"Wherever God has planted you, you must know how to flower..."
Beginning in 1937, Military Attaché Lt. Colonel Jean-François Mercier (Tennant), a highly decorated soldier from the First World War, is stationed at French Embassy in Warsaw, where East meets West, as Poland is prey to the influences of both Stalin’s Russia and Nazi Germany. Keeping tabs on the rising tension from both sides, Mercier appears to be a lone voice against a tide of apathy. Growing grossly suspicious of the German military’s intentions, he increasingly juggles his formal duties at stifling diplomatic functions with the often death-defying realities of espionage. Certainly he is seen as little more than a trouble maker by Jourdain, his hilariously snippy French bureaucrat boss played by Burn Gorman (Torchwood’s Owen Harper).
With intelligence from his German informant Edvard Uhl (Ludger Pistor), Mercier sets out on a stealth mission with his trusted accomplice, grizzled right hand man Marek (Miroslaw Zbrojewicz), where they discover that the Nazis are ensuring any future invasion of Poland can take place effectively and with little resistance. Mercier almost gets caught and killed during the mission, narrowly escaping, and thereby facing the wrath of Jourdain, who naturally is anxious to avoid the further heightening of diplomatic tension.
Amid the threat of a second world war, Mercier is also vying for the affections of Parisian Anna Skarbeck (Janet Montgomery), a gorgeous League of Nations lawyer, currently in an empty-shell relationship with Russian Émigré and political journalist Maxim (Piotr Baumann). As Mercier and Anna’s relationship develops, it is clear that she must choose between both men. But will Mercier’s feelings for Anna jeopardise his mission and can she be trusted even as German tanks drive through the Black Forest.
Mercier’s quest becomes all too dangerous as his cover is compromised while further trying to unearth German military plans, and a man believed dead reappears, sparking significant repercussions for both Mercier and Anna. Will Mercier discover the truth in time and what consequences will this have on the rest of Europe? Led by intelligence from Dr Lapp (Anton Lesser), Mercier travels to Czechoslovakia to find and question the illusive ‘Seagull’, a German activist who is on the run from the Nazis. Finding Seagull reluctant to become involved with the French, Mercier soon takes matters with into his own hands and persuades him to travel to Berlin under false identities. There, with Seagull’s help, Mercier hopes to employ a man who could prove to be a powerful ally against the Nazi regime.
As Mercier’s superiors become increasingly frustrated with his lack of protocol and risk-taking, they begin to question the intelligence he has gathered, when finally, Mercier finds himself in opposition to his own government. Frustrated with work and longing for the beautiful Anna, he returns to Paris and the support of his younger sister Gabrielle (Tuppence Middleton), eventually seeking solace at the old family estate and his father’s well-stocked wine cellar. Now the threat of war becomes all too real as tensions rise across Europe and Mercier has to make difficult decisions in the face of what will become a horrifying reality.
Ostensibly a diplomat, but operating as a spy in a covert world of dinner dances and secret assignations, Tennant convinces as the suave sophisticate from a minor aristocratic family who bears both the scars and medals of the previous conflicts. A world away from science fiction and emotional drama, we see him indulge in action both on the streets of Warsaw and between the sheets as he plies his trade which should certainly please the more ardent members of his fanbase.
Director Coky Giedroić handles the action sequences impressively, as well as the softer, romantic moments. Tension filled covert meetings amid smoke filled cafes and abduction on the streets of Warsaw are all backed by some wonderful use of jazz on the soundtrack. With its seedy world of undercover agents, back alleys and German Gestapo agents in black leather, this might seem at first to be traditional espionage fare but there is a far deeper story here. This is a tale of trust and betrayal as the love story develops between Mercier and Skarbeck, while at the same time he struggles to get both proof of Nazi plans through his contacts, and also to be believed by his own people.
With hindsight, of course, we know what feat would await the city of Warsaw and the wider world at large. In October 1944, Heinrich Himmler issued the following order to his SS commanders: "The city [of Warsaw] must completely disappear from the surface of the earth … No stone can remain standing. Every building must be razed to its foundation." By 1945 the toxic endlösung for the Polish capital was essentially complete. The scale of the destruction is hard to digest: 63 days of bombing, 200,000 dead, 85 per cent of buildings obliterated. Given that backdrop, it’s a miracle that Warsaw still exists today, let alone that it should be providing the setting for a new pre-war drama described as "Tinker Tailor meets Casablanca". A noirish thriller where the cityscape features prominently certainly surprised many when BBC Four held a press conference to announce the drama. Why on earth have you come to Warsaw, asked the reporters, if you want to evoke the Thirties?
