I Watch TV: The Ipcress File

The IPCRESS File

Based on the Len Deighton novel and clearly influenced by the films starring Michael Caine, it’s a 1960s cold war spy thriller. A British scientist has gone missing, believed kidnapped and taken to East Berlin. A spy department recruits Corporal Harry Palmer; he’s spent the last few years running a smuggling ring in West Berlin, so has contacts across the Berlin Wall. I say recruits, they arrest him, to coerce him into helping.

It turns out he’s good at it. He’s working class, the son of a docker, but bright, having gone to Imperial College (mathematics?) and also a hero from the Korean War. He also needs to get a divorce from his wife, which at the time requires proof of infidelity. The spy department let him deal with that, stick and carrot, they’re smart like that.

The meeting in Berlin goes wrong, with Palmer meeting someone who appears to be the scientist who is then shot. But Palmer thinks this is a double-bluff. If the Russians (represented by the affable Colonel Stok) don’t have him, who does?

This leads them on a convoluted adventure through Beirut, a nuclear test off Diego Garcia, Helsinki and a Red Chinese brainwashing facility. Every step of the way the Americans are with them. What do they intend? Are they good allies or bad?

It revels in stylish 60s though it’s happy to visit grim 60s as well. It likes some exotic locations but it’s at home in England, and most of all London. It flirts a little with class and race but in the end the questions are loyalty to a country, to an ideal, or to your comrades, and where will you compromise.

Anyway it was good fun, probably as clever as it thinks it is, but doesn’t really have more to say than earlier iterations.

Watch This: Cool 60s cold war spying with just a slight edge to it
Don’t Watch This: Imagine the cold war being cool again