As British television switched to colour at the end of the 1960s, many of its programmes became increasingly greyer as it put
the 'swinging sixties' to one side.
Britain in the 1970s was for many an era defined by loss of status in world affairs and economic instability. This period saw increasing industrial action, the energy crisis, the introduction of the three-day week and the arrival of 'stagflation'.
On television the spy genre was still generating such traditional 'them versus us' adventures as Codename (BBC,
1970) and Quiller (BBC, 1975), along with tongue-in-cheek romps like
Spyder's Web (ITV, 1972) and The New Avengers (ITV, 1976-1977).
Even more lightweight were the David Jason spoof The Top Secret life of Edgar
Briggs (ITV, 1974) and the audience participation game show Masterspy (ITV, 1978), hosted by William Franklyn. A tougher, bleaker, more pugnacious
style was increasingly in evidence, however.
John Le Carré's End of the Line (tx.
29/6/1970), for Armchair Theatre (ITV, 1956-1974), looks outwardly like
typical espionage bluff and double bluff, but its penetrating study of verbal
deception is more akin to Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter than James Bond. The
internal politics of the British Secret Service were also analysed through
intense and vivid exchanges of verbal wordplay in Ian Mackintosh's splenetic
drama series, The Sandbaggers (ITV, 1978-1980).
During the 1970s and '80s, attempts were finally made to look, more or less directly, at the legacy of the Cambridge spy
ring. Dennis Potter's twinned plays Traitor (BBC, tx. 14/10/1971) and
Blade on the Feather (ITV, tx. 19/10/1980) explore how the 1920s and '30s
social and political milieu helped created upper-class defectors and traitors
like 'Kim' Philby. Ian Curteis's Philby, Burgess and Maclean (ITV, tx. 31/5/1977) emphasised the fear of nuclear war behind their actions and was
highly successful, though it soon seemed dated by omitting Anthony Blunt, whose
role as the 'fourth man' was only revealed two years later. That however coincided with the hugely successful transmission of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (BBC, 1979), John le Carré's fictional re-imagining of Philby's exposure.
Alan Bennett's An Englishman Abroad (BBC, tx. 29/11/1983) and A Question of Attribution (BBC, tx. 20/10/1991) look sympathetically at the later lives of Guy Burgess and Anthony Blunt, while Blunt (BBC, tx. 11/1/1986) and Cambridge Spies (BBC,
2003) concentrate more openly on the homosexual aspects of the affair. A measure of the power and almost mythic status of these KGB double agents can be gauged from the fictional assassination of Philby in The Fourth Protocol (d.
John Mackenzie, 1987), released over a year before his actual death from natural causes.
The other great British spy scandal of the post-war years, the Portland affair, was dramatised as Act of Betrayal
(BBC, 3/1/1971) by Hugh Whitemore. He later turned it into a stage play, which was itself televised as Pack of Lies (UK/US, 1987). Troy Kennedy Martin also turned to history for Reilly - Ace of Spies (ITV, 1983), a romanticised look at the adventures, in pre- and post-revolutionary Russia, of British spy Sidney Reilly (Sam Neill).
In the 1980s the genre flourished, often reflecting the perceived political chicanery and unrest of the times, spying
presented frequently as an activity undertaken as a kind of game by remnants of
the British upper-classes. This is neatly summed up by the series Chessgame (ITV, 1983) with its academic, aristocratic hero Dr David Audley (Terence Stamp), the gamesmanship of its title and plots invariably revolving around Britain's military past. John Le Carré's partly autobiographical A Perfect
Spy (BBC, 1987) plays like the flipside of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier
Spy, depicting five decades in the life of a British double agent (Peter
Egan). David Pirie's Ashenden (BBC, 1991) faithfully adapts Somerset
Maugham's jaundiced spy stories but emphasises their basis in the life of the author.
A deep streak of cynicism and pessimism is much
in evidence in such one-off dramas as Charlie Muffin (ITV, tx.
11/12/1979) and Bryan Forbes' The Endless Game (ITV, 1989), which
completely reject patriotic sentiment, while Stephen Poliakoff's 'Soft
Targets' (Play for Today, BBC, tx. 19/10/1982) uses spy
conventions as a mocking counterpoint to a story of urban isolation and despair.
The traditional spy story finally petered out
in the late 1980s with the end of the Cold War, falling foul of new political
realities in the era of 'Glasnost' and the fall of the Berlin Wall. The genre
was capped however by Granada's superb adaptation of Len Deighton's best-selling
trilogy Game, Set and Match (ITV, 1988), a hugely expensive thirteen-part
miniseries starring Ian Holm, which was an undeserved ratings catastrophe.
Subsequent examples have been few and far between. The Piglet Files (ITV,
1990-1993) was a Nicholas Lyndhurst sitcom set in MI5, while Sleepers (BBC, 1991) looked comically at the fate of two forgotten Soviet agents (Nigel Havers and Warren Clarke), mistakenly left deep undercover in the UK for
twenty-five years.
Since the 1970s, as British national identity has been eroded and patriotism questioned, personal ties have come to the fore
in the spy genre, reflecting E.M. Forster's celebrated phrase: "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country". Blunt himself alluded to these lines in his statement to the press after being exposed as a traitor.
Spies were successfully returned to the screen in Spooks (BBC, 2002- ), following renewed national security anxieties in the post-September 11 world.
Sergio Angelini
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