The simple answer is the Old Town. When the war ended, the surviving Varsovians rebuilt the city’s 13th-century core from scratch, re-sculpting its warren of streets from sketches, photos, even vedute oil paintings. Which explains why, recalls the Telegraph's Olly Grant, one warm day in central Warsaw, he was able to watch Tennant filming in what looks like a picture-portrait version of pre-Himmler Poland. Extras slouch moodily on the cobbles in fedoras and flat-caps. A vintage Citroën lounges against a wall covered in Polish signs with Deco typeface. "You couldn’t build a set of the Old Town if you tried," says Tennant, with mild understatement. The period authenticity is so strong in the Old Town, he says, that the same streets even doubled as pre-war Berlin for some sequences. "They were hanging up banners with swastikas. There was something terribly chilling about seeing people come out of their dressing rooms in full Nazi regalia. Especially doing it here, in a city that was so ill-treated by that regime; which has such a graphic, ghastly history of what Hitler was capable of." He pauses. 'I have to say, the locals were very understanding."
One of the interesting things about Spies is that war is the most important fixture in the drama – and yet, like Godot, never actually appears. The hero of the tale is the one man who does expect it to turn up. "He has some undercover contacts that he’s working on, and he does a bit of crawling under barbed wire, and he starts to uncover things that, actually, his French superiors don’t want to know about," says Tennant about his character. The job of the actors, in a sense, was to perform a mental equivalent of what Poles did with the Old Town: forget 1944; construct a pre-existent world. "When we look back on World War Two now, we look back with a sense of a certain inevitability," Tennant, 41, explains. "But if you were actually living through that, it’s important to remember that people would always have been looking for a way out. And, of course, in Britain and across Europe, appeasement was a hugely popular movement. There was this sense that war might be avoided. That Hitler was a bit of a rogue, but he wasn’t all that bad and if we tolerated him a bit we could get him on-side."
It’s this climate of anxiety that makes 1938 a more dramatically rich setting, in some ways, than the conflict itself – at least according to the men who adapted the script, Porridge creators Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. "As for World War Two, how many more stories can we really tell about it?" muses North-East born La Frenais, 77, when Grant catches up with them. They are sitting outside a palace near Warsaw; La Frenais, impish, with ageing-rock-god hair, Clement, 75, the softly spoken straight man. What they loved about Spies, says La Frenais, was its inherent tension – "that extraordinary sense of the world being on the brink of cataclysmic change." That and the fact that it’s a spy thriller, which, despite a career that spans The Likely Lads, The Commitments and Never Say Never Again, is fresh territory. "Actually we love this genre," says Clement. "In fact, for years we wanted to do Le Carré but never managed it. Alan Furst is the nearest thing, in a way. Great plots. Wonderful characters. And that sense of uncertainty surrounding everything; particularly with the romance that you get here, which gives it that quality of Casablanca – of love that’s threatened by events."
Clement first came across Furst’s work when La Frenais gave him one of his books to read. It happened to be Spies of Warsaw. "I’d never read Alan Furst at that point. But, as a result, I went out and read them all. I had a binge. Read the lot," says Clement. The writers were also in touch with Furst a lot over the two-part TV adaptation. "Though when we asked him if he would like to see the scripts he said, ‘not really, I know that you have to change things when you switch from a novel to the screen, and I trust you’. So that was very nice." They’re pleased by the result. "It looks terrific," says Clement. "We were both knocked out by it. It looks really rich and moody. It’s got the period detail just right. It’s got everything, really. I think Alan will love it."
The period was one of the main attractions. "It really intrigued us. It really is another world. A world of apprehension. And a different Europe to that which any of us are familiar with. I mean, you look at the maps in Alan’s novels and they have all these countries that don’t even exist anymore," says La Frenais. As for Mercier, Clement says Furst feels that the whole secret to him is that he’s a French aristocrat. "This idea that he’s a ‘chevalier’ and comes from a family of chevaliers – there’s a difference of attitude about him, and we talked to David [Tennant] about that before he started filming. It’s that thing of coming from money. And with a sense of honour. He’s a gentleman, and there’s a romantic, slightly old fashioned quality about that which makes him very appealing to modern audiences."
Many of their previous projects have been set in the modern day so how did they find writing for the 1930s period? "Well, you have to remove the anachronisms. Modern words can easily slip by. ‘Okay’, for example. Something that simple. Or ‘I’m on it...’," says La Frenais. "But of course people did talk in a slightly more foreign way in the 1930s. I mean, the conversation between a man and woman who had just met for the first time would be more formal than it is now. There was more propriety in men’s approach to women. Obviously if the dialogue sounds too stilted, it will damage everything. But of course these actors are so good too – they can make it all sound like conversation," says La Frenais.
