CREATING A SECRET AGENT ON SPEC
Classic spy thriller The Ipcress File, made famous by Michael Caine’s film, is back with a new six-part TV series …and, says the leading man, getting the iconic glasses right was key
IT WAS always about the specs. Ever since Michael Caine appeared on our movie screens as secret agent Harry Palmer in 1965, the deliberately unglamorous spy created as the antithesis of James Bond, the heavy, square frames of his glasses were a key part of the look. In 2006, the iconic pair Caine wore in The Ipcress File were auctioned at Christie’s for double the £3,000 estimate. So when Joe Cole – John Shelby in TV’s Peaky Blinders – took on the daunting task of stepping into the great man’s shoes, one of his concerns, he says, was finding the right pair of specs.
Cole, who plays Palmer in an ITV six-part adaptation starting next month, says: “I remember going into opticians Cutler and Gross in Knightsbridge. I tried on every pair in the shop and there was only one pair that worked. As soon as I put them on, I just knew. Then our costume designer Keith Madden turned up and he echoed, ‘Yeah, they’re the ones’.
“It was great because glasses are tricky to get right: they have to really suit your face. Originally, we were looking at the same ones that Michael Caine wore back in the day. They just didn’t work.
“The ones we used still have the very hard black, strong frames. As soon as I put them on, it was, ‘Job done’.”
Back in the 60s, Richard Harris and Christopher Plummer were said to have passed up the chance to play Palmer before the part went to Caine whose breakthrough role had been a posh cavalry officer in the classic Zulu.
He relished playing Harry, he revealed at the time, because he was “more like the real me”. It was the role that made him a star.
The movie was an immediate success and was subsequently included on a British Film Institute list of the Best 100 British Films of the 20th Century.
Simon Winder, publishing director at Penguin Press, says: “Until Harry Palmer wandered on to the scene, the traditions of the English spy novel were essentially upperclass ones, with John Buchan, Ian Fleming and John le Carré the masters of the genre.”
Author Len Deighton, 93, who wrote the book on which the film is based, is the London-born son of a chauffeur and cook. He worked as a commercial artist, having trained at St Martin’s School of Art and the Royal College of Art.
He knew Soho like the back of his hand. He’d also seen a fair bit of the world, having completed two-and-a-half years of national service with the RAF and worked as a flight attendant with British Overseas Airways.
Following the 1961 publication of a cartoon cookery illustration in the Daily Express, he was commissioned by The Observer to provide a “Cookstrip” for the paper’s magazine, which he supplied weekly between March 1962 and August 1966.
In 1961, he wrote The Ipcress File, his first novel, on a trip to France – “as a holiday diversion”, he later said. It was published the following year, shortly after the cinema release of Dr No, the first instalment in the James Bond film franchise.
Deighton’s hero – unnamed in the novel but christened Harry Palmer for the screen – was the antithesis of the smooth, superficial 007.
Emmy award-winner James Watkins, director of this TV adaptation, explains the differences between Fleming’s creation and Deighton’s agent. “Bond is a superhero,” he says. “He kills without thinking or caring. He’s an Establishment figure. He went to Eton. He uses his fists and his weapons more than his brain; gadgets rather than real life.”
Harry is short-sighted, working class and haunted by killing in Korea. A reluctant spy, he’s trying to make his way in a world that’s stacked against him. He’s the anti-Bond.
The Ipcress File has been adapted for the small screen by Oscar-nominated and Bafta award-winning writer John Hodge. It was shot in Liverpool (doubling for London) and Croatia (doubling for Helsinki, Beirut and the Pacific).
It also stars Lucy Boynton (Bohemian Rhapsody), Tom Hollander (The Night Manager) and Ashley Thomas (Salvation).
Set amid the highly charged atmosphere of the Cold War as it rages between the West and East, Palmer is a British army sergeant on the make in Berlin. In this newly partitioned city, a sharp working-class young man with sophisticated tastes can make a lot of money.
Wholesaler, retailer, fixer, smuggler, Harry’s varied interests bring him into contact with everything and everyone – until the law catches up with him and he’s sentenced to eight years in a grim military jail.
But his impressive network and efficiency have not gone unnoticed and a gentleman from British intelligence has a proposal. To avoid prison, Harry will become a spy.
When he got the part, Joe Cole didn’t plan to watch the 1965 film, he says. “But when I got up to Liverpool to start shooting, I thought, ‘Maybe I’d better check this out’. I appreciated it for what it is and what it was.
LUCY BOYNTON plays upper-middle class spy Jean Courtney, a part taken by Sue Lloyd in the film original but given more heft in this new TV series for the obvious reason the character can be considerably fleshed out over six hours as opposed to the 149-minute cinema version.
“The scripts are brilliant in the way they stay true to the essence of the original story but the time and space you get with six episodes mean Jean has had much more life breathed into her,” she says.
“It’s a very special role. Our costume designer kept joking about wanting to get T-shirts made with ‘Everyone wants to be Jean’ on the front. It was an empowering experience walking in her shoes.”
Jean works at a provisional branch of the War Office in London’s Charlotte Street.
“The way society, and those around her outside of her work, underestimate her because she’s a young woman is something she powerfully utilises. She can therefore hide in plain sight,” says Lucy.
She loved the hairstyles and coveted the clothes.Then there were the cars.
“Over the course of the series, Jean also drives a ridiculously stunning succession of them,” she reveals. “She starts with this gorgeous cream drop-top MG. I have a picture of my dad when he was in his 20s
‘Harry is a reluctant spy, trying to make his way in a world stacked against him, he’s the anti-Bond’
with this same car in blue. It was his pride and joy so I was sending him pictures daily.”
Tom Hollander didn’t have to be asked twice to take on the role of supercilious, stiletto-sharp spy chief Major Dalby. “The reason I wanted to do it,” he says, “was because of the wit. We stuck to the scripts exactly. Often, you read a script and then play around with it because you have a sense there’s a better version. But John Hodge’s scripts were so precise. He’d really thought about each word before he’d written it.”
DALBY IS the boss of a spy agency in London which is independent of MI5. “He’s been around a bit and is slightly weathered. There’s a cynicism about him and a superiority in terms of condescension to MI5.” It was a great experience, he says. “Filming The Ipcress File was like being in a time machine. That’s true for any period drama except this was in the middle of the pandemic and so the fictional world was so much more alive than the real world.”
Hopes run high that Harry Palmer is back to stay. Executive producer Will Clarke points out: “We own rights to another three Len Deighton novels. So the ambition for us is to go on and continue Harry’s odyssey through the 60s and capture those wonderful moments of social and political change. I think this is just the beginning.”
The Ipcress File begins on ITV on Sunday March 6 at 9pm