The problem I have with cold war dramas is that I never know where to position myself. I can never find the right hook from which to suspend my disbelief. I’m pretty sure it’s true that we weren’t best mates with anyone who spoke in a guttural accent from under a heavy fur hat and that we and they both spied on each other as a result. But … but… were there really such things as dead letter drops? People muttering cryptic messages to each other – “The geese fly south at midnight” – from behind newspapers? Taking photos of incriminating documents with funny little push-pull cameras and referring to their shadowy senior operatives as “Daddy”?
I am finding my pig-ignorance of the world an increasing hindrance to life.
The latest such drama, The Game (BBC2), written by Toby Whithouse, Sarah Dollard and Debbie O’Malley, hits so many of the marks (bar the fur hats) in the first few minutes that it teeters on the brink of falling into French and Saunders parody territory. Then Paul Ritter appears as MI5 high heid yin (though not the Daddy – that’s Brian Cox and he comes later) Bobby Waterhouse – part jobsworth, part Machiavel, wrapped up in a wholly brilliant performance. Suddenly the whole thing starts to thicken with intrigue and deepen into a compelling story that convinces on its own terms, even if in real life you aren’t sure whether the KGB were real or just something Ian Fleming had to invent.
Anyway, MI5 gets wind of Soviet plans to unleash something big, something wicked, something that weirdly goes unspecified until the trailer for next week’s episode, but turns out to be a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Britain. All hands are set to the pumps to track down the sleeper agents who are being prodded awake to set this diabolic plan, known to the initiated as Operation Glass, in motion.
One of those hands is young Joe Lambe, played by Tom Hughes with an anachronistic touch of stoner dude that is probably meant to suggest disillusionment as he is first seen attempting to defect to the east in order to be with the Polish woman he had fallen in love with instead of simply – um – pumping her for information. He is unmasked and she is shot by a particularly brutal and guttural Russian called Odin. “Daddy” covers for him, claiming that he was faking his defection as part of his undercover operation, thus securing Joe’s personal loyalty.
Meanwhile, it turns out that Odin is heavily involved in Operation Glass, thus giving Joe a secret agenda that quickly takes slightly unprofessional precedence over saving the country and ends up nearly getting the detective constable aiding MI5 killed, sort of gets the first sleeper agent’s throat slashed, maybe definitely gets his Russian contact at a nearby comedy club killed and nearly certainly will cause further complications before we’re all done, five more episodes from now.
OR WILL IT? OR DO WE? OR HAS IT? OR WHAT? For nothing, of course, is quite what it double-crossing, triple-bluffing seems. OR IS IT? OR DO WE? OR ARE THEY?
It looks beautiful. The series was first shown in BBC America, which makes me wonder if US investment meant simply that the money was available to buff things up a bit or whether the original plan was for realism but nobody across the Atlantic was prepared to countenance quite how poor and ugly Britain really was in the 70s. No one could willingly suspend that much disbelief.
How true the depiction of life at the BBC is in W1A (BBC2) is a question only the hundreds of millions of people who work there will ever know. Last night’s episode began the day before the closing date for applications for the post of Director of Better (a job title that manages to better – just – my previous favourite, Matt Taverner’s Generic Head of Comedy and/or Drama) and the same day the news breaks that Evan Davis is to become a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing. Siobhan (Jessica Hynes, perfection) is all for it. “Because the audience for Strictly is, like, everyone? And the audience for Newsnight is, like, no one? Evan does Strictly. ‘He’s one cool guy! You’re telling me he’s got his own show?’ Suddenly it’s just, like, you’ve rhinocerised your audience for Newsnight.”
Matchless details elsewhere included Idris Elba being proposed as the presenter of new game show Family Face Off, gently sub-moronic intern Will (Hugh Skinner) being baffled by names in the diary (“This has to be a typo … ‘Yen-tob’?”) and the flickering glances between members of the older guard as bafflement wrestles with politeness, ambition with despair, personal conviction with professional weakness and all, somehow, lose.
It’s brilliant. And if it’s even a 10th true, we need a missile strike on BBC HQ, instanter. Odin, you’re up.
