The Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation once again stands accused of unpatriotic tendencies, this time for glamorising Philby, Burgess, Blunt and Maclean. But the complaints about Cambridge Spies (Fridays, 9pm, BBC2) are misplaced. All Peter Mullin's four-part drama tries to do is understand the double agents' original motives. However, as no one has ever suggested they were in it for the money, travel or women (or men), the premise of Cambridge Spies - that they thought communism was a good idea and the best way to challenge fascism - is neither sensational nor very interesting.
The question is how foolishly naive the writer plans to make the four men look. Everyone now knows that Comrade Stalin was about as bad a tyrant as you can get and that communism went down the drainpipe of history a decade ago, so Mullin was probably wise not to pack his script with dramatic ironies. Not that he can resist them all. In episode two (shown on BBC4 straight after the BBC2 transmission of episode one on 9 May), Blunt meets the Queen Mum. Noting that she had downed three double gins before 6pm, he tells his KGB contact Otto: "Well, put it this way: I don't think she'll outlive Stalin."
As for playing fast and loose with history, Cambridge Spies pleads guilty as charged in its opening caption, which states, "Certain events and characters have been created and changed for dramatic effect." Given this licence to fictionalise, the viewer's complaint should be that the series is not dramatic enough, just as it is neither clever enough nor funny enough.
What it is is beautiful. The production bathes Cambridge in perpetual summer, shines blue lights down Viennese nights, and places key meetings in pristine corners of Regent's Park. The young men (Samuel West, Tom Hollander, Rupert Penry-Jones and Toby Philby) are 24-carat jeunesse doree. The women they take to bed are Tatler-level totty. Now that even Saturday-night ITV has caught up with verite (in the promising MIT), for BBC2 to be treating the cold war as if it were Brideshead Revisited is odd. The nearest Cambridge Spies gets to verisimilitude is when Philby offers it to Otto as a solution to one-across in the Times crossword.
The romanticised filming - the director Tim Fywell treats even the bombing of Guernica to a slice of poetic slo-mo - not only reduces credibility, it overwhelms the characterisation. Most of us remember the drawling, arrogant aesthete Blunt. West plays him as a humourless head boy. Philby was flamboyant, promiscuous and a compulsive liar, but as played by Stephens he is a worry-guts who beds and weds by mistake. Penry-Jones makes no more headway as the dilettante Maclean and so resembles West, right up to the hair-parting, that the two are often indistinguishable. Only Hollander shines as Burgess, partly because he is short and so at least stands out, and partly because he has humour, homosexuality and an incipient nervous breakdown to play with.
If this piece was going to work it would have to have been a character study of four very different spies. Instead it is satisfied to play up their similarities as BA Cantabs. Nor are they differentiated by dialogue, because everyone speaks in quotation-book aphorisms. Philby, facing the SS in Austria, announces to his companions: "I went to a very fine public school and Trinity College, Cambridge. My back is straight. My upper lip is stiff. And I have a British passport." While Maclean gets the tongue-twister: "Betrayal is betrayal whether the betrayed know it or not."
In the second part even the Queen is at it, banging on about men without moustaches being either "pooves or spies". "Which are you, Anthony, poof or spy?" she asks Blunt, who replies, "Oh, a little bit of both - aren't we all?" (Not a bad line, except that it reminds us of the much greater sport Alan Bennett had with Blunt and royalty in A Question of Attribution.)
Mullin shamelessly plants in Philby's mouth E M Forster's famous pronouncement: "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country." Despite a long detour about the nature of faith, structured around Maclean's late father's Anglicanism, but encompassing the Stalin-Hitler non-aggression pact, this is where Mullin locates the heart of his fey little drama.
A key moment has Philby, working as the Times's pro-fascist reporter in Spain, failing to shoot Franco, not through a lack of guts but because he has been told by Burgess that the assassination would expose and break up the ring. So the four musketeers, who in this version not only go to college together but share the same flat in London, survive. This is a beautiful friendship between four men who, once they have stripped off and dived into the Cam together, will never be divided.
Incidentally, the show is anything but unpatriotic. It is deeply in love with England, Englanders and Englishness, with Cambridge sward, London clubs, city parks, Auntie and the class system (because, viewed in a certain light, this too is picturesque). As Otto scolds them in Regent's Park: "Never meet with me together. It breaks all the rules. It's amateur. It's English." Adorable.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times
