Le Carré: BBC is right to give my spymaster a sex change for television
JOHN LE CARRÉ has admitted that his novels need updating for 21st-century television audiences, after giving his blessing to a raft of changes to an adaptation of his The Night Manager, which begins on BBC One tomorrow.
The six-part James Bond-style production has cost £3 million an episode to make – 50 per cent more than the BBC’s recent epic, War and Peace – and is thought to be the most expensive drama in the corporation’s history. It features Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie, alongside Olivia Colman, who plays Burr, a spymaster originally written by le Carré as a man.
Colman was pregnant during the filming, prompting further changes to the script, but le Carré, whose real name is David Cornwell, said that he “dearly wished” he had written the character as a woman in the original book. He said: “In the novel, my chief British spook had been a man named Burr – a rough-cut, ponderous, no nonsense fellow, but a man for all that, and a throwback to my own distant days in the secret world, when female officers were, to say the very least, a rarity.
“But did we really want this in 2015: one white male middle-aged man pitched against another white middleaged man, and using a third, younger, white middle-aged man as his weapon of choice? We didn’t. So enter instead – to loud applause from myself – the delightful Mrs Burr. I dearly wish I had written her into the novel.”
David Farr, the writer who adapted the book for the six-part BBC drama, said le Carré “took a little bit more time” to come round to the idea of changing the character’s gender, but “now he’s over the moon about it”.
The Night Manager, published in 1993, was le Carré’s first post-Cold War novel, and tells the story of Jonathan Pine, played by Hiddleston, who goes undercover to try to bring down armsdealing billionaire Richard Roper, played by Laurie.
In the book, Roper attempts to sell weapons to South American drug cartels, but this was considered too out of date for the television adaptation, so the theatre of conflict has been moved to the Middle East.
Simon Cornwell, le Carré’s son and executive producer of the drama, said that the series had a £20 million budget, the equivalent of more than £3 million per hour.
The BBC is understood to have contributed just under a third, with international broadcasters providing the remainder.
Cornwell said: “It’s a cinematic experience. It just looks amazing. It is basically a six-hour film.”