I have just finished the classic British spy drama Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - and I mean the old tv version with Alec Guinness and not the relatively recent film starring Gary Oldman (which I had seen first) - and I enjoyed it a lot. It is quite a change of pace for someone born after the start of MTV when it is assumed any slowness in the telling or portraying of the story will instantly bore the viewer and flashy editing is needed to hold their attention. TTSS was about the possibility that one of the leading members of the Circus - the term used for the British Secret Service - is actually working for the Russians. George Smiley, played by Alec Guinness, was then recruited by the government to find out who this spy might be. With Smiley having recently retired from the Circus he was the perfect man for the job, he knew everyone involved, had the requisite skills but as the Russian mole was still active was beyond suspicion. TTSS moved at a snail's pace. It seemed to take an hour for four people to enter a room and sit round a table. The film version is two hours long and I wondered what they had cut out from the seven episode tv show; and the answer seems to be cutting out the scenes of people moving from room to room and the long____pauses____between____people ______asking_____and_____answering______ questions. TTSS even showed people sitting and thinking; just Alec Guinness alone, thinking about things with no voice over to tell you what was going on in his head. Even comparing the set of the film and tv show highlighted the difference in how things are made now - the film set looked period appropriate but it still looked like a cool spy office, whereas the tv show set looked like the dullest civil service office ever. The tv show demanded you pay attention and it will not make it easy for you and a lot of stuff has to be worked out by the viewer. None of these are criticisms of TTSS but it was certainly jarring. The only real problem I had with the series was that I because I had seen the more recent film I knew who the traitor was. I might yet read the book.
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| Seriously, it feels like it takes an hour for these guys to enter a room and sit round a table |
I've always had quite a fondness for spy films, tv shows and books and it's hard, if not impossible, to approach this topic and not to mention the most famous fictional spy of them all - James Bond. I have watched a lot of Bond films but not all of them and I must admit there are lots of the old ones that blur into one long film where a villain in a volcano lair kills people using golddust while a man with metal teeth fights James Bond on a fanboat on the moon. While I think all the different Bonds have something to offer I think my favourite is probably Daniel Craig followed by Pierce Brosnan and it might only be because those were the new Bond films for me, I see the rest as "classic" Bond films. I have never really had a problem with the constant reinvention with Bond, he started off being a British spy fighting the Cold War but when in reality the Cold War ended the films moved into that new world quite well. Goldeneye made a lot of play out of Bond being a Cold War dinosaur, someone stuck in an old mindset when the world had changed around them. Daniel Craig's Bond is very much the "War on Terror" Bond, where he no longer fights countries but sinister individuals or organisations. For a number of reasons I should hate Bond, in terms of politics (including gender politics) I am a million miles from Bond - I don't think someone should have a licence to kill, I don't think the way to solve problems with other countries is sending in a spy to kill people and I don't think that if you are given a licence to kill you should drink quite as much as he does. There is a scene in Skyfall which bothered me a lot, even though I loved the film overall, at one point Bond meets a woman who can take him to the villain, and it came out that she was essentially a slave, forced to have sex with people. On the journey to see the villain this woman takes a shower and Bond joins her, and they have sex. I can't be the only person who thinks that if you meet someone who has forced to be a sex slave you shouldn't try to have with them hours after having met them. I don't think the filmmakers intended the scene to read in a creepy way but once it had occurred to me it was hard to ignore. But despite all these reasons to hate Bond I usually like the character.
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| Some of these Bonds seem a little bit too much in love with their gun |
I have only read one Bond book, Casino Royale, which I read after I saw after the Daniel Craig film of the same name. Two things struck me - first, the stakes were much lower and second, Bond doesn't really do any fighting. For the first point, the villain in the film is Le Chiffre a mathematical genius, poker player and banker for terrorists, warlords etc. where he gambled with hundred of millions of dollars of said evil peoples' money. In the book they play for millions of francs (considerably less) and Le Chiffre was a union boss who lost money when brothels were made illegal. You might think that this smaller stakes affair would make it more boring but I enjoyed the book a lot and often find the huge stakes some films (including Bond films) insist on risking predictable and dull. If the stake is the destruction of the whole planet then you can be pretty sure the good guys will win. The second point - Bond doesn't really do any fighting or shooting, the fantastic fight scenes of the film have no place in the book. Again, what could have made it seem boring actually worked in it's favour. Bond is a spy and spies don't get in massive gunfights, they are discrete, quiet, unassuming.
