GUINNESS WOWS AS ULTIMATE SMILEY

TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY, BBC

MORE than once in the last couple of months somebody has evoked the novels of John le Carré to explain what’s been happening in the world.

There’s been cloak: the hack of the Democratic National Committee. There’s been dagger: the leak of the contents of said hack to Wikileaks for dissemination through the media.

Terms considered lost to a bygone era have resurfaced with a vengeance. There’s been talk of bloodless coups and spheres of influence. There’s been talk of agents, double agents and counter-espionage.

Most strikingly of all there’s been talk of kompromat. That is information held in reserve by the Russians – once upon a time it would of course have been the Soviets – to blackmail or control an intelligence or other asset.

Without getting into the ins and the outs of it, without getting into who is supposed to have done what and to whom and for what purpose, it pitches us into a world and a time closer to the cold war than anything we’ve become used to since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Spycraft has changed and changed utterly since then of course. Nowadays it’s a game of cat and mouse between coders and hackers. A lot of the time it’s not even as sophisticated as all that.

The story of how John Podesta’s email was hacked is more a tale of bumbling incompetence than cyber sophistication. The chairman of Hillary Clinton’s campaign fell victim to a simple phishing exercise, that’s about one step up from being conned by a Nigerian price.

Aside from the obvious and potentially ruinous geopolitical implications, it all seems so small bore and pretty. The Podesta family risotto recipe was a topic for discussion at one point. What feels very familiar is just how grubby it is.

That’s something that le Carré captures so brilliantly in his work. It’s the exact opposite almost of Ian Fleming’s work with James Bond. Bond is glitz and glamour, sex and violence. Le Carré’s work largely eschews that to paint a more realistic picture of life in the intelligence services.

That le Carré – real name David Cornwell – was an intelligence officer in his youth only adds to the sense that the world as he portrays is respectful of the real deal. That said Fleming also worked for military intelligence during the second world war.

Accurate and realistic or not the world of novels like The Spy Who Came In From The Cold and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy feels real, it feels lived in, feels as though everything and everybody in it has its place.

To capture that feeling and transfer it to the screen, big or small, is not easily done. Even so there are a great very many successful adaptations of le Carré’s work.

Many of us were glued to the BBC’s The Night Manager last year for instance and just a few years ago there was a very successful adaptation of Tinker,

Tailor, Soldier, Spy by the Swedish direction Tomas Alfredson.

Towering over them all, however, is John Irvin’s seven part adaptation for the BBC. Nothing better captures the grubby nature of intelligence work. Nothing better captures the faded grandeur of the Britons and their lost empire.

The Circus – as the headquarters of MI6 is known in le Carre’s universe – is grey and grim, a warren of corridors and too small rooms with too many files, physical files bound in brown paper. All of which compliments wonderfully a sense of paranoia and claustrophobia as the officers, led by the mercurial Control (played by Alexander Knox), seek to ferret out a Russian mole, loyal to or compromised by Moscow Centre.

Central to it all is George Smiley, the long time deputy of Control, an inscrutable man played by Alec Guinness. As good as Gary Oldman’s performance was in Alfredson’s version, Guinness remains the quintessential Smiley.

Unlike in the movie version, which by necessity had to be completed in a couple of hours, this version plays out over a much more stately seven plus hours. It allows for greater character development and a more organic teasing out of plot and this being an espionage thriller that is absolutely critical. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a masterfully realised project – a brilliant story, brilliantly directed with some outstanding character actors taking on meaningful roles. Sian Philips features as Smiley’s oft mentioned but rarely seen wife Ann. Ian Richardson, famous later for House of Cards, is every bit as slithery and smooth as Bill Hayden as he was as Francis Urquhart. For all its unsettling moral ambiguity, there’s something reassuring about the world le Carre created and mirrored. In those days on the big issues we all where we stood. Now we’re not quite so sure anymore.