As the CIA and MI6 try to predict the next gambit of the unstable leader in the Kremlin, Britons flinch at reports of the possible use of nuclear weapons.
But this is 1962; Khrushchev not Putin. ITV’s new adaptation of Len Deighton’s cold war novel The Ipcress File – which was a 60s-defining movie starring Michael Caine as the working-class spy Harry Palmer – was meant to be a period piece for 2022 viewers. But the Russian president’s invasion of Ukraine, and pointed reminders to the world about the size of his nuclear weapons, have given the Sunday night drama a new context.
“I thought I was writing history, but it turned out to be current affairs,” says screenwriter John Hodge. “When you pitch a script, you’re always asked: ‘What’s relevant about this? Why should we make it now?’ And with The Ipcress File, there was a fear that this stuff was so long ago. Our line was actually always that, in the cold war, people were very much aware of the threat of nuclear annihilation but it hasn’t gone away because of the number of warheads and rogue players and so on. But it feels terrible to be proved right.”
As Hodge’s Oscar-nominated script for Danny Boyle’s 1996 movie Trainspotting was on screen within three years of Irvine Welsh’s novel, and his adaptation of Alex Garland’s The Beach in 2000 appeared just four years after the hardback, Deighton’s 1962 novel is by far the oldest source material Hodge has ever brought to our screens – and the first that has already been a movie.
His version of The Ipcress File, though, is very different from either the 1962 book or the 1965 Caine film about a kidnapped British nuclear scientist. The novel is a first-person narrative and the movie dominated by Palmer, but Hodge has “given voices to other characters. Six hours of TV demands huge amounts of story compared to a movie. You need more central characters.”
The TV version spreads the action between the new Palmer, played by Joe Cole), British agent Jean (Lucy Boynton), her spymaster Dalby (Tom Hollander) and CIA agent Maddox (Ashley Thomas). The fact that an African American spy was plausible (though rare) at that time, when the English secret service was hideously white, also allows the series to achieve both historical realism and diversity: “It is a balance between being true to the era and writing something a modern audience can relate to.”
Cole, after a clever bit of business with the thick black-framed spectacles that were Caine’s visual signature, takes the role in a new direction, helped by a new backstory featuring thrilling scenes in Berlin that Deighton never imagined. Hodge and director James Watkins (Black Mirror, McMafia) “felt we needed something to introduce Harry,” says Hodge. “I think in a movie you can just say here’s a spy and go along with him. But TV audiences need to know a bit more about the characters … so I wrote a sequence about how Harry got involved, rather unwillingly, in espionage.”
In the 60s, the cockney boy confidently dining at the highest tables was seen as a symbol of England’s social evolution. But now, says Hodge, we see it differently. “This is set at a time when the next five British prime ministers [Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, Thatcher and Major] are going to be from state schools, and it feels, in that moment, that the Old Etonians are over. But obviously we now know that they weren’t.”
Hodge has also done a lot of plot renovation. “I think Deighton lost interest in the plot halfway through the novel, and it’s a series of comic riffs after that.”
He sees it as a story about the emergence of a modern culture in Britain, after the still literally and metaphorically rationed 1950s: flying to Rome or Paris seems impossibly glamorous, and exotic delicatessens offer unimaginable foodstuffs such as pomegranate.
The show covers 1962 to 63, and older viewers and history students will delight in trying to anticipate how Hodge might bring in what he calls “high 60s moments” – the Cuban missile crisis, the Profumo sex scandal, the presidency of John F Kennedy: “One of the pleasures of writing recent historical fiction is that you can aim for these landmarks that some of the audience will be anticipating.”
Deighton’s cheekily meritocratic spook has widely been seen as an anti-James Bond and, oddly, working on The Ipcress File was also post-007 for Hodge. He and Boyle (his director on Trainspotting, its sequel T2 and Shallow Grave) were employed on “Bond 25”, which subsequently became last year’s No Time to Die; they co-wrote a script before being sacked.
“I think it was me they really wanted rid of, but Danny took the bullet, too,” says Hodge. Do non-disclosure agreements cover their departure? “No. Just decent British discretion!”
At the time Hodge and Boyle learned they would not write another day, there were suggestions they had spooked the producers by pitching an incredibly subversive storyline. But the released movie contains a twist at least as dramatic, which seems to disprove the rumour they had gone too far. “My understanding was that that twist had been decided even before we came on board because Daniel Craig wanted it. I think, with us, it was that old cliche “creative differences”. It felt very dramatic at the time but it was just another bump in the road of the Bond franchise.”
As Hodge says he is sparing with scene directions (“I don’t like to tell directors what to do”), I wonder about the spectacular action sequences in a Bond movie. Do you just write “the island rises into the air and explodes” and let them get on with it?
“I kind of hoped that was the case, because in a big action movie, the action is worked out between the director and numerous departments. But for some reason, they want you to write the action. It’s the thing I hate doing most: ‘The car skids round the corner, bouncing off the kerb. Inside the car, Jack Wiley lights a cigarette’ etc. And you can only get it wrong: they either tell you it’s too expensive or say it’s too unambitious because a plane already flew through the Deptford Tunnel in Fast and Furious 7, or whatever.”
Hodge still has his Bond script on a laptop. When he saw the movie, he found that “half a line” of his dialogue had survived. What is it? “Aaaargh, I can’t. It’s their film. I don’t want to seem like the guy who got paid and goes round telling stories about them.” He didn’t even tell his family what the half-line was. “Look, it’s the screenwriter’s life. If you’re lucky, you get a job, and sometimes that job doesn’t end well.”
If this ITV show is successful, Hodge would like to adapt Deighton’s 1965 novel Billion Dollar Brain (also a film with Caine), which is about viral warfare, and which may also have reached an interesting moment for a remake.
He does not, though, expect Trainspotting to become a trilogy. “I think that’s done. In that heady atmosphere of producing T2, we talked about coming back to it. But the second film was not as exciting as the first, and to me that was a reflection of the fact that life isn’t as exciting in your 40s and 50s as in your 20s. I was at peace with that. Any idea of getting the gang back together for more hijinks just feels misguided to me.”
He and Boyle are “developing an idea for a feature film, which is quite an old-fashioned idea these days. And, like most writers in the UK at the moment, we’re trying to think of ideas we can pitch to a big streamer for a vast multiseason international show!”
The Ipcress File starts on 6 March at 9pm on ITV. The full series is available on ITV Hub
