Flipping the Script - Dr Joseph Oldham explains how 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy' changed television drama forever
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This month we were delighted to be able to talk to the freelance writer and academic, Dr Joseph Oldham. Jo is the author of Paranoid Visions: Spies, Conspiracies and the Secret State in British Television Drama.
In addition to covering the classic le Carré television adaptations, we also shine a spotlight on two of the more obscure ones - The End of the Line, an episode of Armchair Theatre from 1970 that is difficult but not impossible to find, and a short scene from Call for the Dead, staring Arthur Lowe as George Smiley, which no-one has seen since 1977. Join us as we discuss all things le Carré, Guinness and Smiley...
Jonathan Moran (JM): Hi Jo, thanks so much for your time. Let’s start by talking about your background and your areas of research interest, specifically British television drama and the history of the intelligence community. Where did it all begin for you?
Joseph Oldham (JO): I have to go back to growing up in the 1990s. In many ways that period was a bit of a lull in the history of the spy genre but it was also a time when British television was showing lots of repeats like The Man From Uncle and The Avengers. This got me very interested in television depictions of espionage in the Cold War. I was aware that this was old material, so I was also getting interested in the history of television at the same time.
As a teenager, I was very into Doctor Who and Blakes 7, which have really active fan communities that were strong on doing archival research and writing accounts of the production. I became fascinated in the practises of making television drama, particularly how things had been done in earlier decades, and the different sort of aesthetics, like the distinctions between film and video.
Professionally, my interest started when I was doing my Master's degree in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. In one of the modules, we did some work on Edge of Darkness, the very famous 1985 conspiracy thriller by Troy Kennedy Martin. I loved that and when it came to doing a PhD, which I started in 2010, myself and my supervisor talked about how much I liked Edge of Darkness and enjoyed those spy shows from the 1960s. This was also the time when Spooks was one of the big flagship BBC One shows. So it seemed like a fascinating story to tell that went from the 1960s right up to the present day.
At the time, it almost seemed like there was this narrative that in the 1960s you had lots of lighthearted fun shows about secret agents going out and fighting the villains and saving the day. It gets a bit more cynical with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It gets even more cynical in the great age of the British conspiracy thriller with things like a Bird of Prey, Edge of Darkness and A Very British Coup. And then there's an attempt to reestablish the more heroic side with Spooks and yet they can't quite do it. It's still got all this conspiratorial anxiety running through it.
As always happens, the more you dig into these things, the more exceptions and complications you find, but this narrative set me off on a fascinating PhD length project to look at the evolution of this kind of storytelling in spy shows and conspiracy dramas, and the way they told stories about ‘the secret state’.
There is an interesting anecdote relating to the production of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy where director John Irvin wants to know what MI5 is like and he asks John le Carré. John le Carré says, “I don't need to tell you anything, it’s just like the BBC. Just look around”. And this is something that Jonathan Powell, the producer, has said at points, that he saw Tinker Tailor and its depiction of the Circus as a kind of metaphor for the BBC and the changes in British institutional life. And then I was fascinated to find that there was an interview with David Wolstencroft, who devised the format of Spooks, where he says something similar in the 2000s. He's talking about what his version of MI5 in Spooks is like, and he says he kind of modelled it on the BBC. But of course, by then, the fusty old BBC that you see in Tinker Tailor has been replaced by this slick corporate organisation, and you see that reflected in Spooks. So there was something very interesting about the representation of intelligence services and how this can also tell you something about the evolution of broadcasting institutions, which became an organising through line in my work.
JM: We will come on to Tinker Tailor, but I want to talk about le Carré’s first excursion into television. It was a short play that he wrote for Armchair Theatre in 1970. It's not commercially available, but I know you've seen The End of the Line as part of your research. Most people probably haven't seen it, I certainly haven't. What can you tell us about it?
JO: It’s such an unusual little piece and it's almost entirely forgotten. I've read so many interviews and articles by le Carré where he talks at length about the various screen adaptations of his work and he just never seems to mention this play. It was clearly something he put a bit of effort into but it only warrants just a fleeting mention in Adam Sisman's biography. I first discovered it when I chanced upon some paperwork at the BBC Written Archives. It was chiefly relating to the fact that the BBC rejected it, and it was only later taken up by the ITV company, Thames Television.
