Here is the accepted manuscript of my article ‘”The trouble with treachery nowadays”: Revisiting the Age of Treason in Philby, Burgess and Maclean (1977) and Blunt (1987)’ , uploaded to coincide with Samuel West’s return to the role of Anthony Blunt in the current season of The Crown. (JO)
Abstract: The Cambridge spy ring has been the subject of many dramatic representations on British television. While prior scholarship has largely focused on plays by Dennis Potter and Alan Bennett depicting the later lives of such figures, this article examines an alternative tradition: representations which re-enact events at the height of their careers in the early Cold War. I focus on two productions which centre specifically on events surrounding the 1951 defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, but from hugely contrasting perspectives. Firstly, Philby, Burgess and Maclean (ITV, 1977) by Ian Curteis covers a ten-year period from the 1945 ‘Volkov Incident’ to Kim Philby’s exoneration in 1955. This production closely adheres to broadly accepted accounts of the case as known in the late 1970s, and I examine this is as a product of the public service-oriented drama-documentary culture of Granada Television.
I then contrast this with the revised narrative presented in Robin Chapman’s Blunt (BBC, 1987). Not only does this incorporate the newly revealed ‘fourth man’, Anthony Blunt, but it also offers a more humanised portrayal of Burgess and centres much of its drama on the marginal but implicated figure of Goronwy Rees. I explore how, in contrast to Curteis, Chapman takes greater artistic licence in examining the spies’ personal lives, which resulted in a wave of controversy. I argue that this portrayal can be situated within a broader revisionist school of 1980s representation which mobilised these icons of an earlier generation’s ideals in order to critique new political developments.
To cite this article, please use the version published in the Journal of British Cinema and Television, Volume 15, Issue 3 (July 2018): https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/jbctv.2018.0429.
Abstract: This article explores shifts in how John le Carré’s novels have been interpreted as prestige television adaptations, with A Perfect Spy (BBC 2) and The Night Manager (BBC 1) as central case studies. It examines changes in how the author’s profile has been mobilised, and more broadly what the differences between these adaptations reveal about the production cultures that created them and the changing international landscape in which such dramas have been developed. Firstly, A Perfect Spy is analysed as an in-house BBC production which utilises the characteristics of heritage drama to portray a crisis in the traditional spy hero of the John Buchan mould, providing an intimate view of a man destroyed by contradictory inheritances. Yet I argue that the adherence to heritage resulted in an overtly reverential adaptation, abandoning the novel’s formally experimental features and blunting much of its impact. This is contrasted with The Night Manager, developed within an increasingly globalised independent production sector by members of le Carré’s family with BBC at a greater remove. This serial, described by its production team as a ‘radical’ adaptation, breaks free of the overt heritage imagery of prior le Carré adaptations with a focus on the glamorous jet-setting super-rich, even as the theme of inheritance seems more relevant than ever at a production level. I explore the impact of this on decisions to rewrite the narrative and impose a more heroic ending, thereby rejecting the moral ambiguity with which le Carré had long been associated.
The article was originally published in Adaptation, Volume 10, Issue 3 (23
es collection Spy Chiefs has been published by Georgetown University Press, edited by Christopher Moran, Mark Stout, Ioanna Iordanou and Paul Maddrell. 
Spying on Spies Conference, 3-5 September 2015, The Shard, London 