If the explosive finale of The Night Manager’s second series has left you hopelessly bereft, craving more of John le Carré’s intricate webs of deception and moral compromise, there’s an easy fix. Sitting on iPlayer is the BBC’s 1979 adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, published just five years earlier; it remains the most electrifying distillation of the author’s work ever committed to the small screen.
Widely considered to be one of the greatest British television dramas alongside Brideshead Revisited, Tinker Tailor anticipated the box-set era by decades, with seven filmed episodes unfolding with such languor that patience became a prerequisite. But, my word, what a payoff. The story follows George Smiley’s hunt for a Soviet mole buried deep within MI6 – inspired by the notorious double agent Kim Philby, who had duped le Carré himself during his own foreign-intelligence service days in the early Sixties. Clive James, the venerable TV critic, initially dismissed the series as “turgid” and “incomprehensible”. How wrong he was.
At its centre was Alec Guinness. Uncertain at first whether to take the role because he lacked the soft bulk of the George Smiley in le Carré’s novels, Guinness is extraordinary as the retired intelligence officer brought back to winkle out a traitor near the top of “the Circus”. His Smiley is all restraint, barely modulating his tone, his face an impassive mask, never an eyebrow raised. Resembling an elderly academic in an unprepossessing cardigan and blazer, he somehow exuded low-key menace – all through the subtlest of facial expressions and his repeated habit of cleaning his glasses. So effective were Smiley’s silences that they became a form of torture – agonising stretches of nothingness in which suspects, unable to bear the vacuum, would simply crack and confess.
Adapted by Arthur Hopcraft (who did the same for the BBC’s 1985 Bleak House, with Diana Rigg as Lady Dedlock), Tinker Tailor was a masterclass in slow-burn tension. Modern viewers have learnt to love shows that don’t give up their secrets easily, leaving room for actors to peel back the layers. But for an espionage drama of the time, the trust that Tinker Tailor placed in the intelligence of its audience was genuinely revolutionary. Suspense is favoured over action, waiting over pursuit, as the chess game of the plot plays out. Take the interrogation scenes – psychologically intense, drawn-out, probing: you can trace a direct line from those scenes to the way Jed Mercurio builds pressure in his bent-copper thriller Line of Duty.
Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 film, starring Gary Oldman as Smiley, offered a sleek, accomplished take on the book that was clearly influenced by the BBC series. Its writers – the husband and wife team of Peter Straughan and the late Bridget O’Connor – also masterfully built tension. But what distinguishes the BBC series is its verisimilitude. While the film’s Seventies aesthetic was meticulously stylised with the sheen of a coffee table book, the television series simply was the Seventies. Awful furniture. White leather. Avocado bathroom suites. Pallid faces under fluorescent lighting. It was released in the year, lest we forget, that Britain’s deepening economic malaise swept Margaret Thatcher into No 10. The directors made no attempt to prettify any of it; the decor itself became a character.
Just as The Night Manager depicted the gleaming surfaces of contemporary international corruption, so Tinker Tailor depicted a Britain in visible decay, its secret service populated by privileged public schoolboys with bottled-up resentments. Le Carré’s novels had always interrogated Britain’s refusal to accept its diminishing global status; here was that decline made visceral. Underpinning it all was Geoffrey Burgon’s elegiac score, which captured the end-of-empire melancholy impeccably.
Le Carré had been adapted on screen before – most successfully in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1965). But his labyrinthine storylines, with their emphasis on patient surveillance and the unpicking of duplicity, needed hours rather than minutes to unspool properly; TV had the time cinema lacked. His writing suited it perfectly: conversational yet laden with subtext, influenced by Harold Pinter’s understanding that what people don’t say matters as much as what they do. The exchanges simmered with deception. Add to that le Carré’s genius for memorable characters and you had rich material for Britain’s finest actors to feast upon – Ian Richardson and Patrick Stewart, in supporting roles, especially.
When le Carré discussed the 2011 film with The Telegraph, he reflected on what made the original series special: “When Guinness and that crowd came to it, it was made as a love letter to a fading British establishment. Even the nastiest characters were huggable.” Years earlier, in his introduction to a later edition of the novel, the author – who would later cite the BBC adaptation as his favourite – credited “the marvellous direction and casting” and how it brought the book’s “clandestine vocabulary” to life.
Le Carré, who died in 2020, lived long enough to see his work flourish in the streaming age. The Night Manager, which first aired in 2016, demonstrated that his world works brilliantly as modern prestige drama, with its globetrotting scope and contemporary anxieties. But for the purest expression of his vision, nothing touches that original Tinker Tailor. For audiences mourning the end of The Night Manager, this is the ultimate tonic.