I eventually managed to arrange for a screening at the BFI Research Viewing Service. I watched it on a television set in a cellar at the BFI base at Stephen Street in London. It's basically an hour long play. Le Carré actually wrote it to be an hour and a half, but Armchair Theatre would only accept hour long plays, so they ended up having to cut quite a lot out, according to the contemporary press coverage. It is basically about two men on board a train. One of them is a civil servant called Frayne, played by Robert Harris, who we learn has forged an indiscreet relationship with somebody working for the Soviets and has been leaking information. The other man is a character called Paul Bagley, played by Ian Holm, who initially appears to be a Reverend, but then it seems like he might be an investigator from MI5, but he might also be a Soviet operative trying to clean up this operation. And you never quite know, it's all a bit mysterious and elusive.
Robert Harris as Frayne (left) and Ian Holm as Bagley (right) in The End of the Line
Something I've noticed in the press coverage is that several reviewers say this is le Carré pastiching Harold Pinter, and I think they are absolutely right, that is clearly what is happening. Harold Pinter, of course, had come to prominence a decade earlier and his plays stereotypically are often in these confined spaces and have a stranger arrive, and then there's this battle for territorial dominance. Many of his plays have actually been staged on television as videotaped studio drama and were very effective in that form. You can almost feel le Carré hitting on a sort of Pinter style play and combining it with a story about spies, making it quite enigmatic and elusive.
What makes it quite different to, for example, a story centring on George Smiley, is that you've got this character, Bagley, who is the investigator, but you know nothing about him. You don't even really know who he's working for, what he's doing or what his agenda is. Le Carré never really has a chance to do this in his books - you always get to know the protagonist very well. But here he has a bit of fun with the unknowability of the protagonist.
This comes along at a very distinct point in his career. At this time he's also writing The Naive and Sentimental Lover, so for his big novel project, he's actually putting the spies aside and trying to do a literary non-genre work. And it also coincides with his attempt to get a film adaptation of A Small Town in Germany off the ground, where he goes with an independent production company and is trying to do things outside the normal studio system. So he seems to be trying out all these slightly different oddball things before he comes back to doing what we think of him doing most with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy a few years later.
The End of the Line does almost lead into Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in a way, in that it is ultimately a story about the interrogation of a traitor.
JM: For those of us who haven’t seen it, how would you rate it?
JO: I think it doesn't quite come off but it is a valiant effort. I wonder if maybe something was damaged in the cutting of le Carré’s ninety minute script down to sixty minutes. It's doing that sort of Pinter thing where there are all these changes in power dynamics and they do seem to come very quickly, perhaps a little disconcertingly quickly.
It's also the only le Carré television production to be shot on video in a studio using multi-camera. Le Carré otherwise was done entirely on film. In other circumstances, I'm a huge champion of videotape drama but I do wonder if there's something about video that just doesn't work for John le Carré. I don’t mean this in a negative way but his dialogue can be a little bit arch and a bit heightened and he has these big Dickensian characters. I wonder if something like that is too much on video. You almost need film to damp it down a bit or a director like John Irvin who can conjure up a world in which it makes sense. I think there are very good things about it, but I wonder if there's a reason why le Carré seemed to forget about it.
JM: If somebody reading this did want to see The End of the Line how would they go about doing so?
JO: They would need to contact the BFI Research Services where students and non-commercial researchers can view it.
JM: Brilliant. That's a lead I’m sure some people will follow. Let's talk about Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Obviously, you've written a lot about it and you've described it as an iconic programme. What, in your opinion, makes it iconic?
JO: It's technologically groundbreaking in that it's a long form serial shot entirely on film and on location, which I think enables it to build this sort of textured and engaging world. It moves between a whole range of settings - you’ve got bits out on the street, which feel like a kind of film noir, you’ve got scenes set in Lisbon, which have this sunny dream-like haze, you've got bits set around country houses, which feel a bit proto and Brideshead Revisited. I think its ability to move seamlessly between all these different settings is groundbreaking.
