In praise of 1979’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: Guinness’s Smiley is still as mesmerising as ever

Those suspiciously shiny bronze Ford Cortinas and yellow Austin Allegros look like what they are: lovingly restored and preserved vintage vehicles that rarely come into contact with a motorway surface anymore, unless it’s for a film or TV shoot.

​It’s a 21st-century designer’s impression of what the 1970s were like rather than something built from memory or experience.

This is one of the many reasons why it was a joy to rewatch 1979’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, which was stripped across this week from Monday to Wednesday on BBC4, and be reacquainted with the real grubby, downbeat, depressive 70s.

Arthur Hopcraft’s masterly seven-part adaptation of John le Carré’s gripping spy novel, produced five years after the book came out, is — along with I, Claudius, The Singing Detective, Edge of Darkness, House of Cards and Our Friends in the North — one of the era-defining BBC dramas.

It’s also a fascinating time capsule of late-70s Britain and late-70s British television. Both have changed a lot in the meantime.

I have no doubt viewers who watch television with one eye on the screen and the other on TikTok, Instagram or Twitter — and not all of them are members of Generation Z, by the way — might find Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on the demanding side.

In general, individual scenes are longer than in most contemporary dramas and feature a lot more dialogue, sometimes between two characters sitting in a room for protracted periods.

In the novel, the quest by spymaster George Smiley, played on screen by Alec Guinness, to unmask the “mole”, the Soviet-controlled double-agent operating within the upper echelon of MI6, unfolds largely through conversations between Smiley and other characters about events from the past. In the series, these sometimes segue into flashbacks.

The plot is complex, something that drew complaints and a certain degree of mockery when the series was first shown. Terry Wogan and Larry Grayson, of all people, cracked jokes about it on air.

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Throughout the series’ run, Clive James, then The Observer’s TV critic, had a whale of a time expressing his weekly bafflement at what was going on.

Given James’s formidable intellect, talent and wide knowledge of cultural matters, you have to think a lot of this was done for comic effect. I imagine he had little trouble following the plot.

Nobody should, really, provided they’re paying attention. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy demands attention.

It was lean-in television long before anyone even used that expression to describe series like The Wire.

But while it may be complex, it’s never needlessly convoluted. Unlike far too many of today’s drama series, which fashionably start at the end or even in the middle of the story and then drag the viewer back in time to show us how the characters got to that point, it doesn’t use a tricksy narrative style to whip up cheap suspense or give the illusion of depth where none exists.

At the heart of the series is Guinness as Smiley, the wily, watchful veteran who finds himself out of a job with “the Circus” (le Carré’s name for MI6) when his boss dies and he’s swept out the door by the new broom, only to be called out of retirement six months later to secretly root out the traitor.

Guinness, who had never worked in television before, is utterly mesmerising.

He’s surrounded on the show by a superb supporting cast including Michael Jayston, Hywel Bennett, Ian Richardson, Beryl Reid, Ian Bannen, Joss Ackland and Patrick Stewart (who plays Smiley’s elusive KBG nemesis Karla).

He gives one of the truly great performances in one of the truly great TV dramas of its age — and, four-and-a-half decades on, for the ages too.

‘Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy’ is available on BBc iPlayer (you’ll need a VPN to access it from Ireland) and on Blu-Ray and DVD