Streaming on BritBox - Rod Bishop recommends A SPY AMONG FRIENDS (Dir:Nick Murphy, Sc: Alexander Cary, UK, 2022)

Kim Philby

“Chaps like us.” 

“Yes, chaps like you.” 

These are two of the last lines spoken in this spy series based around Kim Philby (Guy Pearce), Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis), Anthony Blunt (Nicholas Rowe), Sir Roger Hollis (Adrian Edmondson) and the entirely fictional Lily Thomas (Anna Maxwell Martin). 

Damian Lewis, Guy Pearce

It’s the early 1960s and an MI6 intelligence operator, the Cambridge-educated Nicholas Elliott, a chum and an intelligence colleague of Philby since 1940, is struggling to accept a “chap like us” has been a KGB double agent for all of that time.

It’s personal for Elliott. Philby was by some distance his best friend but Elliott must now accept that for decades his “best chap” had been gaslighting him by his treasonous betrayal. 

This Philby “chap” epitomizes upper-class self-loathing. He is coming apart at the seams and hates the British class system for its rank stupidity. Particularly the inability of the incompetent intelligence services to believe someone born into the ruling class of the British Empire could be a traitor.

Anna Maxwell Martin

“Chaps like us” have oodles of charm. It’s essential in deflecting dangerous inquiries into their personal behaviour. They top this with their shield of class superiority, underscoring an “I will not be questioned” haughtiness. None better at this than Sir Anthony Blunt, hiding in plain sight behind the Queen’s largesse, and giving learned dissertations on art history to adoring audiences.

Along with their heavy scotch and gin consumption, “chaps”consume lots of cups of tea and there’s always “it’s Thursday, isn’t it? Let’s have Beef Wellington at my Club”. Getting pissed in local pubs and reviving drunken, improvised limericks from their Cambridge days is a thing, and, of course, they need to be kept abreast of the cricket scores during England vs Australia Test Matches.

Elliott has volunteered to go to Beirut to extract Philby’s confession, but after days of drunken interrogation, Elliott apparently stuffs it up and Philby escapes to Moscow. Or, ponders British intelligence, is this a CIA connivance to embed Philby in the heart of the KGB as a triple-agent for the USA?

Top - Elliott, Philby, Angleton
Lower  - Lewis, Pearce, Stephen Kunken

Most of this is revealed in episode one and the remaining five episodes are left to carefully unpick the characters of Philby and Elliott. This is achieved mostly through the inquiries of someone who is definitely not a “chap like us” – Lily Thomas, a Northerner, married to a black doctor, and whose outlook on life couldn’t be more different to Elliott or Philby. 

Despite the power struggles between their characters, Damian Lewis as Elliott, Guy Pearce as Philby and Ann Maxwell Martin as Thomas all give exquisitely balanced performances. No scenery chewing here. 

A Spy Among Friendsis based on a novel by Ben Macintyre and another of Macintyre’s books SAS Rogue Heroes has just been made as a TV series. I haven’t read either book, but these two series couldn’t be more different from each other. One is a grown-up, sophisticated spy drama and the other is neither sophisticated nor grown-up. It’s more like a Marvel Comic adaptation.

However, there is one similarity between the two. 

They are both about “Chaps like us”.

John le Carré may well have approved of Damian Lewis’s interpretation of Nicholas Elliott. In The Pigeon Tunnel,le Carré spends an entire chapter on the Elliott-Philby friendship:

Damian Lewis

“Nicholas Elliott. Philby’s most loyal friend, confidant and devoted brother-in-arms in war and peace, child of Eton…and surely the most entertaining spy I ever met.

In retrospect, he also remains the most enigmatic. To describe his appearance is, these days, to invite ridicule. He was a sparkling bon vivant of the old school. I never once saw him in anything but an immaculately cut, dark three-piece suit.

He was as thin as a wand, and seemed always to hover slightly above the ground at a jaunty angle, a quiet smile on his face and one elbow cocked for the martini glass or cigarette…He looked like a P.G. Wodehouse man-about-town, and spoke like one…

Guy Pearce

…Among the many extraordinary things that Elliott had done in his life, however, the most extraordinary and undoubtedly the most painful was to sit face to face in Beirut, with his close friend, colleague and mentor Kim Philby, and hear him admit he had been a Soviet spy for all the years they had known each other.

…One evening in May 1986 in my house, twenty-three years after he received Philby’s partial confession, he poured out his heart to me in what turned out to be the first in a succession of such meetings…

While he talked, I scribbled in a notebook.

Elliott:

‘I always had the feeling that Philby himself would like to get the whole thing off his chest and settle down and follow cricket, which was what he loved. He knew cricket averages backwards and forwards. He could recite cricket till the cows came home.’

Self: ‘So, what were your sanctions if [Philby in Beirut] didn’t cooperate?’

Elliott: ‘What’s that, old boy?’

‘Your sanctions, Nick, what could you threaten him with...you could have him sandbagged, for instance, and flown to London?’

‘No-one wanted him in London, old boy’

‘Well, what about the ultimate sanction then – forgive me – could you have him killed, liquidated?’

‘My dear chap. One of us.’

 Chaps like us, indeed.

 

Streaming and on BBC Channels - John Baxter revives THE JOHNNY WORRICKER TRILOGY (David Hare, UK, 2011-2014)

'...a kind of perfect role", Bill Nighy

 A PARFIT GENTIL SPY.

