Sunday nights are made for prestige drama, with lavish budgets blown on bodice-ripping romances and period details. And now, in a deal between the BBC and AMC, the network behind Mad Men and The Walking Dead, we get a crisp, clipped and very British spy drama, a by-the-book adaptation of John le Carré’s 1993 novel The Night Manager, the espionage master’s first novel after the end of the Cold War.
By the book, though, is not exactly the right way to put it, as some big changes have been made to the story in the intervening 23 years. It still centres around former British soldier Jonathan Pine, played by British actor Tom Hiddleston, only this time around he’s served in Iraq and not Belfast, stomping through the busy streets of Cairo during the heights of the Arab Spring in 2011, his loose-fitting cotton shirt billowing in time with the revolutionary banners.
Making his way to the hotel where he works as the eponymous night-time manager, it’s a quick change into the armour of his trade – a freshly pressed suit and tie, and a dour look of polite disdain. But it’s no ordinary night, a smirk infiltrating Pine’s professional demeanour when he encounters Sophie Aleka (Aure Atika), the sexpot moll of a local gangster, her voice a heady mix of plot-propelling cattiness, indifference to her own safety, 20 Gauloises, and five spritzes of Shalimar.
It’s rare that TV shows not about drunken office Christmas parties can manage to wring a sex scene out of photocopying, but Pine is soon living up to his name and it’s a short trip to toner town. But catching a glimpse of the page, he sees it’s an invoice linking Sophie’s “you-don’t-want-to-get-messed-up-with-him” lover to Richard Roper, a TED-talking philanthropist whose weapons and munitions deals are ready to Arab spring a trap and quell any rebellion in showers of napalm.
What’s a nice night manager to do? Pass it on to an embassy buddy, who in turn forwards it to London where Olivia Coleman’s cranky Angela Burr seizes the opportunity for the agency she operates tighten the noose around Roper. “Don’t worry,” Pine tells Sophie, having whisked her away from Cairo and seducing her with his double-sided Xerox skills, “It’ll all be fine.”
It’s not, of course, an unknown mole spills the beans and Sophie’s blood is spilled on her hotel room floor, her cipher of a character doing what le Carré typically carves out for the women in his novels, a hasty death off screen. The moment she sashayed across the lobby it was clear she was just another woman in a refrigerator. Pine is pushed to breaking point, the story jumping four years into the future.
Elizabeth Debicki as Jed and Hugh Laurie as Richard Roper, the "worst man in the world" [BBC]
Now taking charge of the nocturnal nonsense at a high-end Swiss hotel, where who should arrive by exclusive helicopter but Roper, henchman and honey and his right and left hands. Laurie, who once attempted to secure the rights to The Night Manager so he could play Pine himself, is fantastic as the cold and calculated Roper. Toying with Pine while checking into his room, the motivations for his painful game of cat and mouse are devilishly impossible to pinpoint. When he eggs Pine on to serve his lithe and lightly covered in suds wife champagne as she bathes in the tub for all to see, it’s hard to tell if he knows something, is just a bully, or both.
Shaken and stirred, the reluctant Pine gets back on the blower to Coleman’s Burr. “Mr Pine, what happened in Cairo child me to the bottom of my soul,” she says, stealing every scene she’s in and leaving you wondering why we’re not watching a six-part series about her attempts to keep the world a better place while dealing with false contractions. “I know you can’t forgive the man who did that. The question is, what are you prepared to do about it?”
We’ll find out over the next five weeks just what lengths Pine will go to get his man – in what is almost certainly Hiddleston’s screen test to play James Bond. A fine and totally perfunctory spy drama so far, the calibre of everyone involved in this production has made a lot of promises. Here’s hoping they pay off.
- The Night Manager, BBC One, Sundays 9pm
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