Sidney J Furie’s 1965 film The Ipcress File is a much-loved benchmark of its period. Stylish, sinister, witty and depicting a determinedly un-swinging London, it was conceived as the flipside to the absurdly glamorous James Bond movies and pulled it off with panache. It also had Michael Caine playing the lead role of Harry Palmer, and a superb John Barry soundtrack famously featuring that mysterious instrument, the cimbalom.
Turning the same story into a TV series nearly 60 years later was not a job for the faint-hearted, but, remarkably, screenwriter John Hodge and director James Watkins have created a show that expands and develops the story (and incorporates more of Len Deighton’s source novel) while capturing something of the spirit of the movie. Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders, Gangs of London etc) was inspired casting for the Harry Palmer role, bringing a bolshy, delinquent attitude to his portrayal of a docker’s son from the East End rubbing up against the public schoolboys and officer-class snobs of the Whitehall establishment. But he also happens to be academically brilliant and equipped with razor-sharp instincts which leave him well equipped for the back-stabbing skulduggery of secret intelligence work.
This opening episode, set in 1963, treated us to a chunk of Palmer’s back story, perhaps borrowing a few ideas from another of Deighton’s spy novels, Funeral in Berlin. A Korean War veteran who’d been serving with the British Army in West Berlin, Palmer has shown great flair in developing his own contraband network, selling whisky and lobsters to a middle man who smuggles them into East Berlin and sells them to the Russians. However, all good things come to an end, and Palmer’s black market exploits have landed him in a bleak military prison in Colchester (pictured below, Tom Hollander, Joe Cole and Lucy Boynton).
The apparent abduction of a leading nuclear scientist from the Aldermaston research establishment proves to be a lucky break for Palmer, because the kidnapping happened to be organised by his Berlin contact, a man known to British spooks as Housemartin. Palmer is whisked out of jail and recruited by William Dalby (Tom Hollander), boss of an enigmatic undercover outfit which seems to make its own rules. He sends Palmer back to Berlin to find Housemartin, with a view to tracking down the abducted Professor Dawson.
Naturally nothing goes according to plan, but it promises to be an exciting ride. The show gets almost everything right, from the Sixties-style captions and credits to the clothes, cars and interior décor. A beige-ish tint to the photography evokes the early Sixties with eerie potency. There’s no John Barry soundtrack, but Tom Hodge’s music is discreetly chilly and more than a little ominous. The series was shot in Liverpool (though probably not the later episode which features a neutron bomb test on a Pacific island), which serves remarkably well as a stand-in for a crumbling Cold War Berlin.
It’s more than likely that the breakout star from the show is going to be Lucy Boynton, playing Palmer’s spy colleague Jean Courtney. A glacially beautiful blonde, the exquisitely-styled Courtney could show Sixties supermodels Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton a clean pair of heels, while possessing such espionage-friendly qualities as penetrating intuition and icy sang-froid. She also carries a timely message about female empowerment, since her wealthy family are planning a lavish wedding which will see her hitched to a chinless toff in New York, where she will be expected to fulfil the role of loyal spouse and home-maker. That’s not how Courtney sees her life panning out, though.
Chuck in a delightfully caustic performance from Hollander and a variety of flavourful supporting roles, and you’ve got a little beauty to look forward to on Sunday nights (or alternatively, watch it all right now on ITV Hub). I wonder if Michael Caine will be tuning in.
- All episodes of The Ipcress File are available on ITV Hub