Bodyguard: From Surprise to Suspense

British writer Jed Mercurio builds television shows the way the Cenobites build puzzle boxes in the Hellraiser movies. Get too close to one, and its intricate mechanism shoots its hooks into you, pulling you through a portal into a gyre of suspense from which there’s no escape.
—Mike Hale, New York Times

One of the precarious aspects of reviewing a thrilling book, film or series, is the danger of publishing “spoilers”—that is, giving away parts of the plot that are best left to be discovered by readers or viewers during their own first experience of the work.

The new British six-part drama series Bodyguard is constructed around an intricate web of spoilers that make it almost “review-proof”— tricky to talk about without spilling the magic beans. But I’ll do my best and also take the opportunity to look at the controversial area of spoilers themselves and whether they, in fact, can diminish or enhance one’s experience of a film.

Bodyguard was created by Jed Mercurio, writer of the novel Bodies, a medical drama, adapted into a series in 2002 that the Guardian included in “The Greatest TV Dramas of All Time”, based on Mercurio’s background as a doctor, but Bodyguard was influenced by his service as a Royal Air Force officer.

It stars Richard Madden (from Game of Thrones) as David Budd, a former sergeant, recently returned from fighting in Afghanistan. The first episode opens fairly sedately, on a London train, and just when we are wondering if this particular trip is worth our train ticket, Budd comes face-to-face with a female suicide bomber, Nadia Ali, played by Anjli Mohindra, in a sequence that is one of the most emotionally jaw-dropping things I have seen lately and will certainly galvanise you into staying on board until the end.

As a result of the way Budd acquits himself in this terrorist incident, he is given the position of Protection Command bodyguard to the Home Secretary, the Right Honourable Julia Montague, played by Keeley Hawes. Budd, suffering from PTSD, accepts the job reluctantly, even though his own politics, based on hard on-the-ground war experiences, are at odds with those of Montague, a Conservative and strong advocate of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Montague understands Budd is conflicted about working for her but advises him, in a confrontational moment, “You don’t have to vote for me; just protect me.” Later, Budd himself becomes an object of terrorist retaliation due to the high media profile he acquired during the train attack, and his children’s school is targeted, requiring him to put his family into a safe house. The Home Secretary’s car comes under a relentless sniper attack that is almost as nail-biting as the opening train sequence and, as her route was completely classified, a leak is suspected from within police ranks. Budd and Montague become lovers (as we knew they would—that isn’t giving anything away)—complicating their professional relationship.

Midway through the series, a devastating bomb attack changes everything (and any detail of this would definitely be a “spoiler”). Budd comes under suspicion as having been complicit in the attack, and he is suspended from duty. Believing he is being set up to be a fall-guy, he proceeds, on his own, to track down those responsible, uncovering a collaboration between the terrorists and organised crime. In the final episode, another edge-of-your-seater, once again to reveal anything is to reveal everything, so mum’s the word. The finale contains another mind-bending flip that perhaps you may have seen coming, but I certainly didn’t.

Daniel D’Addario, of Variety, said:

[Bodyguard] excels at both the daring, gasp-inducing twist and the methodical construction of slower-burning thrills. The finale, for instance, features a lengthy sequence of almost physically painful tension, a bravura bit of television that could only exist on a show in which we’ve been primed to understand that truly anything can happen.

The series has two directors: the first three episodes by Thomas Vincent, who previously worked on The Tunnel (the British-French adaptation of the Danish-Swedish series The Bridge) and the last three by John Strickland, who collaborated on two previous Mercurio productions, Line of Duty and Bodies. Strickland also directed one episode of the long-running popular US series about the Mormons, Big Love. (The fifty-three episodes and five series of Big Love had twenty-two different directors.)

The music throughout is a weaving, creative and atmospheric soundscape created by Ruth Barrett, who composed the soundtrack for the series Victoria.

Richard Madden, who plays Sergeant David Budd, is best known for his role of Robb Stark, in Game of Thrones, but his real tour de force was as Cosimo de’Medici in the brilliant 2016 RAI Italian series, Medici: Masters of Florence.

