Why I love French telly

There’s a scene in the French espionage series The Bureau — about the DGSE, France’s equivalent of the CIA or MI6 —where one of the characters loses a limb while on active service. ‘Excellent,’ jokes the station boss on his return. ‘This will greatly improve our diversity quota for disabled employees.’ This is why I prefer foreign language dramas to homegrown ones. You can’t imagine a joke like that making it into a BBC drama, can you?

When, in 2015, the first season of The Bureau was shown to members of the real DGSE (Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure) they gave it a standing ovation. It certainly feels accurate: the poky, windowless offices; the long hours and absence of social life; the incestuousness (the only people they shag are one another, unless of course it’s business); the tradecraft; the obsessive secrecy and routine suspicion and mendacity. Not since Smiley’s People (from the days when the BBC was good; that long ago) has a spy drama better captured that hall of mirrors world where it’s almost impossible to be sure who is good or bad, real or unreal, themselves or merely yet another alter ego.

In this realm of deceit, where letting slip the truth can be fatal, the most accomplished liar rules. Enter our hero, Guillaume Debailly (Mathieu Kassovitz) aka Paul Lefebvre, codenamed Malotru. (Malotru means ‘lout’ and like all the undercover agents’ codenames, it comes from Captain Haddock’s rants in Tintin.) Being the most brilliant agent in the DGSE, he’s also the most slippery and untrustworthy one. Though you don’t always like him, you never stop rooting for him because he’s handsome, romantic, troubled, loved by his adorably bolshie teenage daughter and because his gift for being at least three steps ahead of everyone else makes him a veritable Houdini of seemingly impossible, now-get-out-of-that impasses.

At the end of Season Two — spoiler alert — he is held prisoner by Isis and is next in line for one of those horrific orange-jumpsuit executions.