Marketing brochure for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which apparently is a “fast-paced story” featuring Iain Cuthbertson and Anthony Bates!
I think it is historically significant because of the way it develops a complex, long form, mystery narrative over seven episodes, which seems to me to not have a lot of precedent. When I think about spy dramas before then, they are usually more of the kind of episodic ‘case of the week’ structure. So it is groundbreaking to let a story breathe for so long, which, of course, is all the rage now - there are just so many espionage miniseries these days. I think it hugely reinvented the genre on that front.
I think Guinness doing it is very significant. It was quite an unusual thing for a star of his stature to come in and do a long-form miniseries, a sixth month commitment of his time. Again, we see that everywhere now but I think Tinker Tailor was a bit of a game changer in that respect.
I also think it's unique in the history of authors engaging with television. Prior to this le Carré had three of his books adapted for cinema in the 1960s and it was a bit of a mixed experience for him. He mostly liked The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, he seemed a bit miffed with The Deadly Affair because nobody involved him and he didn’t like The Looking Glass War. So his satisfaction decreased over this period, and there's a clear sense that his efforts to get involved in TV adaptations was, to some degree, to get more approval and more control. Although he has no credited role on the series, other than writing the novel, it’s clear to me that he actually pioneers a role that nowadays would get the author an executive producer credit. Later on for The Night Manager and The Little Drummer Girl, he gets that executive producer credit.
This is common now in how television engages with authors - Philip Pullman, for example, gets an executive producer credit for His Dark Materials. My feeling is that le Carré pioneered that role. He figured out that British television, particularly in this strongly public service era, was a medium that respected writers more than Hollywood did. This was something he used to his advantage and it enabled him to shape the production in a way that he liked. I think this is another reason why Tinker Tailor was so influential.
JM: In your view what led to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy breaking through to a mass audience in the way that it did?
JO: That’s a good question and one I find a little hard to answer. In many ways, it surprises me that it did. It's a very odd show. It's a whodunit and, after just a little cameo at the start of part one, it doesn't actually introduce the suspects until part three. That is a big ask of an audience. It's unlike your average whodunnit because the entire plot dictates the main investigator cannot meet the people he's investigating. So it's a very strange thing in whodunnit terms. But I think there is still the basic sense that it is ultimately a mystery story and that’s what hooks you in.
I think it also does some quite clever things with deferred expectation. In the run up to the series being broadcast, the fact that Alec Guinness was doing a TV serial got huge amounts of press hype. And yet, the series actually delays his arrival. He doesn't show up until halfway through part one. And then he's largely absent in part two, because much of that is a flashback with other characters. So it takes ages for him to get going, but I think the series plays with that by building on viewers anticipation and delaying gratification.
It walks a fine line between having a mystery that is quite comprehensible, the whodunit, but also building up around it an excess of complex detail. And I get the sense that there's almost two different kinds of audiences for this. There are some people who actually can absorb that amount of information. And other people who just seem to have enjoyed the fact that it was quite confusing and allowed that to wash over them. There's a lovely quote, which the academic John Caughie says in relation to Edge of Darkness many years later, that there is “a new-found pleasure in losing one's bearings”, that emerges in serial television during this period. There's television that almost allows you to get a bit lost and a bit confused, but still gives you just enough of a central mystery or some interesting counterpoints to grab onto. I think that may well be what made it appeal to people.
I also think that Guinness is just magnificent to watch. It's such an incredible performance, matched by a wonderful supporting cast.
JM: Clearly people picked up enough to be able to follow the central theme, even if they didn’t appreciate everything that was going on. How much credit does Arthur Hopcraft deserve for this, in the way he restructured the narrative?
JO: I think Hopcraft deserves enormous praise for this. There was an earlier attempt to bring Tinker Tailor to the screen by London Weekend Television in the mid 70s, that went wrong because le Carré didn't like some of their scripting efforts. It is a very strange thing to adapt. If you think about le Carré’s previously mystery stories, like A Murder of Quality or A Small Town in Germany, they are more conventional - the investigator turns up at a school or the embassy and is able to talk to everyone and investigate. With Tinker Tailor, the entire thrust of the plot is that Smiley cannot alert the people that he's investigating, so must stay out of sight and so much of the investigation is actually him consulting the files and reflecting on his own memories. I think this is really hard to get across on screen, so Hopcraft deserves enormous credit for finding ways into that.
