Ten years ago the BBC's adaptation of the John Le Carre novel The Night Manager was an Emmy, BAFTA and Golden Globe-winning sensation which sold in 180 countries around the world. Tom Hiddleston played ex -British Army soldier Jonathan Pine working behind reception in Cairo’s Nefertiti hotel. This was very much not a Premier Inn; Pine always had guest parcels and messages ready at the front desk. In fact he'd already taken a sneak-peek and informed his contacts at MI6 of anything dodgy.
That's how he became embroiled with international arms dealer Richard Roper (aka "the worst man in the world” played by Hugh Laurie) and Olivia Colman, (the MI6 operative Angela Burr who gratefully received Pine's intel back in London).
The thing about selling arms is that your customer care has to be seriously on point and we now learn how badly things went for Roper. After several lorry loads of rocket-launchers went astray his Syrian clients were very angry, refused a money-off voucher for their next purchase and, early on in the new series, we see Roper on the slab with a nasty looking hole in his head.
But how to develop a second series when there wasn't another book to adapt? Luckily, writer David Farr says this new plot came to him in a dream the night that le Carré died in 2020.
We are quickly reintroduced to Pine who is no longer working in hospitality. He’s now called Alex Goodwin and working as a lowly surveillance operative with an MI6 team known as the Night Owls. My heart sank a bit as we joined Pine, sorry Goodwin, walking on the beach at Three Cliffs Bay in Wales. I've been to Three Cliffs Bay. Terrific ice creams. But quite grey and windy off-season, and a huge part of the Night Managers’ success was the sheer number of sunny locations, linen suits, jouncing speedboats and al fresco suppers involved in the pursuit of international baddies.
Fortunately the producers remember this so Pine, sorry Goodwin, is soon yanked off the Welsh coast and sent to Colombia in pursuit of Teddy dos Santos, the "true disciple of Richard Roper" (played by Diego Calva). For ease of identification Dos Santos is the hot male latino in mirrored sunglasses on a seemingly champagne and cocaine-only diet. Early doors we see him hassling senior Colombian customs about his “shipment” which is held up in a local port. Reading between the lines as fast as he can snort them, we soon suss this cargo is not a consignment of oranges or castanets or anything else vaguely legal.
Our man Goodwin has to intercept this shipment. That much is clear which is good because other elements quickly become quite confusing. I had to put down my cold turkey sandwich and rewind to confirm that, on his undercover Colombian adventure, Alex Goodwin (formerly Jonathan Pine) soon changes identity again to Matthew Ellis.
Using the £300 million confiscated from Roper in the first series he is allowed to buy a lot of snazzy new suits and shades to facilitate this new persona. Quite a lot is made of this new ‘deep cover’ but, to be perfectly honest, even after blowing a king's ransom on new designer shmutter,, Ellis looks very similar to Alex Goodwin, who himself was not so very different from Jonathan Pine.
Be warned: once our undercover banker is ensconced in Colombia he changes identity again, briefly becoming the English everybloke-in-a baseball cap Max Robinson in order to hire a local detective without arousing too much suspicion. Job Done. Robinson finds out something pretty extraordinary about Teddy Dos Santos and then goes back to being banker Matthew Ellis.
After an awful lot of champagne and coke around at the Dos Santos’ swimming pool Ellis then enters into a covert ‘throuple’ with Dos Santos and his extremely hot girlfriend Roxy (Al Pacino’s real-life stepdaughter and star of Daisy Jones & The Six, Camila Morrone).
It’s all here. The fast cars, the beaches and all the cleavage and chest hair that made season one so enticing. And yet I don’t find the Colombian baddies as interesting or menacing as Richard Roper’s mob in the original. There was something so suavely, mesmerically ghastly about Laurie’s googly-eyed Roper, not to mention his sidekick Corky (played by Tom Hollander) that is missing here.
However, Camila Morrone does add something new. We all remember Elizabeth Debicki as Jed, Roper’s beautiful, much younger girlfriend from the first time round. Jed was an old school gangster's moll, morally courageous (she tried to help Pine bring down her lover Roper) but still largely powerless. Well, Morrone’s Roxy is different; very much a match for both bad boy Teddy and smooth sophisticated Pine/Ellis/Goodwin, it's hard to know what she really wants or who she is really working for.
Overall The Night Manager is still like a superluxe edition of the classic travel programme Wish You Were Here? except not presented by Judith Chalmers but Tom Hiddleston. With additional material like speedboat chases and shoot-outs provided by the British security services and the cartels, naturally.
The Night Manager is on BBC One from January 1
