Under attack

The Grid, which arrives on BBC Two next week. is very much a post-September 11 drama about the ubiquitous threat of terrorism. It’s a drama for our times about the nature of a war being fought, not just on the ground, but behind the scenes in the high-tech world of intelligence and counter-intelligence. The epicentre of the quaintly dilapidated set is a specially constructed oasis of futuristic-looking computers and gizmos that whir and beep as they relay “ top priority, classified information” into the HQ of an international team of counter-terrorists.

As the cameras roll, you catch snatches of dialogue involving expressions such as “Awacs surveillance”. It’s 24 meets Spooks meets Alias, whose cutting-edge look and feel it promises to share. Ask Julianna Margulies, who stars alongside Dylan McDermott as Maren Jackson, the ambitious White House security council staffer who is placed in charge of the counter-terrorist team.

“What I’m proposing is an inter-agency team comprised of analysts and agents of the CIA, FBI and defence who’ll co-ordinate their intelligence about the sarin attack. And what’s radical about this is that they’ll bypass their own agency hierarchy.” Margulies pauses, then laughs. “It took me five days to learn that piece of dialogue. It just isn’t how normal people speak.”

For all that, when you speak to the makers of The Grid, which include Fox Television and the British independent company Carnival (which made Traffik), one of their aims is to show the very ordinariness of those involved. Controversially, that means giving a human face not just to the intelligence agents, and those perceived as being on the side of right, but also to the terrorists themselves.

“We wanted to show that those who work for government agencies are ordinary people like you and me,” says Mitch Engel, one of the show’s producers. “Their job is, potentially, to save millions of people from terrorist attack, but they are still human. You could make a documentary about how Washington and London are dealing with the threat of terror and that would make an interesting one-hour show. But what’s fascinating here is the relationships between the characters and what makes them tick.

“Similarly, we’re trying to understand what makes someone strap explosives to their chest and blow up a bus. In fact, I think we are the first post-September 11 drama that attempts to understand the personal lives of both intelligence agents and terrorists, and we may well come in for criticism as a result.”

When the series was shown recently in the US, it was watched by 16 million viewers and received rave reviews. It managed to tread the fine line between entertainment and education, between action and polemic. The Grid — so named to reflect the idea of an international network of both agents and terrorists — had become a Zeitgeist show that reflected the events and emotions of contemporary life.

“Our aim was for audiences to switch on and feel the relevance of what they were witnessing,” says The Grid’s director, Mikael Salomon (Band of Brothers). “Nothing happens that couldn’t happen at any minute. And we were meticulous in our research and in what was allowed into the script. So we were left with the feeling of a drama with events that you might read about in tomorrow’s paper.”

Disturbingly, then, for British audiences, the drama kicks off with a deadly sarin gas attack in a London hotel which leaves 19 people dead. From then on American and British agents collaborate to prevent further attacks and disrupt the terrorist network. Not named specifically as al-Qaeda, it nevertheless has its roots in Islamic fundamentalist terror. “What we want to show is that Islamic terrorists don’t fit any particular racial profile,” says Seaquist. “They come from any place in the Muslim world — South-East Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. At the time of September 11, al-Qaeda had offices in, maybe, 70 different countries. So they often look like us. They wear three-piece suits. They have big bank accounts and we don’t know who these people are.”

Given the difficulties this scenario presents, it is not long into The Grid before the terrorists are running rings around the intelligence team, successfully detonating a series of devastating bombs during an oil summit in Lagos despite the agents’ best efforts to prevent them. Discredited for not predicting the attacks, our team faces being disbanded and must continue its vital work unaided.

The pressure is intense, not least because two of the team have had a fatwa issued against them and are under attack. Ultimately, the group must find the terrorist leader Muhammed and his foot soldiers before they carry out their plan — co-ordinated attacks on Arab, British and US soil. Terrorists and counter-terrorists move closer together, until they meet in the explosive conclusion.

There are some who might argue that huge viewing figures for the show are yet another indication that because of the West’s growing paranoia about terrorism we would watch anything about it. But, says Engels, “we’re not looking to alarm but to present a reality that you can’t ignore.” In many ways, too, he adds, the drama seeks to diffuse rather than to inflame our fears.

“It was important, for example, to represent the fact that 99 per cent of Muslims are peaceful people,” says Salomon. “We are not just filming in Canada, but in London and Morocco, where we were scouting during Ramadan. But we were overwhelmed by the gentleness and generosity of people we met there and it would be a betrayal to represent them as people of violence.”

The drama reflects, too, that there are many Muslims currently working to defeat terror in government agencies. The inclusion of an American-Arab, Raza Michaels, played by Piter Marek, as a counter-terrorist analyst on Jackson’s team, reflects that fact.

“There is a scene when I berate him about Islam’s oppression of women,” says Margulies. “I say that until Islam agrees that women have the God-given right to eat, walk, do and say what they want, I’m deaf, dumb and blind to what they’re selling.

“And his response is: ‘Have you ever asked a Muslim woman for her point of view?’ When do women in the West ever ask?”

Margulies admits she has been politicised by her role. “What’s happened in the Bush Administration is embarrassing to me as an American,” she says. “I don’t believe in war and I don’t believe in guns.” Working on The Grid has given some intellectual weight to what was previously a gut, emotional response.

Now Margulies turns first to the news pages rather than the arts when she picks up The New York Times. “I think, ‘Oh my God, my interests have shifted’ when I was trying to stay away from all this stuff for the simple reason that it depresses me.”

It reminds her too much, perhaps, of September 11 itself. After the attack, Margulies took herself down to Ground Zero where she cooked for firefighters. “I’m a New Yorker,” she says, “and these were my people. I had a real sense of needing to do something.”

She wonders if her role in The Grid isn’t part of the same need. “Perhaps it is,” she says. “It feels important to me now that we talk about terrorism, that we make dramas about it, that we ask questions and that we try to understand the whole complex deal.”

The Grid may not have all the answers. But it’s a good start.

The Grid, September 7-9, BBC Two, 9pm