Spooks - BBC Series 1 (New Packaging) [DVD]

Annoying:1) The three disks are not numbered so its a lottery to find the disk you want. This is made more difficult by2) A most unintuitive top menu system which had me messing about between PC and DVD player trying to figure out how to actually get to the episodes, and3) The disks include some "interactual" software which wants to load itself on to your PC. No way!!Hopefully, when I actually get to watch an episode, it will be worth all the aggravation, but until then, two stars is all I give it.

The reason I am only giving this three stars, has nothing to do with the great series, or the brilliant wonderful storylines. The reason is because it is so annoying trying to navigate through everything to get to the actual start of episode one. I get that the makers thought it might be cool, but maybe some instructions on how to navigate this would have been helpful. It was pure chance that I managed to get to the start of the first episode. I just hope the other series/DVD's do not have the same convoluted mess to get to the start of each episode.

Note that this is NOT a review of the great Spooks series, but of the particular DVD quality.It's nothing to do with it being second hand either, but I don't know how anyone dares sell this specific make;* very poor picture & sound quality* no top menu to select episodes* a most annoying repetitive intro "skit" to go through before each episode* two episodes would not play at all!In conclusion, this looks like a home-made pirate copy!

Very grateful to the reviewer who explaining how to navigate the episode selections. I was finding it totally impossible. Instead of the DVD firing up in the usual way with a menu allowing you to pick episodes or scenes there's infernally annoying of someone in a balaclava breaking into an office and stealing DVDs from a rack. I couldn't see any lettering on the screen and the video just kept running round in a loop. Not 'cool' - just mega irritating and not - as one reviewer said - 'part of the fun':life is too short!The content? Well it's 5 stars, of course and I've only knocked one off for the stupidity described above.Fast-paced, great, believable characters, gripping plots. Brilliant stuff.

Season one takes a few episodes to get going , but by the end of season one if your'e not hooked, then you are not alive. Argualbly one of the best shows that the BBC brought to TV in this genre. It just goes from strength to strength, seasons 2,3,4,5,6,7 are excellent, I started to go off the show by season 9, just because of the poor characters brought in, just not good enough as the actors who were in the first 7/8 seasons were of a high calibre and better known. In season 9 it feels like that they have run out of ideas, and although I watched season 10, I cannot remember most of it.The one star reviews here are absolute nonsense, stick with it, It just gets better and better. Great stories, well produced and written and at the time the stories were very current and topical, and many of them stand up today. Looking forward to seeing the movie.

Having decided to re-watch all of Spooks recently I also decided to review them all here.In short, Spooks is a show about MI-5 and the operations of Section-D the Anti-Terrorism division of the Security Services.There is not much to dislike about this show but I will start off with the negative and then proceed to the largely positive aspects. The main gripe I have is that only around 8-10 people seem to work permanently in Section-D and between them they deal with all major security threats to the United Kingdom. Having said this I appreciate that within a TV show they need to focus on a certain number of characters and this is the main reason for this.Overall this is a great show! Matthew MacFadyen and Peter Firth as Tom Quinn and Harry Pearce respectively are the two stand out actors in my opinion, with MacFadyen bringing a mostly serious but occasionally humorous persona to the show while Firth as the Head of Section is the authoritative and sarcastically funny figure. Harry Pearce is clearly not written as a funny man but at times some of his lines are just downright hilarious "You're a little s***e Derek, have I ever told you that?" "You've implied it enough times Harry"The supporting characters of Danny and Zoe both come across very well and to be honest despite what I mentioned earlier I cannot find anything bad to say about this series!Watch it! NOW!

The first season of Spooks is a jem, and gift from heaven. Especially, to fans of the beautiful Matthew Macfadyen, like myself. I just can't praise it enough. The stories are so very interesting, and mind you, I'm not a fan of action movies. I just don't like mindless suspense and running about, but sometimes, you have a lot of humanity and intellegence in an action piece. This was the case with Spooks season 1. The stories are just interesting. To see how spies cope with situations of Britain's national security, how their personal lives are affected by their job, how they interact with people, what situations they cope with and how they cope, is just very interesting. Add to that brilliantly written, interesting characters, played to perfection by a bunch of exceptionally talanted actors, and also a very talanted direction, and you just get 6 hours of pure pleasure. A word of caution about episode 2 - it involves a torture scene, just close your eyes for a few moments. After it aired, the producers got a lot of complains from the viewers, so thankfully, the violence was toned down from that point on. Other than that, the show is perfect.