Inspector Morse: Last Bus to Woodstock

 "Is sex more trouble than it's worth?"

This is another solid episode, with a fairly impressive cast, with a couple of twists at the end> John Thaw, as ever, is superb. But this- based, I believe, on what was Colin Dexter's very first novel in 1975, although updated to not use the phrase "swinging set" or, indeed, the distasteful subplot of John's perviness- doesn't really stand out as an episode.

It's much toned down from the rather edgy novel. Neither of the Crowthers die, and Mary doesn't deliberately murder Sylvia. It leads to a far more sedate experience which shows, more than most episodes, how much has been changed from the rather dark and sexually sleazy early novels. Instead, we have an innocent female student of English Literature who gets #MeToo'd, in a very 1988 way, by a creepd don who faces no consequences, and blames herself, and also gets to talk to Morse about Spenser and the naughty Earl of Rochester.

It's good. I enjoyed it. But this is not, I think, an episode that will linger in the memory.

Incidentally, I'm 44 and don't instinctively think of 1988 as being particularly long ago. I have memories from 1988. It feels modern and contemporary. Yet this is a world of office desks without PC's, of men routinely wearing suits in offices, of calling colleagues "Mr" and "Miss" at work, and of typists. When I started in the Civil Service in 2003, it was literally the Monday after typists had ceased to be a thing...

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Flushing Out the Mole

"Poor George. Life's such a puzzle to you, isn't it?"

Ah. You know how I’ve been saying that yes, Tinker Tailor is bloody good, the acting is superlative, the slow pace is excellent and the whole thing is superb but not quite in the very first rank? Well, I’ve changed my mind. Sometimes it’s the impact of a final episode that can fully drive home a multilayered and complex subtext, and this final episode is both extraordinary in itself and defines the entire series. I suspect also that there are all sorts of scriptural references I’m not getting.

Yes, this is the episode where the mole is unmasked,  and the first ten or so minutes are a suspenseful whodunit, but that’s over quickly. Gerald is caught, he’s Bill Haydon, and suddenly the world is entirely different. The whole senior echelon of the Circus are summoned to hear the tapes of Haydon speaking to his handler, and you can see from the previously supercilious Percy Alleline that he’s utterly defeated. The tables have turned, and the outcast Smiley suddenly commands the room, a situation that lasts for most of the episode. Toby in particular is suddenly very, very oleaginous.

We see where Jim Prideaux has gone- he’s watching as Bill is taken to a camp and, quite obviously, roughed up. Everyone is shocked that good old Bull, outgoing, patriotic, the “laughing cavalier” should be a traitor. But Ian Richardson is extraordinary in explaining his motives to Smiley- they all started at the Circus when they were “golden with hope”, and Bill gradually came to hate America for its callousness towards its own poor, presumably meaning its cruelly inadequate welfare system and its lack of a decent health system- but was the Soviet Union any better? America may never have had an NHS, but neither did the USSR. Bill, though, with the cynicism of the defeated idealist, comes to see, as early as the Forties, that Britain is a fading, irrelevant power. None of this explains his motives satisfactory but that, in itself, makes him seem real.

Even his affair with Ann was directed by Karla- he was to “join the queue” to make any suspicion from Smiley feel like a personal thing. And yes, he shafted his old partner Jim. He is a traitor in every way. But he’s an unsavoury character in other ways- he tries to pay off not only a girlfriend but a “boy” who is “a cherub but no angel”. I assume we’re not talking over sixteen here. Brr. This was hardly approved of in 1979 but there was perhaps more of a tolerance for a kind of public school pederasty that makes the flesh creep.

Fittingly, Bill is killed by Jim amongst lax security, the traitor meeting a fate far more merciful that the traditional one at Tyburn but denied a melancholy, vodka-soaked exile. And Smiley is left master of all he surveys, his words conveying absolute authority as he explains he’s been “asked to look after things for a while.” But this is nicely undercut when we meet Ann, played by the splendid Sian Phillips, who is openly having relationships and living free and apart, treating George as an innocent friend to be patronised. And that’s Smiley; man of the world and yet not so, a fascinating character, one very much worthy of the great Alec Guinness.

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...

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: How It All Fits Together

”One day that lack of moderation will be Karla’s downfall.”

Things are developing now, plot-wise, but plot is not, of course, everything. The slow pace allows for depth, character and, I think, commentary both on how youthful ideology fades into cynicism, as well as reflection once more on how Britain's place in the world has diminished into- to use a '70s phrase- managed decline. All so much more grown-up than the delusions of today's political class that we, a medium power since at least 1956, can somehow survive against the great powers of today without the solidarity of the European Union. But I digress.

Perhaps the central scene is the flashback to Smiley’s interrogation of Karla in New Delhi in the ‘50s, where Smiley talks and talks and expresses a cynicism about the Cold War and ideology that he assumes his counterpart shares- but Karla, a fanatical Communist, says nothing. And there is another interrogation- of Peter by Percy Alleline, who now knows of Ricky Tarr and believes him to be a defector. But this in turn proves to Smiley that the Witchcraft source is linked to the mile in that both are run by Karla. Soviet penetration of British intelligence is complete, and now we have to tell the Americans, who don’t trust us anyway. Such is our place in the world.

