Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Tinker Tailor

“You don’t break, exactly. You just run out of stories to tell.”

Yes, I know; it’s been nothing but Stranger Things for a week. I’m afraid Mrs Llamastrangler and I have become addicted, and what we watch together isn’t dictated by the needs of the blog in the way that my solo viewing often tends to be. Fear not, though; I haven’t forgotten this, or Batman and Robin, or indeed Agents of SHIELD or other things I need to return to.

This is a dark episode about Jim Prideaux, having been caught in Brno and extensively tortured and then hung out to dry by the Circus, telling us his side of the story while striving as a prep schedule teacher while living a life of genteel poverty in a caravan. It’s a sad, bleak episode and the lack of care for someone so traumatised in the service of his country is staggering. Then again, so are many other things in that most foreign of countries, the past. It’s heavily implied that Jim and Bill Haydon were lovers at uni, but also that gay relationships are implicitly acceptable pretty much only in this context (“We were children!”) and, amazingly, that recruitment into the security services was linked into this kind of circle, back in the days when both prejudice and the law meant that any deviation from heterosexuality was seen simply as a security risk. It all just seems so long ago.

Also tragic is the other tale we here of the operation going wrong, Control being secretive, Bill Haydon taking charge and, worst of all, Control starting to forget things. But none of that can compare to Jim’s stoic description of torture, how the days went by until his inevitable cracking, and the interrogation of Karla, immediately recognisable by the mention of Smiley’s old cigarette lighter. There’s a real sense of the Circus being old, hopelessly inefficient and riddled with compromising agents, mirroring a country in decline, a snapshot of how the country felt when it elected Thatcher’s Tories in ‘79. Yet there’s also a harsh lack of care, an acceptance of casualties, in a world where all that matters is jockeying for the position of captain of the Titanic.

This episode, more than the others, is as much about mood as it is about plot, and is quite a step up. But more than anything else it’s showing us just how very long ago it was in 1969, when I was two. I feel old.