            Given its failure to anticipate 9/11 and other disasters, the international intelligence community has clearly lost the plot. The problem may be the sheer number of people involved. Efficiency in espionage appears to be inversely proportionate to the number of agents.  Why else would East Germany, where the Stasi spied on everyone, fail to envision the fall of the Wall? 

            Spying is simpler in the cinema. Hardly had Tom Hanks and his busty assistants driven Russia from Afghanistan in Charlie Wilson’s War than he changed hats to become the lawyer in Bridge of Spies who saves Soviet agent Rudolf Abel from execution. Catch Hanks spending a decade tracking down Osama bin Laden. He’d have nailed him in an afternoon, with no more help than an adoring aide to keep the Martinis flowing.

            A similar thought appears to have motivated David Hare in writing and directing his trilogy of spy dramas about MI5 analyst Johnny Worricker, played by the imperturbable Bill Nighy. 

            Produced by the BBC, Page Eight (2011), Turks & Caicos and Salting the Battlefield (both 2014) reduce espionage to the matching of skills among a handful of dedicated individuals. As in most spy fiction, winning or losing are abstractions.  Nobody believes the recovery of “the plans”, the exposure of the mole or the outwitting of Karla, Moriarty or Smersh will change anything. To Hare, as to his predecessors John Buchan, Rudyard Kipling and John le Carré, it’s all about what Edwardians called The Great Game.

"a thuggish Ralph Fiennes"

            Like George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,  Worricker is the right-hand man of a dying boss, in this case Benedict Baron (Michael Gambon), head of MI5. Almost on his deathbed, Baron entrusts him with a report on America’s clandestine “black sites” and the practice of “rendition”.  Page eight of the document reveals in passing that British Prime Minister Alec Beasley (a thuggish Ralph Fiennes) knows and approves of their existence. 

            Worricker exploits allies, lovers and family to authenticate the report and disseminate its contents.  He’s unconcerned that this makes him a fugitive from his own department, now run by Jill Tankard (a snarling Judy Davis;).  Should we be in any doubt as to where his true loyalties lie, the vicar at Benedict’s memorial service announces that Johnny has chosen the music, then leads the congregation in the hymn I Vow to Thee, My Country.

            The last shot of Page Eight shows Johnny standing at an airport, contemplating a smorgasbord of possible bolt-holes.  His story could have ended there, had the popularity of the first film not induced the BBC to fund two more. 

            Turks & Caicos finds Worricker on that particular Caribbean haven for dirty money, eavesdropping on some post-9/11 profiteers who have become rich constructing the infrastructure of illegal imprisonment.  Pausing to take up again with old flame Margot (Helena Bonham-Carter), he sabotages their consortium and the secret fund set up to guarantee Prime Minister Beasley a comfortable retirement, then slips away with Margot just before the axe falls. 

            The third film, Salting the Battlefield – a reference to the practice of victors destroying the economy of the defeated by sowing their fields with salt - might have been better called The Morning After.  Flitting between German safe houses, Worricker is induced to return to Britain with Margot, only to find that his absence has barely been noticed. Jill Tankard now runs MI5 in cahoots with a thriving American intelligence industry, for which rendition and black sites are just weapons in the arsenal of freedom. Beasley has escaped censure by blaming the Americans, then resigning to become a well-paid statesman-for-hire on the model of Tony Blair. 

            Fortunately, Johnny’s enemies are compassionate in victory. He’s allowed to come in from the cold and return to his old office where he can play the Great Game while Tankard and Co. get on with the Greater Game of fighting international terrorism. 

            In all three films, Worricker has a female companion, and sometimes two. In Page Eight, he befriends Syrian publisher Rachel Weisz, the mysterious death of whose brother at the hands of the Israeli Army he’s able to elucidate. “I don’t suppose you’d let me thank you?” she says hopefully when they find themselves alone in a hotel room, but of course nothing so carnal would cross Johnny’s mind. If he were to share her bed, it would be with a metaphorical sword laid between them, a guarantee of knightly restraint. 

Bill Nighy, Winona Ryder, Christopher Walken

            The distressed damsel of Turks & Caicos is Winona Ryder, who, in a different kind of film and another era, would have been called a “moll”. With the connivance of a CIA man, played with loose-jointed glee by Christopher Walken (an actor Nighy greatly admires – “Every move he makes is a dance”), Johnny saves her, before escaping into the dark waters of the Caribbean with Bonham-Carter. (Whistle-blowing accountant Meredith Eaton would have been a more appropriate companion, though her height, a mere four feet, might have complicated the incognito on which Salting the Battlefield depends.)

             “British actors,” said Roger Ebert, “love playing gangsters as much as American actors love playing cowboys.” This is no less true of spy stories, and clearly Nighy enjoyed himself as Worricker.  Asked to describe his character, he said “I wear a dark blue overcoat. I smoke herbal cigrettes in the rain, I stand on Battersea Bridge in the dark and you have to worry about what I’m thinking. It’s a kind of perfect role.”  

            Why would a political writer like David Hare devote three films to something so close to escapism?  Did he, by exposing the aimlessness of espionage, hope to condemn by implication the secret gathering of information and those involved in it? Alas, in the wake of Wikileaks, this is old news.  We are now all too aware that strangers can watch our every move, hear every word.  “Aren’t you worried?” attorney Tom Hanks periodically enquires of Rudolf Abel in Bridge of Spies.   We can only respond, like Abel, “Would it help?”   

Christopher Walken, Meredith Eaton, Bill Nighy, Winona Ryder, on set