Not everything here is worthy of praise- there are once again no female speaking parts(!) and I note that Fawn, the only character not from the world of public schools and Oxbridge, has his accent mocked and is judged only in terms of his physical prowess. But things are heating up, and it’s all very compelling.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Smiley Tracks the Mole

"Poor loves. Trained to empire. Trained to rule the waves."

The pace is certainly as slow as ever and, in fact, the structure of this series is completely unlike what we’d normally expect even back in ‘79. (Incidentally the offices of the Circus, with all the brown, the grey and the paper files, are a splendid artefact of Seventiesness). After last episode being pretty much an extended flashback, here we get Peter trying to burgle the Circus and ascertaining that the file on Irina has been deliberately ripped out, while George visits Connie and we get an extended flashback showing us all the suspects. That’s it.

Connie, though... she’s a fascinating and multilayered character, and not only by virtue of being a rare female presence in the Circus and, indeed, the episode’s only female speaking part. Sacked as Head of Research for, it seems, getting too close to fingering Polyakov as Karla’s local underling, she’s very bitter behind the sunny surface, and now struggling to find meaning in her life. Beryl Reid is superb but so is Alec Guinness; he says little, but somehow avoids coming across as cold.

We learn, mainly through flashbacks, that Control, and by extension George, always found the “Witchcraft” material a little too convenient, and Alleline’s arrogant pride a little annoying- and Alleline, indeed, comes across like a proper twonk. Then we have the cynical Roy, the enigmatic Bill, the ambitious Toby, suspects all. And it’s all a splendid opportunity to see a bunch of character actors at work.

It’s gripping. And, still, pretty much nothing has happened.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Tarr Tells His Story

"It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?"

Again the pace is positively glacial- plot-wise, Ricky Tarr reveals the presence of a mile high up in the circus, something Control knew about a good while ago, and Smiley is appointed to smoke out “Gerald”. That’s it.

But it isn’t plot that’s the purpose: this episode, an extended flashback with Hywel Bennett foregrounded as Tarr relates what happened, isn’t about that but about the pathos of Tarr, in Lisbon on assignment, coming across Irina, a Russian wanting to defect, and falling in love with her while trying to get out of her the big secret- there’s someone in Russia, known as Karla, who is running an agent called “Gerald” right at the top of the circus. And there’s more to it even than this; Irina is a complex character, with a deeply religious soul that thirst for meaning and the freedom to explore it.

And it is Tarr who almost certainly dooms her by reporting back to London in too much detail, and she is returned to Russia in circumstances which evoke the possible horrors and, indeed, martyrdom that await her.

Tarr’s broken reaction is real too, but not overplayed. And we find that only Smiley is brought back from retirement to which the mole, without involving the resources of the Circus itself.

It’s slow. It’s gripping. It stars Alec Guineas. This is extraordinary telly.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: Return to the Circus

"I shall become an oak of my own generation..."

This is, of course, a justly renowned piece of telly and, as I saw it before many years ago, I’ll not be departing from the general view. I must confess that, to my mother’s disapproval, I’ve yet to read any John Le Carre, so I’m unfamiliar with any greater levels of depth and detail which no longer exist deep within the novel and, indeed, series of novels on which this is based. I comment only on what I see. But I see much.

The slow pace is truly extraordinary from the perspective of 2019, forty years later the pre-credits scene consists simply of the four mole suspects- Bill Haydon, Toby Esterhase, Roy Bland and Percy Alleline- slowly entering a room. but this allows for much subtle physical acting by the character actors portraying them. Similarly, very little really happens- we learn of the existence of the mile, Jim’s Czech mission goes south, the retired George Smiley is accosted by the gossipy and somewhat camp Roddy Martindale and endures am interrogatory lunch which gives us much exposition about the Circus, Smiley’s forced retirement, the uneasy atmosphere, and his hinted at marital problems. He is then summoned by Peter Guilin to meet Oliver Lacon and hear an apparently shocking tale from one Ricki Tarr. That’s it. That’s all that happens in fifty minutes.

And it happens slowly. There’s loads of tension in the scenes with Jim in Brno. We get to see Alec Guinness’ extraordinary acting mannerisms and use of cleaning his glasses to evoke a deep interiority. It’s fascinating to see the master at work here; no method actor he. It’s all about the exterior mannerisms, as he says in his autobiography, and that’s what makes him so bloody good.

We also get time to get an impression of the Circus as a downbeat, very male (there are no speaking female parts in the whole 50 minutes!), very public school and Oxbridge little club not trusted by the Americans. We get to breathe. And it’s wonderful.

I’m looking forward to the rest. I can’t help noticing, though, that Ian Richardson looks scarily Old at 45, and that’s me in three years...