A talent for understatement

I've finally got round to watching Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy for the first time. Why on earth it has taken me for so long I have no idea – it was always going to be something I was going to love. I have an obsession with twentieth century history, and I recently read a wonderful account of le Carré's work in Dominic Sandbrook's postwar British history sequence, Never Had It So Good and White Heat. Sandbrook saw le Carré's writing as a reaction against the increasing glamourisation of spies in Cold War fiction, typified by James Bond's lavish lifestyle and gaudy exploits. Colour in le Carré's work, like fuss, is kept to a minimum. In the 1979 BBC dramatisation of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, the most colourful things are Beryl Reid's force of nature performance as former head of research Connie, Warren Clarke's bizarre queeny cameo as doorman Alwyn and Bernard Hepton's shirts. Hepton was one of my Mum's many unlikely crushes, alongside Alice Cooper, David Bowie and BBC legal correspondent Joshua Rosenberg.

The series starts and ends with two of the most terrifyingly tense sequences I've ever seen – Ian Bannen's journey into Communist Brno and his inevitable ambush, and the interception and unmasking of the top-level Soviet spy by George Smiley, played with detatched amusement and controlled rage by Alec Guinness. But outside of those two moments of thrilling action it's the greyness of this world that is most fascinating – the drab files, nondescript offices, unremarkable public schoolboys in senior positions, petty politics and anonymous meeting points. It shares with Yes, Minister a thoroughly believable depiction of the upper echelons of British power in the 1970s, devoid of any of those cliched signifiers of the age, be they disco or glam, hippies or punks, studs or bitches. The skill here is the lack of ostentation, both in the operations of the world it represents and in the plotting and characterisation. Here you see a world that the British could really excel in – an industry of undemonstrative irony and banality. The public school subplot makes clear that they believed the Cold War would be won on the playing fields of Eton. A whole echelon of society is sketched out here.

The characters are studies in emotional unintelligence. And that is what makes the ending so shocking: not the unmasking of the traitor, but the revelatory performance of Sian Phillips as Smiley's oft-mentioned wife Ann, who hears of all of the regime-shattering revelations from her husband with the sort of amused tolerance of a mother listening as her child relates stories of his boarding-school adventures. George, this all-knowing collossus of British Intelligence, is left blinking in the sunlight as his wife mocks his uncomprehending response to her thoughts on love: 'poor George'. Here it is, the real face of what the British ruling classes deemed intelligence: a man so wedded to the subtle intricacies of the politics of his work that he can no longer understand his estranged wife's direct emotional response. Clever, subtle, beautiful stuff. And I stil have Smiley's People to go!

EDIT: Almost forgot to mention the names. Smiley, of course, is anything but. Toby Esterhase is a name that will buzz about in my head forever, it being so wonderful to say. But it is Control that captivates. Control. An actual character called Control, amidst all the banality of the Bill Haydens and Roy Blands. Is the name an indication of a more mysterious and professional past to the Intelligence Service? Is it a courtesy? A joke? Did he turn up at work one day and tell everyone, 'I want you to stop calling me Dennis Jones, from now on I want you to call me Control.'
'Is that Dennis Control or Control Jones?'
'No, just Control.'
'Well, that's going to mess up the phone list.'
Best of all, they don't call him 'Control'. They call him 'Controle'. Rhymes with Mole.