He cleverly moves the sequence of Jim Prideaux’s excursion into Czechoslovakia to the start of part one. It is a really great bit of mood setting and a narrative hook that draws you in. It was smart of him to figure out that he could move those scenes from later in the novel and not spoil the plot.
One of the very few photos of Arthur Hopcraft
JM: I agree, I think the changes he made at the start of the adaptation give the viewer just enough to get them to that key moment at the end of episode two where Lacon charges Smiley with cleaning the stables. And that opening scene, that's all Hopcraft as well, isn't it?
JO: It is. I remember someone once telling me that the opening scene struck her as almost something you might do in a drama improv class. All those little mannerisms, which reveal something about each character. But it is fully scripted in detail and it does seem to be his idea.
JM: One more question on Tinker Tailor and Smiley in particular - Guinness or Oldman?
JO: Guinness!
JM: That’s the right answer on this website! We love Garry Oldman but Guinness is Smiley. So, let’s talk a little bit about Smiley's People. How does it compare to Tinker Tailor and how would you appraise it?
JO: Every time I watch Smiley's People, I have the same response. I spend the first three and a half hours thinking ‘this is amazing, this is so good, I think this might be better than Tinker Tailor’. It's so fascinating watching Smiley, who in Tinker Tailor has been in these quite exclusive settings, country houses and offices, and here he is out and about meeting all these people from different walks of life, emigres and refugees and so on. I think it's incredible the way that Smiley’s People just commits to having Smiley by himself for so long and doing so much without dialogue. In many ways, it's a bolder and more ambitious piece in that sense. And I'm not surprised that Alec Guinness found it quite exhausting to do, because if you think about it, he's on camera all the time, whereas Tinker Tailor gives you all these subplots and flashbacks where he doesn’t feature. I love it but when he gets to Paris and we are introduced to the new Guillam it sort of sags a bit for me and it never quite recovers until the end.
I love them both. Tinker Tailor, I think it is the most consistently rich. Smiley’s People storms out of the gate, but doesn't quite sustain it. I admire its bravery and that it doesn't tell you what is at stake in the same way that Tinker Tailor does. It leaves you very uncertain for a long time as to what Smiley is actually doing, what the whole point of it is, which is a lot to ask of an audience. I admire it for that.
JM: Breaking away from le Carré for a moment, you have written a lot about Bird of Prey. I actually remember this series but it seems to have been largely forgotten, although second hand DVDs are still out there. I was interested in why you have focussed on it so much and why you found it to be an important production in terms of your area of research?
JO: In Paranoid Visions, there are eight programmes that I focus on in depth, and I would say Bird of Prey is definitely the most obscure and forgotten of those. I came across it largely because it's referenced in John Caughie’s short monograph on Edge of Darkness at the BFI, as a kind of precedent. In many ways, he's a bit dismissive of it because he is saying that Edge of Darkness is much better and more sophisticated - and to be honest, he's probably right. I think it is very enjoyable and has a really witty, clever script. It's definitely groundbreaking. Over the decades, you get this kind of British tradition of ‘state of the nation’/conspiracy mini-series like Edge of Darkness and then later State of Play, Utopia and Bodyguard. After years and years of researching this, I have not come across an earlier example than Bird of Prey. Maybe I've yet to discover something, I’m always hesitant to say something is the first because history often surprises you, but I'm tentatively saying it's a bit of a progenitor for the form.
It is fascinatingly in tune with developments happening in British society in the early 1980s. It is about the rise of computing technology and the growing significance of international finance on British politics. It's also about the increase of integration into the European Economic Community. It's got so many things going on which are built into this quite complex narrative of intrigue. It is definitely well worth the watch and I think it’s historically interesting.
