The BBC’s new Night Manager? It’s more 50 shades of brown...
THE LITTLE DRUMMER GIRL BBC1, last night ★★★★✩
DO not adjust your set. everything in The Little Drummer Girl ( BBC1) really is a shade of brown. Secret agents conduct interrogations in wood-panelled meeting rooms, illuminated a dingy beige by racks of dim neon.
Women in camel coats and knee-length leather boots carry ticking bombs around German towns in two-tone brown suit-cases. You have to wonder whether this production has been sponsored by Ron-seal, because everything looks like it’s been lacquered in two layers of varnish.
All the spies in this Seventies thriller, based on a John le Carre novel, are hypersensitive to the spectrum of muddy colours. One griev-ing father whose son has been blown up in a terrorist atrocity stops sobbing long enough to describe the paintwork on the killers’ car: ‘Salmon, peach, Vienna sausage...’
‘ Copper brown!’ growls the grizzled counter-terrorism expert, recognising the precise variant. Thank goodness he did – imagine if Mossad agents were sidetracked on some wild hunt for a vehicle the colour of Vienna sausage. The whole investigation would be compromised.
This six-part espionage drama is the much-anticipated follow-up to the BBC’s 2016 Le Carre smash hit, The Night Man-ager, starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie. That delighted view-ers with its breath-taking loca-tions, whisking us from sultry Cairo to the crisp Swiss ski-slopes and then a Majorcan cove.
THE Little Drummer Girl takes us round europe too. But it doesn’t make us feel like billionaires. Much of the time was spent on a rocky beach on the Greek isle of Naxos – apparently chosen for its towering brown cliffs – or on the streets of Bad Godesberg, a sub-urb of Bonn in Germany, where everything looks, well, yes, brown – even the pavements.
From the tense opening bomb-blast scene, we are plunged imme-diately into 1979 and the interna-tional fight against Arab terrorism in the wake of the Munich Olym-pics massacre – and a wave of hijackings by Palestinians.
Israel’s secret service is prepared to do whatever it takes to protect its people – but in this murky, con-fused war it’s difficult to under-stand what anyone is planning. The Night Manager seduced us with its super-rich crooks and the intoxicating sense of secrecy. The Little Drummer Girl offers none of that. There’s a sense of anti-climax about this, but once we’ve accepted this drama is offering grit, not glamour, the story draws us in.
Our heroine, Charlie (Florence Pugh), is a sulky, over- entitled actress, estranged from her mother, who harbours romantic day-dreams. Her obnoxious Marxist boyfriend sponges off her, dipping into her purse whenever he likes.
Charlie and her theatre pals accept an invitation to perform Shakespeare in Greece from an anonymous benefactor, whose idea of introducing himself is to reflect light from his watchface into her eyes while she’s on stage. Instead of calling the police, she takes the bait and flies straight to the Aegean.
A tall, mysterious stranger (Alexander Skarsgard) appears. He strolls past, humming her favourite tune, and lies on the beach, pointedly refusing to look at her. Clearly, he knows that Charlie has a thing for stalkers. He gives himself a patently fake name, Peter Richthofen, describes him-self as divorced and lures her off to the mainland.
As he drives at 90mph through Athens, a cruel and enigmatic smile plays on his lips while she sobs and begs him to slow down. Yes, this was the macho, action-packed Seventies, but that style of dating is not so much James Bond, more Yorkshire Ripper.
Because Richthofen reveals nothing, while Charlie is shallow, the first episode felt as if its char-acters were cardboard chess pieces being moved around a board.
He’s a divorcee, she doesn’t speak to her mum... we’re meant to think these two are mysterious, but they just come across as unlikeable.
Being liked isn’t something that bothers gravel-voiced Israeli spy Martin Kurtz (Michael Shannon). Back in his wood-panelled world, he is trying to invent new uses for brown furnishings by building a soundproofed cabinet and padding the walls with World Of Leather’s dark walnut range.
Then he stands inside and screams himself hoarse. No wonder he sounds like his throat has been sandpapered. Its charac-ters may be flimsy, but The Little Drummer Girl has been filmed with extraordinary care. every shot is sculpted, with tiny clues scattered everywhere. Gold watches are one motif: Richthofen wears one, as does the bomber Halil, who looks like he has just stepped out of an Old Spice advert. Girls swoon at his feet.
When we meet Kurtz, we’re look-ing down from a high aerial shot as he steps out of a car. Then we watch from above as he descends a spiral staircase. It’s all elegantly choreographed, and designed to induce a dizzy sense of forebod-ing. But it’s definitely brown.