effectively in the EU.
You don’t hear about it much, but Ceuta is as much a legacy of empire as Gibraltar.
Reeve travelled across the Strait of Gibraltar, pointing out that it was a quirk of where he was born which gives him a passport that allows him to make the journey unhindered .
In plastic city – 100 square miles of plastic greenhouses where Europe’s vegetables are grown – Reeve is shown the horrendous conditions where hundreds of Africans work for a pittance and live in squalor.
It appears that the Spanish authorities are uninterested in their plight and one man explains how he has become trapped. He lives in a horrible place for poor pay but cannot return home to his community in Africa because he will be viewed as a failure.
Television as revelatory as this deserves to be watched.
