An ice-cool hero and a damsel in distress, it’s le Carre at his best

The life of Jonathan Pine, former British soldier and now a suave supervisor at a luxury hotel, hangs on one question: can he convince his enemies that he is what he appears? And John le Carre’s The Night

Manager (BBC1) succeeds or fails on the same single point. We have to be able to believe in Jonathan Pine.

here is a man who can walk through a crowd of Cairo rioters and barely flinch at the bullets flying past his ears. he breezes into embassies and hands over stolen documents as if espionage were as normal a part of his duties as inspecting the timesheets.

But he is also a servant, who must pour the coffee and smile when boorish guests insult him. If a playboy snaps his fingers or a fat tourist treats him like a doormat, Pine’s polished exterior cannot betray an emotion.

For an actor, that’s a difficult character to play. It would be easy to make Pine look like a fantasist, a dogsbody in some foreign hotel whose colleagues sneer when he hints at his past in special forces. Worse, he could look like a cheap hypocrite, who will suck up any humiliation in return for a bigger tip.

Tom hiddleston deftly dodged both pitfalls and gave us a hero who served his guests and obeyed their orders as though it were his military duty. every glint in his eyes told us this man was thoroughly accustomed to danger but chose to avoid it, the way an alcoholic tries to stay away from whisky.

The man who lures him back is arms dealer hugh Laurie, exchanging his usual ironic drawl for a clipped, sadistic delivery — the voice of a man who tormented his juniors at school and never lost the taste. Both Laurie and hiddleston went to eton, where they doubtless knew the type.

Tom hollander, as Laurie’s vicious little lackey, brought a touch of film noir: his character, grovelling but murderous, seemed to have stepped out of a Forties movie like The Maltese Falcon.

But this is the world of le Carre, the man who wrote Tinker, Tailor, and so all the exotic locations in egypt and Switzerland connect back to London, with its cold offices where the lifts are always broken.

And because le Carre is a traditionalist, the plot might touch on international politics and digital eavesdropping (like modern spy thrillers The honourable Woman and homeland), but it’s really an old-fashioned tale of a hero and a damsel in distress.

even the credits had that classic touch, with a kaleidoscope of bullets that became champagne bubbles and chandeliers that turned into atom bombs.

It was a first episode brimming with suspense and promising more — especially from Olivia Colman as a spymaster in the back corridors of Whitehall.

If that cast seemed splendid, look at who is booked for Ant And Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway (ITV).

Never mind actor Michael Sheen as the guest announcer, and James Corden as the first victim, on his hollywood chat show, of one of the boys’ elaborate practical jokes.

No, the real all-star line-up arrives next week, in a murder mystery trailed at the end of the show — Who Killed Simon Cowell?

Suspects in the assassination of the chubby impresario include David Walliams, Louis Walsh and just about everyone else who has ever been a judge on a Cowell talent contest . . . with emilia Fox from Silent Witness and Kevin Whately from Lewis as the detectives.

The spoof is written by Chris Chibnall, creator of Broadchurch.

But the puzzle is why, instead of launching it straight away, Ant and Dec wasted time with tired segments including a fancy-dress race (they charged around a maze, dressed as characters from Pacman) and a frankly creepy feature where two parents followed their grownup daughter on her gap-year round the world, spying on her but never once saying hello.

They’ve been named Best Presenters at the national TV awards for 15 years in a row. But, along the way, it seems Ant McPartlin and Dec Donnelly have lost the ability to tell the showstoppers apart from the dross.