It portrays a collapse of reason in society. I think there's a bit near the end where one of the main villains says, ‘the West is turning into bandit country’. There's a sense that all the structures of law and order across Europe have become corrupted and might be turned against you.
Richard Griffiths as Henry Jay (left) with Jeremy Child as Tony Hendersly and Nigel Davenport as Charles Bridgnorth (right)
JM: The ‘villain’ of the piece is an association of people described as ‘The Power’, which is almost like a ‘Deep State’, for want of a better comparison. I wondered what your thoughts were on that concept?
JO: Yes, ‘The Power’, which seems to be this network of people doing quiet little favours for each other that build up into some sort of conspiracy. It's three years on from Tinker Tailor but it's doing something quite different. Ultimately, Tinker Tailor is a ‘state of the nation’ mystery where we find the culpability in the hands of one person, whereas Bird of Prey is going further by saying that the problem is so much more systemic - there is some kind of elaborate network that involves many more people. In that sense, it's almost mixing Tinker Tailor with American conspiracy thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. It's a mashing together of those traditions, I think.
JM: I want to touch briefly on A Perfect Spy. Once again we have Jonathan Powell producing and Arthur Hopcraft adapting Le Carré's original novel. How would you appraise this production?
JO: We now know that John le Carré really disliked it. We only know this because of a quote in Adam Sisman’s book from his private correspondence, he didn't talk out against it at the time. I think he had a similar involvement, as with the earlier ones, as he talked a lot with Arthur Hopcraft, approved the casting of both Magnus Pym and Rick Pym and made occasional set visits. I think with all these adaptations his involvement is more at the scripting and preproduction stage, because that's the point where he could intervene and protest. I think once filming started he tends to take a step back because that was outside of his expertise and it was what it was by then. His letter says something quite ambiguous about how they took the bounce of it and never put it back in, which is a curious quote and I wish somebody had asked him about this, as I think his specific objection is lost now.
Peter Egan as Magnus Pym (left) and Rüdiger Weigang as Axel Hampel (right) in A Perfect Spy
It is obviously nowhere near as well remembered as Tinker Tailor and that may have something to do with le Carré’s lack of enthusiasm, in that he’s not really talked it up in the same way. It works really well in the first four episodes with the historical settings. I think it looks gorgeous and is so well directed. I think Ray McAnally is incredible as Rick Pym. It's possible that Magnus Pym doesn't come across as well, but I think Peter Egan had an enormous challenge. The character is so much defined by his interiority and nobody really knows who he is, which is an incredibly difficult thing to ask of an actor. Press coverage at the time suggests that le Carré gave Ray McAnally plenty of advice on how to play Rick Pym but when Peter Egan asked for some advice on how to play Magnus, le Carré shrugged and didn’t really know what to tell him. I find that actually quite revealing, given that this character is modelled on le Carré.
I think the series struggles a bit in the last few episodes when it reaches the present day. The main problem was the decision to restructure it. In the novel it cuts between people trying to find Magnus Pym in the present day and Pym writing letters explaining his past. What you get in the tv version is that they basically take all these past events and do them in order at the start, and then you get this curious last episode where Pym is hiding away writing letters. People are trying to find out where he is, but there are no flashbacks, because you've already seen that material. It falls really flat here for me.
I think restructuring it to take place in order could have worked, but to pull that off you would need to be bolder and change the ending. If Pym writing letters is no longer serving the storytelling, what's the point? What you would want instead I think is a final confrontation between Pym and Jack Brotherhood, or his wife or somebody. There needs to be some sort of face to face confrontation that I think would actually be a more televisual climax. If it had been written directly for television, that's definitely what they would have done, but unfortunately this adaptation doesn't really have much of an ending. That can't be John le Carré’s only complaint because he seems to think that it didn’t work all the way through, where as I really like the first four episodes, so my complaint appears not to be his complaint.
JM: I agree with you about Peter Egan. I think he plays a difficult role very well but it is hard for an audience to feel empathy for Magnus Pym, isn’t it?
