OK, Boomer: The BBC’s ‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy’

There’s a mole in the Circus, George

Every generation recasts the cultural canon, but the Boomers, with their socio-political firepower, blew it all up. From Monty Python to Spike Lee, from Prince to Wolf Hall, they scorned the old orthodoxies, rediscovered forgotten gems and created a whole new corpus of culturally awesome content. And then never stopped going on about it. But were their choices… ok?

OK, Boomer: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (BBC TV, 1979)

Playing out over seven episodes, this is a slow-moving, serpentine adaptation of John le Carré’s bestselling meditation on betrayal. Retired spy George Smiley is called back into action to investigate his old colleagues – the most senior members of the British Secret Service – one of whom is a KGB double agent.

SPOILER WARNING: It’s been 50 years guys, you should at least have read the book by now. But in case you have not, and have also not watched the film or the TV series, there are *hints* in here that you might prefer to avoid. 

In August 1979 electricians at Thames Television went on strike, closely followed by staff at all the other regional stations. This caused ITV to go off the air entirely for the duration of what would turn out to be the longest strike in British television history. ITV’s holding screen, which explained the strike and promised that transmission would soon resume, regularly clocked up over a million viewers.

For those eleven weeks between August and October the two BBC channels had the skies to themselves. Broadcast in September and October in the ‘classic serial’ slot usually reserved for ruffs and bonnets and curates and cads, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy consistently reached around eight million viewers. While we can perhaps discount one million of these as the kinds of people who would rather watch an inanimate title card than turn the telly off, these audience figures were nevertheless pretty good for a complicated spy story. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was a hit. 

The Legend

1979 was the year of Moonraker, in which Bond went Star Wars: space shuttles, laser guns, and a timeless double entendre (‘I think he’s attempting re-entry, sir’). In what passed for the mind of the British public, intelligence work was closely associated with trick cars and jet-setting sexcapades. The cultural chasm between Bond and George Smiley made the viewing figures for Tinker Tailor all the more surprising; the closest it gets to Bond is Ricki Tarr, a loose cannon agent who is despised by the ‘grown-ups’ back at headquarters. 

This was an altogether unglamorous vision of espionage. It referred baldly to real-world truth that the betrayals and defections of the ‘50s and ‘60s had crashed the morale of the British secret services and delegitimised them in the eyes of the Americans. These were not suave and deadly super-spies; they were institutional failures, grey men in grey rooms, shuffling bits of paper while other, better spies settled the world’s fate thousands of miles away. All the shooting takes place off screen. The most tense sequence shows Smiley’s right-hand man, Peter Guillam, illegitimately accessing a file in a library.

But it was done so well that it captured the nation. And then it entirely mystified it. The plot is complex, full of flashbacks, cover names and double talk. To follow it you have to marry up a chance word there with a significant look there, and sift seemingly accidental encounters for hidden inferences. The script carried over a lot of Le Carre’s fictional spy jargon – ‘lamplighters’ and ‘scalphunters’ and ‘product’ – and did even less to explain it than the book had. It relied on the actors to do some actual acting, to tell us as much with looks and expressions as they did with words. 

Despite being impenetrable (BBC Radio legend Terry Wogan ran a regular Tinker Tailor quiz on his Radio 2 show entitled ‘Does anyone know what’s going on?’) viewing figures for the show remained consistent throughout. This was because the script was brilliant, the direction was thoughtful and gripping, and those actors really did some acting. It helped to have one of the greatest screen actors of his generation, Alec Guinness, in the lead role. 

The legend, then, is that Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was not only a good adaptation of a good novel, but that it was one of the great TV shows, full stop; the holotype of the serious, aspirational TV series, the forerunner of the shows that make up our ‘Golden Age of TV’.

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The Reality

In this case, the legend checks out. Beautifully considered and made, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy really was a milestone in the evolution of TV as a serious art form. Right from the opening sequence it builds a complex structure of character, visuals and story.

This opening scene is a slow and apparently mundane sequence in which a group of men arrive for a meeting. The pacing, and the ordinariness of the location, tells us something important about the story we’re about to see. We’re being encouraged to watch, to pay attention to small details. Because the way each man comes into the room, and the things he does as he sits down, and the clothes he wears: these all tell us something important about him. Toby Esterhase is punctual and prissy in his awful shirt. Roy Bland is bullish and Percy Alleline is patrician. Bill Hayden, late and louche, covers his cup with a saucer less he, ahem, ‘spill the tea’, as the kids say. 

At this point the viewers don’t know a lot of things. We don’t know that one of these men is a ‘mole’, a double agent. We don’t know that they were all identified as suspects by Smiley’s now-dead boss, and that before he died he gave them codenames: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier and (for Esterhase) Poorman. (We don’t know that we are meeting the characters who give the series its title.) We certainly don’t know that we’ve even been given something of a clue as to who the mole might be. But we’re aware that we’re being offered something dense, something that will reward our time.

