'Brideshead Revisited' meets 'Queer as Folk'

The only sign of moral qualms is when the actor playing Philby goes about looking vaguely constipated

The toffs are back this week. Ten years after John Major announced, in those appropriately flattened vowels of his, that Britain would soon become a classless society, the national obsession with public schools, gentlemen's clubs and the eccentric, occasionally pervy behaviour which has become accepted as a class indicator, lives on. Members of the upper class may no longer hold political or economic sway over the country but, as the TV series Cambridge Spies, launched tonight on the BBC, reminds us, they play a significant part in the national imagination.

At almost any given time, there is a class-based story on the go in the media. It might be the antics of Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, or the unmasking of Major Dodgy-But-Dim of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, or a fly-on-the-wall documentary about some goofy aristocrat trying unsuccessfully to come to terms with modern life. Or it could be a glossy fairytale about how four chaps go up to Trinity College, Cambridge, and end up betraying their country to the Soviet Union.

It will be said that Cambridge Spies has nobler ambitions than to give the British class system another outing, and it is undeniable that the story of why and how Philby, Maclean, Burgess and Blunt infiltrated the upper echelons of British society on behalf of Moscow is potentially fascinating.

But not here. As if to exemplify the problems of producing an expensive series dependant on lucrative foreign sales, Cambridge Spies seems to go out of its way to avoid addressing the intellectual confusion, personal neuroses and moral conflict that lies at the heart of betrayal, in favour of a slick, pretty, undemanding four-parter – televisual wallpaper. Its original pitch for funding might have been "Brideshead Revisited meets The Third Man and Casablanca on the way to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, making a discreet nod in the direction of Queer as Folk."

Those who have complained that the way the story has been fictionalised glamorises and simplifies what actually happened are right. The suggestion is that the four men turned to Moscow out of a sincere, youthful opposition to fascism, distress at the class system, disapproval of anti-Semitism, and a general queasiness about the British establishment. The only sign of moral qualms, in the first three episodes at least, is that, when the consequences of the actions become clear, the actor playing Kim Philby goes about looking vaguely anguished and constipated.

Anyone making fiction from history is obliged to invent episodes for dramatic purposes, but here the effect is to smooth out the complexity of what happened, prettifying it beyond recognition. It is all very well for the writer of the series, Peter Moffatt, to admit that certain scenes came from his imagination, but the overall effect is to undermine even those based on fact. The result is that thinking viewers will be suspicious of the entire project, sensing that a story of deception is itself deceptive, while, more seriously, the less sceptical majority will accept this easy-viewing version of events as the truth.

It is the class assumptions behind this approach that are interesting. The series goes out of its way to give its audience what they might expect from a TV drama set in a world of power and privilege during the 1930s through to the 1950s: nice shots of the Cambridge backs and Trinity College, an old gent representing the moribund establishment by snoring in a leather chair at the Reform Club, some light sex scenes, spies in raincoats meeting on park benches, some war-is-hell footage from the Spanish Civil War.

Nothing if not consistent, the writer and director have also deployed generally accepted truisms about class. So toffs can be good-looking and randy (Philby and Maclean), they can be tight-lipped and cold (Blunt) and they can be amusingly eccentric (Burgess, here portrayed as considerably less disgusting and outrageous than he actually was). But it is a general rule of TV that they cannot be complex. The cliché is now so well entrenched that a TV dramatist has only to present a well-bred face with an old-fashioned haircut, rather immobile features, not much brain and a voice like a 1950s announcer on the Home Service, for viewers to feel entirely at home.

This unquestioning snobbery has a wider effect. Iain Duncan Smith has made a game bid for classlessness but his voice, face and background have already done for him. Instinctively, voters sense that talking and looking like that, he cannot be as bright, worldly and competent as he would be if, rather than having been an officer in the Guards, he had been a teacher or, better, a lawyer.

It is reassuring, of course, to be able so easily to dismiss members of a class that once inherited power as a matter of right, but let us not delude ourselves that a classless society is any nearer today than it was 10 years ago.

terblacker@aol.com