The supporting cast of Bodyguard is made up of a host of memorable character studies, the kind that British dramas excel at. Gina McKee (who played Caterina Sforza in The Borgias and the magnificent Irene Forsyte in The Forsyte Saga) is cast as Commander Anne Sampson, frosty head of the Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Unit. Ash Tandon plays Detective Chief Inspector Deepak Sharma, whose more empathetic nature, we are thankful, prevails in the all-important close. BBC journalists Andrew Marr, John Pienaar, John Humphrys and Laura Kuenssberg appear as themselves. David Westhead, who played Bertie, Prince of Wales, in Mrs Brown, has a small but important role as John Vosler, the Prime Minister.

Sophie Gilbert, of the Atlantic, wrote: “Like Homeland, Bodyguard expands its horizons to cast a big, knotty, conspiracy-theorist net over the police forces, the intelligence community, and the upper echelons of the British government.”

The creator and writer of the series, Jed Mercurio, was born in 1966 in Nelson, Lancashire. He was the son of immigrants who arrived from Italy after the war, and his father worked in the coal mines of Cannock. His former Walhouse Junior School teacher remembers him as “Gerald”, a quiet, clever boy who was “effortlessly able”. Mercurio was adept at science and had ambitions of being an astronaut. He graduated in 1991 from the University of Birmingham Medical School, becoming a doctor, working fifty-six-hour shifts in a Wolverhampton hospital for three years. He joined the RAF as a pilot, intending to specialise in aviation medicine and treating pilots.

In 1994, while working for the National Health Service, he replied to an advertisement in the British Medical Journal looking for advisers and collaborators for a new hospital drama. Under the pen-name John MacUre he wrote the BBC medical series Cardiac Arrest. Sarah Hughes of the Guardian called Cardiac Arrest “a shocking portrait of hospital life … with tales of euthanasia, bullying and incompetence on the wards”. It became a television blockbuster, extending into three additional seasons, and enabling Mercurio to buy a Porsche. After that, he began writing under his own name.

Bernard Padden, scriptwriting teacher at Staffordshire University, said that Mercurio’s “killer touch” was based on his knowledge of police, hospital and government procedure: “He uses this knowledge to create a sense of realism you don’t see in other dramas and crime shows … [he’s] very good at drawing character … but he’s not afraid to kill off major characters.”

Despite these successes, his Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for ITV in 2007, garnered only a lukewarm response and an adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 2015 was panned. Jasper Rees of the Telegraph said it had “barely a flicker of D.H. Lawrence’s original”.

Mercurio spent five years creating pilot episodes for shows in the US when, as he says, his career was “quiet” in the UK. While in the States, he learned some important differences between American and British television drama.

In 2010, Mercurio collaborated on episodes of the Sky1 series Strike Back, taken from the novel by SAS soldier Chris Ryan, the only member of his unit to evade capture by the Iraqi army during the first Gulf War. In 2012 he created the BBC police procedural series Line of Duty, which made a list of the eighty best BBC shows of all time and was commissioned for a further five seasons.

In a Guardian interview, Mercurio said:

We earned the Line of Duty audience’s loyalty over a number of years … With Bodyguard, I hope people respond well to the first series, but I think it would take time for them to become as invested.

Ed Power of the Independent said:

What … Bodyguard [is] especially good at … is delivering Hollywood levels of action while retaining the gloss of a quality BBC drama. This [is the] signature Mercurio touch …

Because Bodyguard has so many visceral surprises throughout, making it tricky to talk about without “giving away the farm”, debate has arisen, among critics and psychologists, as to whether “spoilers”, in fact, spoil anything. Some polls show that viewers feel they enhance the story—that to know something is about to happen increases the suspense. Think of movies about Pompeii or the Titanic: we know the mountain explodes and the ship goes down, but we don’t mind, we still watch. The suspense of getting there is apparently what the public wants—much more than the surprises. This suggests that perhaps what can be “spoiled” by any foreknowledge is a minor part of what memorable films give us. Also, with a truly great film or series, we will go back and view it again and again, despite knowing what’s coming.

Proper etiquette, especially for reviews or film synopses online, used to require the warning: “Spoiler alert!” so readers had a choice about whether to continue. But Stuart Heritage of the Guardian thinks people need to grow up:

Basically, it all boils down to this: avoiding spoilers is your responsibility and your responsibility alone … don’t visit websites that tend to deal with spoilers. And don’t read articles about a show you haven’t caught up on yet. For example, if you haven’t seen Sunday’s Bodyguard, and you care about what happens in Sunday’s Bodyguard, and you’re still reading this, you are an irreparable nimrod.