The woman in question here is Anna, played by Janet Montgomery. "She is a young, very intelligent woman who works for the League of Nations, which was like the United Nations of its day," explains Montgomery. "She’s a lawyer. She’s quite womanly. Quite seductive, I suppose. She can be quite flirty, but in such a confident, ungirly way, because she is so smart. She has that Helen Mirren-style, mature confidence that women sometimes have, but in a fairly young woman." She first meets Mercier when he needs someone to go along with him to a function. "He ends up taking Anna after a friend sets them up, though they’ve never met," reveals Montgomery. "They’re attracted to each other fairly instantly. But she fights it because she’s in a relationship with another man. I think she finds her soul mate in him. They have a connection; the sort of thing you can’t explain unless you’ve had it with someone yourself. It’s one of those ‘we were made for each other’ moments, I guess. But I can see the attraction that she has to Max, as well. He’s a bit older. He’s opinionated. I think when they first met he must have given her a lot of confidence in her own opinions. And I think the demise of their relationship is very painful for Anna. She’s torn. She’s in love with Mercier. But she loves Max in a different way."
Furst has written other novels involving Spies Of Warsaw characters, so would she be up for filming more? "Definitely! I’d love that," admits Montgomery. "Alan has written many different novels. And of course Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, the writers who adapted Spies, have such an incredible track record, from TV shows like Porridge to films like The Commitments. I hope they would want to write more for us." There seems to be a nostalgia now among the public and novelists for the Cold War and so on, La Frenais feels. "Real spies must feel that things were so simple in the old days. So much simpler than the enemy you face now, in the War on Terror. And of course the technology is so different. No computers, no cell phones," says Clement. "I hate those endings to movies where everyone’s hitting the computer keys, trying to get the bank transfer before somebody blows somebody else’s head off. They’re really not very sexy, computers, for that kind of thing. Going a bit further back in time is much more appealing."
Tenant is keen to point out that (as with Casablanca) the fact that some of those events are real gives Spies its punch. "It’s looking at things from a historical perspective. And I think that gives it more texture than a wham-bam, derring-do story – though it has all that stuff, too." Like all the best spy dramas, it excels at portraying the ever-shifting loyalties and dubious morality of those involved in espionage; but why is it we love the murky world of spy drama? asks the Guardian's James Donaghy. In theory, the end of the cold war could have signed the spy drama's death warrant, but whatever ideological battles are being fought in the real world, it seems the thirst for espionage on TV remains strong: Spooks' 10-season run is testament to the genre's sturdiness, BBC1's Restless impressed amid some lacklustre Christmas programming, and tonight sees the start of Ian La Frenais & Dick Clement's classy take on Spies of Warsaw on BBC4.
Key to the genre's popularity, thinks Donaghy, is flexibility. It can deliver everything thrilling and compelling about populist drama on the one hand, and everything sobering and profound about high-minded storytelling on the other. It's very comfortable with car chases, shootouts and one man against 20 martial arts beatdowns – when Jack Bauer snapped a man's neck with his legs on 24 it was only the latest in a string of macabrely inventive killings to make Itchy and Scratchy look like amateurs. And while Spies of Warsaw's Colonel Mercier is no Bauer, there's enough good explosive mayhem to let you know you are in a dangerous world of dangerous agents happy to do bad things in spectacular fashion.
But it's never just about action. Spy dramas are plot-driven by necessity and the doublecross, dark secret and red herring are woven into their fabric. There's a certain joy to be had in knowing you are a spectator standing on shifting sands; that loyalties can switch in a heartbeat and that everyone's motivation is suspect. So much so that committed watchers of spy stories find themselves expecting and indeed predicting shock twists, which can quickly get ridiculous. Not for nothing is the spy genre one of the most spoofed, notably on Fx's glorious Archer where a modern-day Bond with mommy issues saves the world one hideously murdered terrorist at a time.
The most compelling spy shows, however, are those that explore the murky morality of espionage – and this is where Spies of Warsaw really excels, with the moral choices people make as the German war machine masses on their doorstep at its psychological heart. While the plot features many familiar espionage tropes – the honey trap, the dicey border crossing, abduction, interrogation – Spies of Warsaw comes into its own when it examines people doing the wrong thing for the right reasons and vice versa.
Homeland showrunner Howard Gordon has talked about operating in "a grey space of not knowing who the good guys and bad guys are". That Homeland allows you to sympathise with those guilty of infidelity, torture, treason and drone strikes emphatically underlines the point. Complexity is in the spy drama's DNA and it makes sense that it should be a double agent serving two masters – its pulpy and literary traditions. From Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to the crash-bang of Spooks, the genre has something to satisfy both the scholar and the thrillseeker. Not every spy drama has to have a ruminating classicist pondering woefully over the nature of deception any more than it has to have a laser aimed at Sean Connery's balls. The genre's ability to have evolved, conflicted characters, compelling baddies, elaborate plots and narrative drive is what keeps it relevant even as the geopolitical landscape it references changes constantly.
Spies of Warsaw begins on BBC Four on Wednesday 9 January at 9.00pm
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