Tom Bradby

Was that Shadow Dancer?

I started writing.

I came up with the idea wandering down the Falls Road in West Belfast in about late 1993.

The thing that really fascinated me then, so I will answer your question, but the thing that really just gripped me and has never stopped gripping me is I walked from lunch with a senior member of the special branch and I walked up to basically a press conference at the Sinn Féin headquarters, which was full of known IRA people.

I'd found myself just drilling in, as I often did with the special branch guy, into the business of running informers.

I know you're about to talk about this in State Knife, but I just found it so fascinating because these are people who speak the same language, who often live only a couple of miles apart.

You're running someone, and if you make a tiny mistake, that person is going to be killed by their own organization.

I found that fascinating, and I found it fascinating from that day to this.

There have been some quite

good shows there was a sort of i did a shadow dance of the book and then the film which was directed by um the same guy we got very lucky with uh secret service the tv drama we've been talking about this out on monday the 27th of april but part of the reason i think it's come out as such what i hope is a very very high quality product is because we had basically an oscar-winning film director and the reason we got that is because he and i made shadow dancer together and i've been trying to get him back to do something ever since he's done an amazing

job, but

And there weren't good things made about Northern Ireland, but there have been a couple of really good.

Say Nothing is very good.

I don't know if you've seen that.

It's on Disney+.

Yeah, that was really good, actually.

So, yeah, that's probably the best.

I mean, it's kind of not specifically about spying, but it's sort of that territory.

And I have to mention David because I really, really... I'm about to start reading The Persian, but I really enjoyed his first book.

And I'm not going to...