The Game, BBC2, TV review: Tom Hughes looks very much the Burberry model he is in this John le Carré-style spy thriller
Hughes may become the latest object of lust following Aiden Turner's Poldark - but this spy thriller is a bit too beige
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Your support makes all the difference.With The Honourable Woman and the Johnny Worricker trilogy, BBC2 has developed a reputation for icy cool espionage thrillers and six-part series The Game seems to fit the bill perfectly.
Written by Being Human’s Toby Whithouse, it is set in London in 1972, against a background of miners strikes and beige-brown furnishings. The British Intelligence agency, headed up by a man known only as ‘Daddy’ (a charismatic Brian Cox) have caught wind of a new threat from the KGB. The trouble is, they know very little about this ‘Operation Glass’, except that it will involve the activation of a number of sleeper agents already living and working in the UK.
Tom Hughes stars as Joe Lambe, the agent charged with finding out more, and does so looking very much like the Burberry model he is (2009 A/W campaign, alongside Emma Watson). These good looks come in handy, as he’s supposed to have a Bond-like ability to seduce women for information. When assigning Lambe the task of debriefing an undercover Soviet agent, a senior agent sourly notes it will “make a nice change from bedding secretaries and forgotten wives.”
Forget Bond, though, the obvious comparison here is with John le Carré’s screen adaptations, but young Hughes lacks the wry middle-aged ennui of Gary Oldman or Alec Guinness as Smiley (or indeed Bill Nighy as Worricker).
In The Game the interiors of the 1970s office blocks and apartments are more intriguing than the interiors of characters’ minds, with the exception of Daddy’s second-in-command Bobby Waterhouse.
Friday Night Dinner’s Paul Ritter plays him brilliantly as a twitchy lickspittle concealing both greater ambitions and a bizarre relationship with his mother (Judy Parfitt). Now’s a great time to start admiring Ritter’s work, incidentally. He’s also scene-stealingly good in No Offence, the upcoming cop dramedy from Shameless writer Paul Abbott.
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