| Abstract: | This article considers an episode of the television drama-documentary series Spy!, broadcast on the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1980. The programme proved controversial owing to its depiction of a physical assault during interrogation at an MI5 facility, Camp 020, during the Second World War. Numerous 020 veterans complained, pointing out that, with one exception, such physical violence had never taken place there. As their complaints were largely made in private correspondence with the BBC, which stood by its programme, the association of wartime British intelligence with physical abuse was allowed to go unchallenged in the minds of the viewing public. |
