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Tinker, Tailor etcetera etcetera

Saw the movie of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy the other day. Excellent. Felt quite positive when I saw John Le Carre was one of the Executive Producers. In one of the reviews I read:

FAMED espionage novelist John le Carre has likened making a movie from his touchstone work Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to "turning a cow into a bouillon cube"

This is always the problem when converting a weighty tome to a flighty image but unlike many books, and much to my surprise, it worked extremely well.

My first exposure to this epic was the TV series with Obi-Wan Kenobi (old version) aka Alec Guinness playing George Smiley (who isn't - not a bit). This was enough to inspire me to read the book. I remember my father carrying the book around to read on the train when I was but a wee bairn but being of the TV generation it never occurred to me to actually read a book. Especially one that big. But apparently I thought nothing of watching seven hours of (black and white) TV. Which has recently been re-released on DVD (like everything else). To illustrate how dry this all is, the fun stuff section of the imdb.com listing for George has the following quote:George Smiley: I don't seem to have very much on Operation Testify. Would you...? Peter Guillam: Of course, George.Thigh slapping stuff. Yet terrier like in it's grip. Once you've allowed itself into the context.

Whilst trawling through many databases of stuff (what was once called 'research') I discovered that the character Smiley also appears in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold. I sort of remember Richard Burton (he of the mellifluous Welsh voice and hooded eyes) being in the film but it was an adult's film and no one understood it out here in Oz anyway in 1965 or if they did they weren't allowed to talk about it. I don't think it was until MI5 tried to ban ex-MI5 Assistant Director Peter Wright's memoir Spycatcher in Australia in 1987 that we cottoned on to all that spookiness. And then forgot it again.

It also seems that the late, great Ian Richardson played Bill Haydon in the TV series. In one of those bizarre connections that web trawling generates, I also realised that it was Ian Richardson voicing Death in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather which screened recently on TV. Which lead me to remember his famous turn as the evil Francis Urqhart in House of Cards and his excellent performance as Dr Joseph Bell in Murder Rooms: Mysteries of the Real Sherlock Holmes. Bell was one of Conan Doyle's medical lecturers and one of the originators of the forensic methods of police investigation btw. See? You can learn something by watching too much TV!

Then there's Benedict Cumberbatch playing Guillan in the movie. He plays the current day incarnation of Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock, the second series of which is eagerly awaited by all us Holmesians. He is the antithesis of the current film Holmes (Robert Downey Junior though I enjoyed both the films) and describes himself in the series as a high functioning sociopath - much closer to the canon. A lesser known TV series starring him is The Last Enemy. Well worth a watch if you get the chance.


I very much hope the success of TTSS encourages them to make film versions of the other two major Smiley books: Smiley's People and the sadly unfilmed The Honourable Schoolboy (second in the Smiley series and quite enormous in scope and complexity). 'Nuff said. Possibly more than 'nuff said.