Just in case there are men still reading this column after last week's fiesta of wrinkles, wrinkles, keys and menopause: this week I'm going to talk about spies.
Oh, you like . is not it? Spies. Beige coats, rainy nights, strong drinks, special code words, surly Russians, winter park benches and lurking Transit vans.
They're not my cup of tea. Or at least they can be real spies; many of our Only Connect teams, innocent as we may claim that they all met at a local bowling alley or share a love of French cinema or caving, are in fact bound by their activities in international espionage. But, such is their professionalism, they don’t write that in the questionnaire.
Spy fiction, however, is not for me. It's all a bit masculine, confusing and grey. I will never be able to follow the plot. And I'm really not interested in “special craft”.
I once got into terrible trouble for choosing James Bond when I was a guest in room 101. The audience booed! But I always thought he was a bore, combining violence and sexism with a weird camping fussiness about how to mix his drink and what kind of wine is allowed with fish, but women should like him because he has special handles. Don't get me wrong: I love nerds and sexists, but both qualities in the same person are completely non-sexual. At the end of most Bond movies, I get shaky and excited, but they still can't wake me up.
After Sean Connery, James Bond also seems strangely incompetent. In “The Spy Who Loved Me” he jumps off a cliff with a giant Union Jack parachute, thus demonstrating an inability to understand even the most basic principles of secrecy, and by “Skyfall” he cannot keep even one elderly woman from harm – hardly surprising , since his big plan to help her escape the searching helicopters is to lead her through the pitch-black wasteland with a flashlight. In the remake of Casino Royale, when Bond is called “the best poker player in the service”, he can't beat a man whose eyes bleed during a bluff.
If James Bond were a woman, she'd be kicked out like a scruffy old bum right off the bat. (And she would certainly be useless against crime lord Hai Fat in The Man with the Golden Gun, as his name alone would have her screaming health farm.) On the other hand, seducing Pussy Galore would be much faster.
Other spy films are more intellectually respectable, but I still tend to ignore them. My all-time favorite movie is Another Country (1984), but that's because we're told at the beginning and end that Guy Bennett (pronounced “Burgess”) is a spy, but instead of watching all that boring old nuclear secrets in rainy parks, the rest of the movie is about what happened at Eton to kill his patriotism.
Colin Firth and Rupert Everett in Another Country. Author: Alami
This is my favorite place. The Cambridge Spies' setting: country greens, college lawns, handmade shoes, 1930s cocktail parties and handsome boys with fluid sexual persuasion who give up everything for the charms of Mother Russia. My ex-boyfriend played Anthony Blunt in about 12 different productions, and I still shudder with a strange delight when I think about them, even about the prim and servile curator he rolled out in The Crown. (We were just friends then, but I managed to marry a left-handed ex-schoolboy, so I'm happy enough.)
TV this week gave us two looks at these golden Cambridge traitors. A Spy Among Friends is a six-part ITV1 adaptation of Ben McIntyre's book about Kim Philby (previously aired on ITVX, where only spies could find her), and An Englishman Abroad, Alan Bennett's excellent 1983 short story about Guy Burgess' friendship with actress Coral Brown. , was shown on BBC Four and is now available on iPlayer.
In the latter, Coral Brown plays herself, which neatly addresses the lack of women in Cold War spy stories. The Spy Among Friends solves this problem by coming up with a character for Anna Maxwell Martin and she's always nice to look at, but it raises two other issues: (1) if you're going to come up with a woman who's old enough to interrogate a man who let Kim Philby will run away, and who is married to a mixed-race black husband, this is so progressive for MI5 in 1963 that in fact the whole drama should be about her backstory, not to mention the spies, and (2) since she is fictionalized in any case, it's a bit mean to insist that she's from Durham and Anna Maxwell Martin isn't, and then record a long conversation with Damian Lewis's character about her accent.
According to the form, I couldn't follow the plot ” A spy among friends” (“Why are they talking about SIS all the time?” I asked irritably. “It’s MI6,” explained an anonymous media source who loves this kind of thing. “But they mentioned the Soviet intelligence services, and why isn't it SIS?” I shuddered. “Because it's the KGB,” he said like an idiot).
Nevertheless, everyone in it is terribly good, and my companion has paroxysms of delight from all the spy stuff and frames of old London. For me, the Oscar goes to An Englishman Abroad: Alan Bennett, Alan Bates, John Schlesinger and Coral Brown got angry in a pajama shop. Wonderful. I require you to watch it during the iPlayer availability window – and I'll know if you don't because I'm listening in your living room.
Only Connect returns to BBC Two on Monday at 8pm
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