Sweary killers with bulletproof bras? What would Le Carré say!

George Smiley would be horrified. Not at the string of international assassinations, nor by the incompetence of Britain’s security forces, but at the language they use.

When John le Carré’s mildmannered spy worked at ‘ the Circus’, or mi6, his strongest imprecation was: ‘oh dear.’ even the villainous Karla rarely uttered anything worse than ‘damn’.

But the favourite swearword of the spooks in Killing Eve (BBC1) is an eight-letter urological term so revolting that, wherever you put the asterisks, it can’t be printed in a family newspaper.

These immature agents spend their days playing practical jokes and their nights singing karaoke. you can forget coded signals over dinner in a dim-lit restarant: this lot bring their lunch to work in Tupperware boxes.

in this version of the classic espionage tale, the nursery rhyme goes Tinker, Tailor, Spotty oik.

But away from ‘the Playground’, as Killing eve’s mi6 should be known, the world of secret intelligence is as glamorous as ever. Jodie Comer plays assassin Villanelle, a femme who is as fatale as they come. Her wardrobe, with its bulletproof sports bras and poisoned hairpins, would make mrs Peel of The Avengers turn applegreen brilliant in early instalments of The Bridge) is ideal in the role.

The whole series is already on iPlayer. Childish it may be in parts, but i won’t be able to resist bingeing on Killing eve long before the rest is broadcast.

No Frenchwoman could be a match, though, for the brawny fishwives of lossiemouth in morayshire, on the Scottish riviera. As presenter rob Bell discovered on Walking Britain’s Lost Railways (C5), these ladies would hitch up their skirts and wade out to the fishing boats in the harbour every day — carrying their menfolk on their backs.

‘ No self- respecting woman would let her man go to sea with wet feet,’ explained one modernday wife, approvingly. This unconventional new six-part series about British history and archaeology travels some of the 4,000 miles of track axed in the infamous Beeching cuts. it’s a novel way to explore how Britain has changed since the Sixties.

in lossiemouth, for instance, where steam locomotives once whisked each day’s catch to market ( saving the wives a ten-mile walk), the only evidence now of the railway days is a row of sand dunes — said to be the burial sites of old carriages.

A partly submerged spur of rails and timber crosses the sands, like the fossils of a dinosaur. The train on platform three will be 65 million years late . . .