Contemporary publishers change the language in popular children’s books – the works of Roald Dahl, for instance. Film producers and actors baulk at characters and plots as they re-make well-known film stories – consider Disney and Snow White.
On-line commentators hurl abuse at each other, making barbs from words such as ‘woke’, ‘censor’ and ‘philistine’. ‘Influencers’ vie for attention. Readers, film-goers and pundits take sides. Rows erupt.
Why undertake re-makes? Why not make new stories set in contemporary times, wherein contemporary sensibilities can be expressed and tested? History is so rich in material that plundering all elements of it, from actual occurrences (The Manhattan Project to build atomic weapons of mass destruction in the film Oppenheimer) to cultural trends (the creation and marketing of toys and accessories in Barbie) is a powerful driver of cultural production, one that artists of all types find interesting and producers find immensely profitable.
Historically, international diplomacy and espionage existed as a form of upper class high jinks, best learned at an exclusive university. Loyalty to one’s friends trumps loyalty to the State, just so long as your friends are white, male and from the same class, either by birth, by education or by co-option.
Another approach to the clashes between current sensibilities and contemporary treatments of matters of gender, race and class in historical work is to apply imagination, full-square, by inserting completely new characters into the story. This is the approach taken by the makers of A Spy Among Friends, a remake of the Burgess-McClean-Philby-Blunt spy story from England in the period 1934 to 1970, emerging with the rise of Nazism, continuing through the second world war, the cold war and the imperial re-alignments that favoured the USA and the USSR over the old imperialists; France, Spain and England.
A Spy Among Friends imagines a non-patrician female spy, Lily Thomas, (played by Anna Maxwell Martin) as an insider-reformer, while her black immigrant husband, Dr Robert Thomas (Gershwyn Eustache Jnr), is an early NHS saint. Both of them present a liberal socialism, based on the fairness and the rightness of the traditional British way of life in the face of the brutishness of the Soviets and the corporate paranoia of the USA. Not even when the spy closest to the monarch, Sir Anthony (Tony to his chums) Blunt, the most patrician of the lot, has his cover blown, does the foundational British exceptionalism and confidence experience the slightest tremor.
Kim Philby (played by Guy Pearce) is a charismatic traitor. Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis) is his enigmatic friend and colleague in deception. The film covers the cat-and-mouse chase either side of Philby’s final flit to Moscow, where he is greeted with a medal and a life-time of suspicion. The impulse to uncover what really happened – did Philby run or was he chased? - comes from the fictional spy Lily Thomas, transferred from MI5 into MI6/SIS.
If you like watching and reading the work of the late John Le Carré, then this will please you. The locations – seedy hotel rooms in Beirut, grubby apartments in Moscow and Berlin, leather-bound furnishings in London gentlemen’s clubs, isolated rural hideaways where spies are mysteriously sequestered before being whisked back to London – do not disappoint. The colour palette is variations on grey, even in the souk. The great wheel of Empire turns relentlessly, gently whispering “don’t mind us, we’re simply plundering the world in our own interests, while you live out your petty lives.”
The dramatic ruse employed to secure the contemporary viewers buy-in despite the blatant gender, racial and social class bias at the heart of this plundering, is to import a working class woman from elsewhere in the British secret service corridors to drive the unraveling of the chase. Lily Thomas adds vim and sleuthing to the inter-departmental arguments, while unpicking Elliott’s doleful cornering of his ‘best friend’ Philby. There is considerable tension and not much excitement. An overall sense of fine writing, fine acting and intricate story crafting carries the 6 part telling of a well-worn tale. It is very watchable, vaguely comforting and bears enough intrigue to pass an hour each time. However The Spy who came in from the Cold it is not.
A Spy Among Friends begins with the big reveal that Philby is a traitor who has been working for the KGB and feeding them intel for the past 20 years. His close friend and fellow SIS (aka MI6) agent Nicholas Elliott is tasked with going to Beirut to retrieve Philby and extract a full confession, despite appearing to doubt the depth of his friend’s betrayal. It becomes a sort of espionage stew at this point, jumping around in time from the early days of Philby and Elliott’s friendship in the second world war, to MI5’s 1963 interrogation of Elliott, to work out who knew what about Philby and when.
If you have an appetite for Cold War spy thrillers full of men in good overcoats and hats, secrets being passed inside rolled-up newspapers, conversations in coded language and, if you can stomach doses of social class, gender and race biases, then you may enjoy this. It is available on ITVX and the ITV player catch-up service, a further instance of variegation in tv production and distribution.
The chief problem with the series, where the acting and period details are assured and engaging, is that the script suggests that the viewer is being deceived as much in the fiction as in the historical fact.
Recommended.
A Spy Among Friends
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt15565872/
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