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: 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.