JO: Absolutely. I recently listened to one of the radio adaptations, there have been at least two, but this is the one starring Julian Rhind-Tutt. I think it worked quite well on the radio because they kept the non-chronological structure. There was something of the letters, something of Pym narrating his own stories, and it had Julian Rhind-Tutt playing him as a child, which I thought was very interesting. You can obviously get away with something like that a bit more easily on the radio, if the character is telling their own story. Maybe radio just helps that story and the character a bit. There's something about it just being voices that comes across a lot more sympathetically in that medium.
JM: I want to talk about Arthur Lowe because he was the first television Smiley and we have corresponded a little bit about this because scenes from Call for the Dead were dramatised as part of a Lively Arts documentary about John le Carré in 1977. I'll let you take up the story but we don't really know what happened to these scenes, do we?
JO: Well, this is the ultimate rarity. It is something that nobody can seem to track down, so if anyone is reading this and knows where to find a copy, both of us would be delighted to know. Basically, there was a documentary about John le Carré broadcast in September 1977 as part of the Lively Arts series, to coincide with the publication of The Honourable Schoolboy. The bulk of this was an extended interview with le Carré at his home in Cornwall conducted by Melvyn Bragg. In the original edit of this documentary there was a reading from The Honourable Schoolboy by le Carré himself, which lasted about eight minutes, and there was a five minute dramatised sequence featuring Arthur Lowe as George Smiley, which was loosely derived from part of Call for the Dead.
I have never seen this. I don't know anybody who's ever seen it but people who were watching TV in 1977 saw this. I have managed to read the script which was published in something called The Bell House Book: Celebrating 60 Years of a Literary Agency, which brought together all sorts of odd miscellaneous short fiction by various associated authors. This was printed in 1979 and the script was written by le Carré himself. It’s the sequence from Call for the Dead where Smiley comes home to find the East German agent Hans-Dieter Mundt in his house. Smiley has to pretend to be somebody else and make a speedy getaway.
Le Carré has taken this and expanded it a bit beyond what is in Call for the Dead, so it starts off with Smiley visiting this launderette. He collects his laundry from a really obnoxious staff member called Lilly, who says a lot of mean spirited gossip about his wife. Then Smiley goes home and notices all the clues that reveal there's a stranger inside the house. He knocks on the door and pretends to be somebody else, as in the book, and then goes around the corner to a phone box to call Peter Guillam. The conversation reveals that he's retained all this information about the unfamiliar cars on the street and their registration plates and says, “Put two surveillance teams on this”, and then it basically ends.
So it expands on what is in Call for the Dead and gives a lot of attention to Smiley doing all this tradecraft, which actually isn't in the original novel. It doesn't fit the continuity of Call for the Dead, because at that point in the story Smiley has resigned from Circus and is acting alone, whereas in this 1977 version, he's calling them up and asking them to help him out. If you think about it, it's very similar in structure to how Smiley is introduced in Tinker Tailor. The comedic incident with the launderette is almost the equivalent of the Roddy Martindale scene, in that Smiley is seen as this downtrodden figure getting bullied by a mean spirited gossip. Then it cuts to him going home and finding there's somebody there, at which point you suddenly see all his clever tradecraft coming into play and you realise that he's a much more substantial character.
So le Carré has taken a little off-cut from Call for the Dead and made it much more like the stuff he was writing in the 1970s. This was filmed with Arthur Lowe in the role of Smiley and Paul Seed as Hans-Dieter Mundt. In numerous interviews since then, le Carré indicated that this vignette actually served a secondary purpose of screen testing Lowe for the part of Smiley, with the notion that he might play Smiley in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I find this a little hard to reconcile with the chronology because, going by the BBC Written Archives, it seems like most of the work on this Lively Arts documentary was done by mid-March 1977 and the earliest indication of Powell trying to acquire the rights to Tinker Tailor start in June that year. So it seems a little surprising to me, unless there are unrecorded discussions that took place earlier.
