Comic Cuts - 1 March 2019

Just my luck: it's the warmest February on record, the sun is shining and I've managed to catch a cold. I woke up on Tuesday feeling a bit rough, but got through the day with a few sniffles and sneezes. Dosed up with paracetamol, I had an early night, but woke up at four in the morning with a blocked nose and sore throat.

Will some of the Co-op's own "Max Strength Cold & Flu Relief Powder for Oral Suspension: Lemon Flavour" – that's what it's called! – do the trick. Let me just take a sip of my oral suspension and I'll let you know.

I've just finished the third season of Berlin Station, which is one of the better spy series on TV at the moment. (You can find it on More4 here in the UK, although they're still catching up on earlier episodes.)

A Russian oligarch close to the Kremlin plans to destabilize Estonia by way of ramping up tensions between Estonians and Russians living in the country. Assassination takes out the moderate political voice, misinformation drives a wedge between the populations, and an attack takes out the electricity and communications across large portions of the country.

An invasion force has been created to rush in and "rescue" Russian citizens, drawing Estonia back into Russian control; other Baltic states will likely follow suit, re-creating the USSR and the conditions to bring down the Iron Curtain once again.

Far-fetched? Not when you learn that the US military had to block a Russian troll farm from disrupting the US midterms last year. The military shut down the Internet Research Agency of St. Petersburg, "a company underwritten by an oligarch close to President Vladimir Putin," the action taken in order "to thwart attempts to interfere with a US election" according to The Washington Post (26 February 2019). It's not quite an invasion, but, as they would have said in Berlin Station, it's "right out of the Crimean playbook."

Richard Armitage, central to the first two series, is sidelined for much of the new series, a captive of the Russians and although Rhys Ifans is back, he's hasn't the screentime he was given last season. No, this time, centre stage is Leland Orser as Robert Kirsch, who hasn't had the flashy, front man role in previous seasons but who still managed to establish himself as deputy chief at the CIA's Berlin office under both Richard Jenkins (as Steven Frost, also returning this series) and Michelle Forbes (Valerie Edwards, the current Section Chief). The whole series could be run from Kirsch's nervous energy like a battery. He could probably have powered Estonia.

It's an up-to-the-minute Spooks, more colourful than Le Carre with all the usual spycraft and plenty of twists and turns. The show is unflinching when it comes to its treatment of characters; some self-serving bastards for once act and behave like self-serving bastards and, like Spooks, not everyone is going to survive to see season four. And I do hope there is a season four.

My oral suspension isn't helping much.

I don't know what it is about Berlin, but I've just started watching the second season of Counterpart, which I'll discuss once I've watched it all the way through. I'm also reading the spy thriller Berlin Nightfall by Jack Grimwood (or Jon Courtenay Grimwood as he's better known) which I suppose I could also describe as more colourful than John Le Carre. It's certainly an enjoyable romp.

I was going to talk about what a no deal Brexit means to me as a small publisher, but it's too damn depressing. I feel like we're putting up our own Berlin Wall and in a few years we're going to be queuing up at the Eurotunnel, sitting in our equivalent of a Trabant, desperately wanting to buy jeans in France.

Instead, here's a picture of a kitten wondering what the hell we're doing to ourselves and our country.