Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Smiley Sets a Trap

"Ever bought a fake picture, Toby?"

We get closer to unmasking Gerald in a slowly gripping final episode, but we begin with a rather odd character, Jerry, player with delightful eccentricity by the legendary Joss Ackland. Yet Jerry speaks in a bizarre “Red Indian” argot of “braves” and things that are “heap big”, a retro type of casual racism from a very different age. This, like the BP petroleum station, reminds us that this was made fiery years ago and makes me, a young man of forty-two, to feel not perhaps in the very first flush of youth.

Jerry, while admittedly confessing to some xenophobia owing to Toby Esterhase’s Hungarian origins (very much played down in this adaptation) Jerry drips more suspicion on Esterhase, who forced him to sit on suspicious information of Soviet troop movements on the Czech-Austrian border just after Prideaux (who seems to have gone AWOL) was caught.  So Toby is lured to George’s lair and, in a series of gripping scenes where Alec Guinness demonstrates the art of acting at its finest, interrogated and turned, a pawn who knows not what lies behind the suspicious largesse of Witchcraft. With Esterhase an innocent dupe, the suspects reduce to three...

I like this. I like it a lot- and I saw an article in the Guardian about a week ago that praised Tinker Tailor to the skies. So far I’m finding it very good, indeed excellent, but not quite first class, in spite of the performances. Yes, there’s a certain subtext of national decline and doing the right thing in spite of that, without reward- yet I can’t help feeling that the slow pace and silences, while unquestionably a good thing, flatter the series somewhat by allowing the viewer to fill in the subtext.

Still, Smiley is setting a trap for Gerald; let’s see how it ends...