By the time the Lively Arts episode was transmitted in September, plans were well underway for Tinker Tailor, so you can imagine that Jonathan Powell would have watched this with interest. Perhaps there's a misremembering of that. But the story le Carré tells is that they watched Arthur Lowe playing the part and, because they knew him as Captain Mainwaring and from all of his other comedic roles, they were in hysterics and couldn't take it seriously. I cannot comment on this myself because I have not seen it. I can't help wonder if it's a little bit unfair, because Arthur Lowe's co-star in Dad’s Army, John Le Mesurier, had a few years earlier appeared in Dennis Potter's Traitor. This was a Play for Today about a Kim Philby type figure and Le Mesurier had played it completely straight and won critical acclaim, including a British Academy Television Award for Best Actor in 1972. So there was precedent for a Dad’s Army star doing a completely serious espionage drama.
I think we can imagine how Lowe would have played the slightly more comedic scene in the laundrette. The question is whether he brought the kind of steel that would be needed to the later sequence where he meets Mundt. And that's what we don't know - maybe we won't ever know.
JM: The original documentary was re-edited, wasn't it, for later broadcast, without these scenes.
JO: Yes, what happened was that two years later, they prepared a version of the documentary in advance of the broadcast of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and essentially repurposed it into a promotional vehicle for the series. They cut it down to fifty minutes and took out The Honourable Schoolboy reading and the Arthur Lowe scenes, replacing them with just a few brief preview clips of Guinness playing Smiley. This 1979 version is much more readily available. It is on YouTube and it seems that when anyone investigates this, they end up finding the 1979 version. Creating a new version of the documentary seems to have caused havoc with cataloguing in the archive and led to the earlier programme being replaced. If the 1977 version survives, it is astonishingly difficult to find through any of the channels you might use for something like this.
JM: It goes without saying that we would be interested to hear from anybody who's seen the 1977 version of this documentary and even more interested to hear from anybody who has a copy of it or knows where we might acquire one! Please feel free to email us at guinnessissmiley@icloud.com if you have any information. It is ironic that the Arthur Lowe scenes are missing because Alec Guinness was a bit concerned that Lowe had got there before him, wasn't he?
JO: Yes, in the first letter that le Carré sends to Guinness, which is printed in full in A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré, he says Smiley has basically never been played on screen before. He mentions that Rupert Davies did a little turn in the role in The Spy Who Came In From The Cold, misses out the fact that James Mason played a re-named version of the character in The Deadly Affair, and then says as a by-the-way, that Arthur Lowe did it in this little comedy piece for the Lively Arts. His aim in writing this is clearly to say ‘you will be the first true Smiley and these other actors who have played the part are completely insignificant’. But actually mentioning Lowe backfires, as in his reply Guinness writes that he’s a bit worried Lowe has already been seen in the part and thinks he's a really good actor.
As described in the books, Arthur Lowe physically resembled Smiley far more than Guinness did and far more than any other actor who has ever played Smiley. He's described as rotund and double-chinned. Guinness took things like physical appearance really seriously and was initially a bit nervous and apprehensive about this difference. There's no sense in the letters that he actually saw the Lowe piece himself, it just seems to be le Carré putting the seed of the idea in his head. According to Adam Sisman’s biography, even weeks into shooting Guinness was still questioning if he was right for the role and whether they should get Arthur Lowe to play the part.
JM: Let’s hope the original documentary does turn up one day - it would be amazing to see Arthur Lowe as the first television Smiley. Your book Paranoid Visions: Spies, Conspiracies and the Secret State in British Television Drama is already out, and I think it's fair to say anybody who has enjoyed this interview is going to love reading it but I know you're working on a new book. What can you tell us about that at the moment?
JO: It is basically the story of the John le Carré television adaptations in order, going back to memos at the BBC talking about Call for the Dead in 1961, right through to 2018's The Little Drummer Girl and possibly beyond if anything else comes out. This is partly because I feel there's so much more to say and partly down to popular demand. The Tinker Tailor material in Paranoid Visions is always the bit that seems to interest people the most and I keep being asked to write other articles about it. So I just thought it would be fun to finish the story as it's obviously something people want to know more about.
JM: Thank you so much for your time, Jo. All the best with your writing
JO: A pleasure, thanks Jonathan
Screen captures from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley's People, A Perfect Spy and Bird of Prey (c) BBC
Images from The End of the Line were found online
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