Joe Cole in ITV’s The Ipcress File
(Picture: ITV)This weekend sees the launch of ITV’s glossy new series adaptation of the (now uncomfortably timely, being set during the Cold War) spy classic, The Ipcress File. Joe Cole plays Harry Palmer, the cocky hero of Len Deighton’s 1962 novel made famous by Michael Caine’s portrayal in the 1965 film, a working class lad holding his own against the poshos of the intelligence community - James Bond without the castle in Scotland. To get you in the zone for a bit of fictional international intrigue, we’ve rounded up the best of British espionage series and where you can find them.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
John le Carré’s masterpiece got a deservedly masterful TV adaptation in 1979, with Alec Guinness starring as the bespectacled, unfailingly polite spook George Smiley, who is tasked with rooting out the mole who has been passing secrets from the heart of Cambridge Circus (aka MI6) to Moscow Centre. A former agent himself, le Carré was inspired by the real life treachery of Kim Philby, the British intelligence officer whose establishment credentials acted as a convenient smoke screen for the fact that he was secretly a Communist working for the USSR. KR
Smiley’s People
Guinness put his square specs back on a few years later for the BBC version of the concluding part of le Carré’s Smiley trilogy (the middle novel, The Honourable Schoolboy, was skipped over). Our unlikely hero finally goes head to head with Karla, the Soviet spy boss (played here by Patrick Stewart) who has haunted his career. Perhaps even more so than Tinker Tailor, the series is a real slow burn, but the final scene - involving a crossing from East to West Berlin - is a masterclass in understatement and tension. KR
Killing Eve
It’s hard to pinpoint the moment we collectively fell head over heels for this spy saga, its first season scripted with razor-sharp wit by Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Was it when chameleonic assassin Villanelle (Jodie Comer) first stomped across the Place Vendôme wearing a powder pink Molly Goddard confection? Her initial charged encounter with Eve (Sandra Oh), the MI6 agent tasked with hunting her down, and bringing down the shady international network she serves too? Or was it when spy boss Carolyn (Fiona Shaw) told a story about a rat drinking a can of Coke with both hands? Killing Eve may have lost a little of its fizz over time, but it certainly shook up the boys club of on-screen espionage in style. KR
London Spy
Well here’s change - unlike most spy tales in which the ‘love’ story is perfunctory at best, this tender thriller focused on a gorgeous courtship between Ben Whishaw’s London hedonist Danny and reserved investment banker Alex (Edward Holcroft), whom he bumps into one morning after the night before. They fall in love, and then Alex disappears, and may or may not end up in a suitcase, and it becomes clear that he is not an investment banker, at all. Also his mother is played by Charlotte Rampling so what more could you want? Brilliant and oddly beautiful. ND
The Little Drummer Girl
Another le Carré novel to get the mini-series treatment, this one marked Florence Pugh’s first big TV role, playing aspiring actress Charlie, who is recruited by the Israeli secret service after a holiday romance with Mossad agent Becker (Alexander Skarsgard). The heavyweight cast also features Michael Shannon on typically unsettling form as spymaster Kurtz, and it’s directed by Park Chan-woo (The Handmaiden, Stoker) so it looks incredible. KR
Spooks
If you’re anything like us, you’ll find it quite hard to go back and watch the first two series of Spooks and not have the whole thing slightly derailed by the nagging amusement of Succession’s Tom Wambsgans appearing as a heart-throb MI5 bigwig. Fictional universe crossovers aside though, this BBC stalwart is well worth revisiting. With its addition of a glossy new sheen to the existing spy thriller format, with a young cast and no small amount of swagger, it’s easy now to reflect on how something this slick, suspenseful, and downright fun series grew into of the BBC’s biggest Noughties hits. JE
The Night Manager
It’s the series that launched a thousand ‘Tom Hiddleston for 007?’ headlines. This glossy spin on le Carré (him again) places the action of the Nineties novel against the backdrop of the Arab Spring. As soldier-turned-luxury hotel staffer Jonathan Pine, Hiddleston got plenty of Bond buzz (and also had the dubious honour of one grainy still of his bum, from one of Pine’s trysts with Elizabeth Debicki’s Jed, going viral), with excellent support from Hugh Laurie as smooth-talking arms dealer Richard Roper, Tom Hollander as his henchman and Olivia Colman as a British operative, originally written as a man. KR
The Game
Everybody is in hock to everybody else it seems in this dense thriller stuffed with all the tickbox spy series tropes you could wish for and an effective ticking clock as numerous people including agent Joe Lambe (a langorous Tom Hughes) race to track down and stop sleeper agents launching a nuclear strike on Britain. Originally made with big money for BBC America, it looks stunning. ND
The Avengers
No, it’s not the all-consuming superhero mega-franchise; it’s the other Avengers, the espionage series that ran for no less than 161 episodes throughout the majority of the 1960s. No other show made Cold War skullduggery seem quite so hip and glamorous — the Pierre Cardin outfits certainly helped with that — and its stalwart hero John Steed (Patrick Macnee) was as much a dab hand at seeing off a Soviet agent as he was maintaining the sexual tension between him and his unfailingly swish female assistants, Diana Rigg being the best of the lot. JE
Alex Rider
Anthony Horowitz’s brilliant book series about a teenage boy recruited by MI6, like a sort of adolescent Bond with gadgets hidden in his Walkman (it was the early Noughties!), spawned one starry film adaptation, Stormbreaker, which underperformed at the box office and nixed plans for a sprawling franchise. More than a decade later, the Alex Rider novels have found new life on the small screen. Otto Farrant makes a likable lead as a very Gen-Z Alex, with Vicky McClure and Stephen Dillane playing his secret service handlers. The first two seasons were based on Point Blanc and Skeleton Key, and the scope of a mini-series gives Horowitz’s ambitious plots breathing space. KR
Cambridge Spies
Le Carré’s contempt for Kim Philby is writ large upon Tinker Tailor, but the notorious double agent — along with his fellow spies Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Anthony Blunt — gets an easier ride in this BBC drama from 2003, which plays relatively fast and loose with the facts (and so was accused of glamourising treachery in service of a good telly). Accuracy aside, writer Peter Moffat’s dash through each of the four men’s idealistic student days, and their later years passing classified information to the Soviets, is highly watchable, with a great cast (Toby Stephens, Tom Hollander, Rupert Penry-Jones and Samuel West play the main quartet). KR