The apparent elusiveness is key to the success of the serial. It is, at its heart, a detective story, in which George Smiley picks up clues and tries to determine which of the suspects is the double agent. The audience has a double puzzle in front of them. If they are going to play Watson to Smiley’s Holmes, they are going to have to understand this hidden world first. Only then will they be able to plumb its depths. We’re not just looking for clues, we’re looking for clues as to what a clue might look like.

Moreover the detective story gives the show a core structure, with episodic progression and revelation, and a propulsion around which it builds its larger themes: patriotism, betrayal and failure. Using a core episodic structure to build wider and more complex stories is a common narrative technique. It was regularly deployed by that former occupier of the classic serial slot, Charles Dickens, and by subsequent ‘serious’ TV shows including at least the first season of The Wire (2002).

It has its flaws, of course. Hywel Bennet as Ricki Tarr for one, who appears to have come as David Cassidy, complete with eye-liner. Indeed, the whole Tarr flashback, which takes up most of Episode 2, is probably the most clammily seventies sequence of the show.

And, of course, any fan of the book is going to have their own idea of the characters. Ian Richardson is superb as Bill Hayden, but he doesn’t have the large charisma of Colin Firth in Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 film (come to that Tom Hardy is a much better Ricki Tarr). But there are also some inspired bits of casting: Michael Alridge is splendidly pompous as Percy Alleline, Michael Jayston is terrific as Peter Guillam and Beryl Reid is, predictably, wonderful.

But there is one bit of casting that makes up for any other deficiencies, of course. Alec Guinness was something of a ‘get’ for Smiley. He was a genuine movie star three times over: the young lead of Ealing comedies, the character actor of sixties epics and now the wise old mentor of eight year children all over the world as Obi Wan Kenobi in Star Wars (1977). 

Movie stars didn’t usually do TV in those days, TV was domestic and dirty, not like the great, glittering screen, and the two rarely mixed. But Star Wars may have helped, paradoxically. Guinness, not entirely convinced by the script, had negotiated for a percentage of George Lucas’ royalties, a deal that made him an awful lot of money. This perhaps meant he was more willing to take the lower salaries the BBC could offer for work that was not what he called  the ‘bloody awful, banal lines’ of Star Wars. It’s rather fitting that Guinness was there not just for the infantilization of cinema but for the maturation of television.

The unassuming and soft-spoken Smiley is the centre of Tinker, Tailor, and having Guinness, who is so visibly unnoticeable and so eloquently quiet, in the part, gives a drive and solidity to a story that is essentially a dumpy, middle-aged man reading old files and thinking about what they mean.

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Is It OK?

That Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy stands up today is actually a testament to how of its time it is.

Where other classic serials may have dated - the seventies version of Victorian London being all studio over lighting and incongruous mullets - Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - a story of ‘70s Britain filmed in ‘70s Britain - works perfectly. And it enhances the story. The Britain of the show is worn and soiled, all brown and small, run down institutions in run down buildings in a run down country. This only amplifies the themes in the book of the end of Empire and the diminishment of Britain on the world stage.

It means too, that they can carry key concepts from the book into the show. Cast members like Aldridge and Guinness had served in World War II, just as their characters were supposed to have done. It is a setting in which the sexism, racism and, most of all, the classism on which the book concentrates, is still in place. You can believe that these are the officer class spies, trained to betrayal and subterfuge in their upbringing. Betrayed by their parents and sent into the enemy territory of boarding schools like the one featured in the story, where they must adopt the cover of nicknames and the casual deceit of not caring. That chilly aristocratic insouciance that is the only defence against the treachery of the system and the promise of inevitable disappointment.

Disappointment is a key theme of the book. Not just for the characters personally, but in their calling and in their country. But it is also about the possibility of redemption of and from failure. Smiley’s life has largely been a failure: he has been exiled from the Service, he not only failed to recruit his nemesis Karla, but Karla has placed a traitor among his own friends, even his wife habitually betrays him. But even at this moment, he can save himself, his service and his country. The flabby British democracy that seems so bloodless and poor in comparison to the fervent Americans and ruthless Russians, can redeem itself by its very moderation and stolidity.

Filmed over the winter of 1978, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy literalises the disappointment of ‘70s Britain. The world-spanning Empire shrunk to one bleak island, the multi-coloured mod revolution of the ‘60s now bleached of life and colour, mean and tight and miserable. A country beset by strikes that could turn off television channels for months on end. But which could also produce such extraordinary and splendid television. Like Smiley and his serious, patient investigation, Guinness and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy redeem their disappointed country and tell it it can still be great.

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For more spies, betrayals and Colin Firth, try Rowan’s piece on male relationships: