The IPCRESS File (TV Show)

I’m not really old enough to remember the 60’s, my earliest memory that can be dated is to mid-July 1969, when I was four. This adaptation of the book looks and feels like it’s set in the 60’s but I wonder how much it feels like films and TV from the period, or set there more than it would resemble reality if we could travel back in time?

Whatever the answer, it certainly feels right and so do the casting choices. The part of Harry Palmer was not written for Michael Caine, but he was pretty much perfect for the role. It would have been better if he was a northerner, from Burnley in fact, but the world at large think of him as a cockney now. Maybe being more true to the book would have helped, because we’re treated to another cockney Harry and there are times I’m irresistibly reminded of Caine's acting. But when I wasn’t, I completely enjoyed this new portrayal as well. I certainly enjoyed his (rather unexpected) posh love interest.

As in both the film, and more particularly the book, the TV show gives us a twisty, turny way way through 1960’s espionage tropes. Of course it was actually written in the 60’s (published in 1962) so a lot of what we know see as clichés, at least in the original, were quite prescient. That starts off at what feels like an intense level, with the Russians kidnapping a British nuclear scientist who has been working on developing neutron bombs. WOPC, some obscure, small British intelligence agency, are on the trail… by the end, which is different to the book but works well, almost everyone is shown to be corrupt, ended up dead or both. Of course some, like Harry, started corrupt, and this show is an odd kind of morality lesson lesson on the ways our spies live in a world of shades of grey and end up tainted with those same shades of grey themselves. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? and all that.

I found I was hooked, the dubious choices made by (almost) everyone were intriguing, and the fact that building up to the end of the last episode there were very few characters I trusted yet I was still avidly watching is compliment to how well they’ve constructed both the characters and the story. Unreliable narrators may work well in books, but in film and TV they’re much harder to pull off. If you think of James Bond, George Smiley and so on, they’re always above suspicion because it’s just easier to manage in a visual format (I know they’re both from books, but le Carré’s books with less trustworthy narrators don’t tend to get converted into movies).

There is a lovely nod to how the book was written in the final scene that I appreciated.

It’s only six episodes, but it’s well worth a look if high-tension spy drama and 60’s chic are your thing.

Bechdel Test: Fail. Many episodes pass, actually quite comfortably, but not all of them. So overall, a fail.

Ko Test: Fail. No WOC to be seen.

Russo Test: Fail. There’s a gay man in a few episodes, but we’re set in a time when it was still a crime in the UK. Unsurprisingly, no one is out about it.