There exists a parody of James Bond so brilliant that I think I like it more than the Bond films. Certainly I like the central character a lot more than James Bond. I'm not talking about Austin Powers or even Dr. Bashir's brilliant turn as a Cold War spy in that episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. I am of course talking about the animated tv show Archer, featuring the sort-of superspy Sterling Archer. There is so much of Archer that is lifted straight from James Bond - he is a womanising spy who drinks too much and exists in some nebulous ill defined time period, the genius twist being that the resulting character is what you'd expect a sexist drunk to be- an utterly reprehensible person. Archer literally does not care if a stray bullet he fired hits a colleague and this is just when they're in the office, not on a mission. One of Archer's defining qualities is how he constantly brags about being a spy, how he uses it as a line to impress women, playing on the frankly abysmal efforts Bond goes to to adopt any secret identity.
But for all his faults there are things to really like about Sterling Archer and I think there are two episodes in particular that show his good qualities. First, we learn that Archer's long-suffering Butler Woodhouse is involved in a tontine dating back to World War I and because of this is marked for death. In an episode that saw Archer giving a baby a cut-throat razor it also showed that Archer can actually care about another person when he rushed to save Woodhouse. The second example is in my opinion the best episode of the series. In one episode we learn that Archer has breast cancer - the next episode showed him receiving treatment which he soon learned was bogus - Irish gangsters had been substituting the real medicine for placebos to make money. In revenge Archer goes on a rampage against the Irish mob. Originally it was assumed Archer was angry purely because his health had been jeopardised but over the course of the episode we learned that Archer had become friends with a fellow cancer sufferer, Ruth, an old woman he met at the pharmacy, who recently died, who perhaps would have been saved by having actual medicine. Archer showed more feeling in this one episode than just about the entire back-catalogue of Bond films. Also, I've not really mentioned this, Archer is a comedy, and it is really, really funny. Aside from Sterling Archer there are a group of brilliant characters around him from possibly evil scientist and radioactive pig cloner "Dr." Krieger, to rival spy Barry Dillon who although has a list of very legitimate gripes with Archer we see as the villain even before he became a KGB cyborg killing machine.
There is another fictional British spy who I think is deserving of a mention. This is a creation of Mark Gatiss, who is more famous for the things he's done on television - he is a member of "The League Of Gentlemen" and has written for Doctor Who and Sherlock (although he has appeared in both - just one episode in Doctor Who but in Sherlock he played Mycroft Holmes - a spy himself) this spy is from a novel he wrote - The Vesuvius Club. Lucifer Box was a portrait painter and socialite who lived at 9 Downing street at the turn of the 20th Century but he was also employed by the British secret service. Lucifer was a charming, extremely handsome and thoroughly bisexual hero who appeared in three separate novels.The first - The Vesuvius Club - is a great spy novel as Lucifer tears around London and then Italy trying to work out a series of murders and a plot against Britain.
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| The different covers do a good job of showing the different time periods of the books |
The unusual thing about the series is that the next book took place in 1930s America and the whole tone of the novel changed, this time the enemy were fascists who were trying to raise the Devil and the different enemy and plot are reflected in the style of the book. In the intervening period Lucifer has changed somewhat and it was suggested that the First World War affected Lucifer quite deeply. The third book changed again, this time taking place in the 1950s when a sinister organisation - Scouts - are trying to take over world. As each book took place in a different phase of Lucifer's life - blazing youth, more mature middle-age and finally on the verge of retirement it gave a different version of the character.
So that was a quick run down of some of my favourite spy tv shows, films and books, from a old and slow British drama to the animated ridiculous hyper-reality of Archer.
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