Jonah Lehrer, in an article for Wired, titled “Spoilers Don’t Spoil Anything”, says he likes to read the final five pages of a book first, then go back and see how it got there:

In this age of information, we’ve become mildly obsessed with avoiding spoilers … but this is a new habit. After all, mass culture consisted for thousands of years of stories that were incredibly predictable, from the Greek tragedy, to the Shakespearean wedding, to the Hollywood happy ending … It’s about the narrative journey, not the final destination.

Lehrer quotes a study recently conducted by psychologists Christenfeld and Leavitt of UC San Diego showing that the tension of not knowing what’s going to happen next actually decreases our enjoyment: “knowing the ending of Oedipus may heighten the pleasurable tension of the disparity in knowledge between the omniscient reader and the character marching to his doom”.

Alfred Hitchcock said: “Mystery is when the spectator knows less than the characters in the movie. Suspense is when the spectator knows more than the characters in the movie.” Often referred to as the “Master of Suspense”, Hitchcock gave many interviews about the different ways of achieving it. He insisted that the audience must be told the vital information of a “ticking time bomb” scenario and then allowed to feel the prolonged suspense of the clock ticking down. He commented: “There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it,” quickly following it up with: “[of course] the bomb must never go off!” In a conversation with Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock said:

There is a distinct difference between “suspense” and “surprise”, and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean. We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!” In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.

One insight that occurred to me while writing this article is that on repeated viewing of a much-loved film or series, all the original surprises, because we can now see them coming, become transformed into suspense.

Ed Power commented:

[Bodyguard] is … TV with a great big pulpy heart … crammed with explosions, shootouts and dangerous liaisons—Madden is required to call on all his Game of Thrones bonkbusting powers. Serious and silly, slow-burning yet packed with surprises, it is one the purest expressions yet of Mercurio’s vision of what great telly should be.

How accurate is Bodyguard?

The present Home Secretary, Sajid Javid, watched the series and commented: “No, it wasn’t very realistic. For a start, my codename is not Lavender—and [Montague] didn’t even do the power stance.” (That is the legs-apart, Wonder Woman-like pose for photographers, denoting confidence, that has been common among Tory politicians since 2015.)

Some critics objected to actual BBC journalists, such as Nick Robinson and political editor Laura Kuenssberg, playing themselves and reporting “fake news”. This has also been slammed by families of actual terror attack victims as confusing and insensitive, yet US television therapy-interviewer Jerry Springer has appeared in dozens of films playing himself, without similar criticism.

Victoria Turk, of Wired, talked to a former personal protection officer (PPO) who spent years working with the Royal Family, who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. He found the show entertaining, but a bit far-fetched. He said the “lone wolf” and isolated aspect of Budd’s character wouldn’t be permitted; that Budd never attended briefings, or had any kind of meaningful relationships with anyone else in the department, whereas real PPO officers are a very tight bunch and watch each other’s backs. Budd would also never have worked alone with such an important principal as the Home Secretary, but always as part of a team. He did, however, suggest that intimate and inappropriate liaisons between the PPO and a principal have been known to happen, as Rich Johnston, of Bleeding Cool, describes:

In 2011, PC Paul Rice was fired from his job as a police officer after it was discovered that, while he was Personal Protection Officer to then-Home Secretary Alan Johnson MP, he had an affair with Johnson’s wife, Laura Johnson, and Alan’s constituency assistant Tracy Windle at the same time. Johnson was Home Secretary from 2005 to 2010, one of the most senior positions in the British government, alongside Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Foreign Secretary. Alan Johnson, then Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, stepped down from the shadow front bench as a result, citing “personal issues in my private life”. They later divorced in 2014 after a twenty-three-year marriage.

Although, to date, a second season of Bodyguard hasn’t received the go-ahead, Jed Mercurio said he is currently talking with the BBC, with the understanding, based on his previous successful productions with them, that if it is approved, it will also imply a third or fourth season. He said: “There’s been such a response that it gives us that opportunity to at least think about doing more”.

Richard Madden’s next film will be as Elton John’s manager John Reid in the biopic Rocketman, and Keeley Hawes will star, with Keira Knightley, in the drama Misbehaviour, where she will play Julia Morley, an executive in the 1970 Miss World Competition, which was disrupted at the Royal Albert Hall by women’s liberationists, who chased all the men backstage, threw flour bombs and leafleted the auditorium.