Alec Guinness beats Gary Oldman, plus debating technique and Afghanistan

I have now watched, for the first time in more than 30 years, the complete BBC version of 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy', and am confirmed in my view that the recent film of the same book is a miserable failure, both in absolute terms and by comparison.

I do have a slight suspicion that the DVD set has been edited – I am quite sure the scene where Ricki Tarr goes to Paris Embassy and hijacks the SIS station there is much briefer on DVD than it was when I watched it.  But then again, I know that memory is a fickle thing. On a recent visit to Moscow, I went to visit my old home and either they'd moved an entire Metro station (Akademicheskaya, since you ask) 500 yards north in the past ten years, or I had remembered the layout of the streets round my block quite inaccurately.   I am, however, certain that the sex shop wasn't there in 1992.

In listing things that the BBC version did and the film did not, I shall recognise that the film had to be much shorter.
But I shall also recognise that the film wasted large slices of perfectly good time with made-up scenes of George Smiley swimming, or roaming about the place, or of Peter Guillam sacking his boyfriend (Guillam in the book is heterosexual, but the TV version completely ignores his sex life).

The main thing that the BBC did was to understand the story. This illuminated its casting. Ian Richardson's seductive glamour, and Alec Guinness's
woebegone despair, together with Anthony Bate's perfect impersonation of a high government official, with all his grandeur and faults, made thenature of the conflict quite clear. I think the BBC also got far closer to Connie Sachs, in the unlikely shape of Beryl Reid (again, didn't she get longer in the original TV version than she does on the DVD?) . And Ian Bannen, as Jim Prideaux, successfully portrays a certain type of Englishman now extinct – but crucial to the plot – patriotic, sporting, ruthless yet kind,  unintellectual yet beautifully educated and a skilled linguist. In my view the depth of the long-lost pre-war homosexual relationship between Prideaux and Bill Haydon, revealed in the final pages of the book, is the key to everything else in the story, and adds greatly to the sense of loss and hurt, and of disappointed hopes, which the story so well portrays.  Haydon has remained sexually omnivorous to the end (Smiley has to pay off a girlfriend and a boyfriend, after his exposure) and was presumably playing a game with the young and naïve Prideaux.  Prideaux, by contrast, was loyal. And in the end, Haydon sold him to the Kremlin, to be tortured and broken, to save himself. That is why Prideaux stalks Haydon at the end, and why he kills him with his bare hands, not (as in the absurd film) with a distant and impersonal shot.

It also explains the haunting closing credits of the TV programme, the golden heart of Oxford on a summer's evening, as a choirboy sings that most melancholy of the Anglican canticles, the 'Nunc Dimittis' to Geoffrey Burgon's plangent setting.  Evensong, Oxford and summers long ago, combined with Simeon's plea to be allowed to 'depart in peace', for he has seen 'thy salvation' – it is perhaps a  clever allusion both to the root of the betrayal , and to Smiley's final effort of will and mind, which saves the service from treachery. I have always thought so.

The TV series also gives a far better account of Control, and is in a way much fairer to Percy Alleline, whose ambition at the beginning, pomposity when at his height, and  bleak devastation at the end is wonderfully portrayed by Michael Aldridge. The horrible Islay Hotel, the sort of bleak, sequestered location in which le Carre likes to set his heroes,  is also more faithfully shown.

It makes an attempt to show Haydon's own rather feeble attempt to explain his treachery (and Smiley's scorn for it). I wish I could see a repeat of John le Mesurier's rather fuller portrayal of a Philby-type figure, reminiscing about his treachery,  in the BBC play 'Traitor', shown in 1971. But I expect it's been wiped. I'm still waiting, in a way, for a real, honest account to turn up in an archive, by one of these people,  of why they did what they did. I think it might, even now, reveal too much about the wider demoralisation of the British governing classes. I have never forgotten the way in which establishment figures such as Graham Greene (whose brother Hugh had been a really destructive Director-General of the BBC) more or less openly sympathised with Philby.

On other subjects, I think the important point about the cannabis debate, which is now viewable on YouTube, is that this much is clear: There is no clear-cut case for legalisation. The arguments advanced as certainties by its supporters are all open to serious question. In which case, surely the wise thing is to retain the status quo. Once legalised, it could never be re-banned, or only with grave difficulty.

The general civility of the debate (greater than takes place when we discuss the matter here in writing) is easily explained. First, jests, sarcasm and teasing are easily understood in spoken language, and often unnoticed in written language.  An actual human being, with a face and voice, is bound to engage some of the sympathies even of his opponents, in the flesh. The same person's ideas, coldly expressed in print, come with no such filter. I think it quite permissible to hit hard at ideas I disagree with, and don't mind the same in return. And in written exchanges, this will happen much more than in personal ones. Mr Reynolds and I continue to disagree strongly with each other, and to dislike the other's arguments. But that does not mean we hate each other.

 

I should add here that I dislike the hostile tone of the some of the attacks on Mr Reynolds among the comments on the previosu thread. I don't in any way endorse them, but at the moment I think Mr Reynolds is quite capable of looking after himself and will leave him to do so. At the same time can I ask contributors to mind their manners from now on. My case certainly isn't served (and Mr Reynolds's case isn't harmed) by personal rudeness. It's the argument that matters.

 

As to who 'won', well, Mr Reynolds won the vote – but my pre-debate survey showed that most of the audience had already smoked dope and could be assumed to be partial. So perhaps I swung more opinions. In fact, 'winning' in such events is as important as the final score in 'Have I Got news for You' – not important at all. The point is, has it made anyone think, or helped anyone think?

I'd just like to offer a brief opinion on other thing.  Why have our soldiers been dying in such large numbers in Afghanistan, after a long period with few casualties?  They should of course not be there at all, but I had assumed that the government, realising this, had instructed their commanders to take fewer risks with lives. This seems not to be so.

From what I can see from the TV, the people of Carterton are making a praiseworthy effort to show their respects to the returning dead. But as they are compelled to do so on a suburban grass verge on the edge of that town, they cannot possibly replicate the scenes which used to take place in Wootton Bassett.  The cortege is (deliberately in my view) routed out of RAF Brize Norton by a back gate and away from the centre of Carterton. The official excuses for this route are pitiful and embarrassing. I still think this is shocking and wrong.