Tinkering
Richard Ingrams
I can't remember exactly when I stopped reading John Le Carre's novels but I rather think A Small Town In Germany (1968) was the last one I read and I'm not even sure whether I finished it or not. My memory is that Le Carre, who started out as a writer of excellent espionage and murder stories, as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, grew more prolix the more successful he became and began to fancy himself as a cut above a mere writer of thrillers. The flattery which was accorded to him by people like Melvyn Bragg who, called him in a recent television interview 'one of the two or three leading novelists of his generation' has not been good for him. To be fair to Le Carre he did acknowledge in that same interview with Bragg an obligation to hold the interest of the reader — always inclined, he said, to be fidgety in his chair.
The same obligation of course rests on the producers of Le Carre's book Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy now running on BBC2 as a major feature in the Beeb's new season. There is no doubting the quality of the acting in this series. Both of the first two instalments featured two first-rate performances, one by Nigel Davenport as the terrible bore Roddy Nightingale and the second by Susan Kodicek as a Russian defector, And then of course, there is the star of the show Sir Alec Guinness, whose facial expressions do promote the illusion that what we are watching is something pretty profound and significant.
But it is not. The adaptation suffers from the same fault as the Melvyn Bragg interview in that it Seriously overrates Le Carres talent. Besides which, spies, be they imagined or real like Philby and Burgess, are fairly boring figures who cannot sustain one's interest for long. Le Cane makes things more difficult for himself by depict ing a 'twilight' world in which no-one is quite sure what anyone else is up to. This may be true of the real world of espionage but it makes it difficult for the viewer to follow the thread. I was hoping that my task would be made easier this week by a resume at the beginning of Episode 2 explaihing in a few simple sentences exactly what had happened in Episode 1. No such luck. As far as I can see, all that has really happened after two 50-minute episodes is that the existence ofa double agent has been discovered in the Secret Service and Alec Guinness is now going to try and search him out. All this could have been compressed into one episode with the resulting omission of much of Mr Le Carre's more pretentious dialogue.
I spoke too soon in July when I predicted a long and welcome absence of Esther Rantzen from the screen due to pregnancy. The old bat is back with something called Junior That's Life which goes out on BBC 1 on Saturday. I'm not quite sure what purpose it serves except to keep Mrs Wilcox in the schedule throughout the year. There is hardly any difference between That's Life and Junior That's Life, except that in place of the ogling, unctuous Cyril Fletcher there is a horrible little boy with glasses called Sean who sits and reads out funny cuttings. Otherwise it is the usual stuff about how Mrs Nargs is given a different postal-code every time she gets a letter from the Post Office. There was a particularly nauseating scene when Esther got a little girl she was interviewing to wipe some lipstick off her teeth for her and all the little kiddies were told to be on the watch for evidence of pollution and ring their Environmental Health Officer at the first sign of detergent in the village pond. If only something could be done to disperse the encroaching Rantzen which threatens to engulf us all.
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