Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979)

I tried to watch this drama series a year or so ago and didn’t get far. It isn’t bad but it has a slow pace, which I am usually fine with, but I am not into spy stories. I gave it a second try recently and had no trouble finishing it this time.

There is some action and a small amount of drama, but mostly it is conversation and a slow-burning tension running through it. I confess I occasionally wasn’t sure who was doing what off screen, but i never completely lost the thread.

Alec Guinness is very good. He gives what seems like a restrained performance, playing a man who fights emotions that rise up inside him so that he can dispassionately do the work required of him with a clear heard and clear eye. A couple of the subplots, such as the former spy teaching at a private school, seem unnecessary on the face of it, though in the example I used there is a big payoff because of it.

I can’t imagine watching the series again., but I still recommend it if you like spy stories without many explosions and violence, especially if you are a fan of John LeCarre.

With the Cold War at it's height, the head of the British counter-espionage agency - "Control" (Alexander Knox) is giving a clear impression that he is losing the plot. He is visibly ailing so his subordinates gather like vultures waiting to take his place. His preferred candidate is the redoubtable, semi-retired, "Smiley" (Sir Alec Guinness) and pretty swiftly we discover that is because the old man is not so doting after all, and is suspicious that there is a spy in his midst. Who can he trust to investigate the matter? There were seven parts to this BBC drama and each episode delivers some more pieces in the jigsaw of his search for the truth and the mole. There's a fine assemblage of British character actors like Ian Bannen and Anthony Bate to populate the ranks of the helpful or the suspected - as well as the slightly odious "Esterhase" (Bernard Hepton), or the slimy "Haydon" (Ian Richardson) or the ambitious "Percy" (Michael Aldridge)! Indeed with such a breadth of promotion-hungry luminaries to chose from, "Smiley" and his right hand man "Guillam" (Michael Jayston) have no idea whom to trust as this cleverly crafted, internecine, story of betrayal and duplicity unravels before us. John Irwin and Arthur Hopcraft have developed John Le Carré's original novel thoroughly, with plenty attention to the detail. There are clues a-plenty, red herrings likewise, and the slow but punctilious process in which the traitor is sought is expertly delivered by a Guinness performance that, like the whole thing really, is engagingly short on extended pieces of dialogue concentrating more on immersing us in a perilous world of lies and deceit - peppered with the occasional trace of honour. This is BBC drama at it's best - slowly paced, certainly, but intimately photographed avoiding graphic imagery, contemplative and illustrative of just how wheels turned within wheels; or maybe dolls lived within dolls.