Search Results

This chapter examines the 1979 BBC 2 serialised adaptation of John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Solider Spy, positioning this as the first instance of the BBC seizing the initiative over ITV in the spy genre. It explores how this was produced within the BBC classic serial tradition, most traditionally reserved for adapting canonical 19th century novels, whilst the casting of acclaimed actor Alec Guinness in central role of George Smiley imparted further prestige from film and theatre. It argues that the serial achieved its popular impact through embracing the complex narrative pleasures of the long-form serial, whilst countering this with the simple through line of a whodunit (or mole-hunt) storyline, offering multiple possibilities for audience engagement. Finally, it argues that through extensive location filming the serial was able it to effectively visualise some of the elegiac themes of the novel through landscape and architecture.

This conclusion surveys the history and evolution of the spy and conspiracy dramas over the preceding decades, summing up the arguments from the main chapters of the book. This is framed by discussion of some of the most recent programmes in these traditions, most notably the BBC’s return to John Le Carre with their adaptation of The Night Manager (BBC 1, 2016). It explores how these are increasingly made through complex co-production arrangements, with both the independent production sector and transatlantic co-production partners playing more dominant roles. This is linked to shift in trends back towards a ‘novelistic’ serial form, and new moral ambiguity whereby it seems increasingly difficult to distinguish the spy and conspiracy genres. It argues that this this responds to the critical agenda set American ‘quality’ television, with discourses of ‘quality’ emanating from pay-per-view threatening to supplant those associated with public service broadcasting.

During the late-1940s a spate of burglaries from residences attached to the Soviet Embassy afforded an unexpected window onto the activities of those engaged in Cold War espionage, both perpetrated by Russian agents living in London and directed against them by British operatives. Thrillingly, they exposed how London’s burglary problem offered a convenient cloak to disguise thefts of information more priceless than jewels. This chapter analyses instances of espionage in which burglary featured, both real and fictive, in order to expose how London’s distinctive criminal character was a factor in shaping international politics in this era. The burglaries of residences attached to the Soviet Embassy in London, and subsequent wrangling over culpability and evidence of the crimes with those involved, mark a little-known aspect of the escalating tensions between the Soviet Union and the Foreign Office under Ernest Bevin. Later intrigues involving burglary reveal another intersection between espionage and what has been termed the ‘cultural’ cold war. It is unsurprising that burglary figured in the hugely popular spy novels of Ian Fleming and John Le Carré; the burglar—especially the ‘spy burglar’, a label coined during the early 1960s—was as much a central protagonist on the stage of the post-war metropolis as the suave ‘man about town’ or the ‘spiv’.

This chapter discusses how the notions of the subject, individualism, freedom, agency, change, and history have come to cluster around the figure of the Muslim woman for whom the metonym is increasingly the veil. It considers how the Muslim woman is conceived in the fiction of John Le Carre, the theory of Alain Badiou, the scholarship on the veil in France by Joan Scott, and in the work of Saba Mahmood.