Behind the scenes, too, there is a lack of nominative diversity, with Peters Kosminsky and Straughan, director and screenwriter respectively. Both of these men have the requisite back-catalogue to match the literary stature of Hilary Mantel or the dramatic heft of Mark Rylance and Anton Lesser, but it is Straughan's back-catalogue that suggested the most intriguing comparison to Wolf Hall to me: for he also wrote one of my favourite films of the last decade, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. There is a running joke on the Kermode and Mayo show about this John Le Carre adaptation not being about spying in the same way Jaws isn't about sharks - this is possibly why the film hasn't had the lasting impact it deserved, because it was marketed as a thriller instead of what it is, a portrait of a decaying England with the last embers of Empire fizzling out and no idea of where it's headed. Tired old men choking down cigarette smoke in beige rooms, distrusting each other.
Tudor England is a rather different place to Cold War Britain - true, Europe is torn apart by a war of ideas, spies are everywhere and foreign powers are not to be trusted, but there is always a boisterous energy associated with the reign of Henry VIII - England looks like it might finally become a power to be reckoned with, springing out of the backwaters rather than sliding back in as George Smiley's country seemed to be. And yet Smiley, in Mantel and Straughan's telling, has a close forebear in Thomas Cromwell. These are an unexpected pairing, perhaps, the Machiavellian lawyer with the zeal of the reformer and the battered old spy, but they are two faces of an unsung archetype in the English imagination: the grey blur, the creature of the system, the man who could become Stalin or Karla or Smiley. I am intrigued, and worried, by the idea that so many Thomases became key Tudor players because no-one could remember which was which. Anonymity is a weapon in the hands of clever men.
We are introduced to both Smiley and Cromwell in shots that have them to the side, the men who in another movie would be functionaries, extras, the men who hand the clipboard to the hero. They are at the right hand of their master and apparent focus of the scene: John Hurt's Control and Jonathan Pryce's Wolsey. They are immensely loyal to the point of sentimentality to both, a pathetic father figure for men well past their middle-age for whom the system is a better family than they ever had themselves. Neither say much or emote much. Their words are careful, slow, with only the occasional bite of wit coming through to hint at the whirring machinery behind the eyes.
Drama, for me, is defined as not knowing what is going to happen next. The reason these characters make for such good drama is that they hide so much that they could be capable of anything. Even for those who know the Le Carre novel or know what became of Cromwell, the idea that Smiley might suddenly lash out from that cage of a face or Cromwell might express a human desire at any moment keeps you on your toes. It's like watching an action scene on someone's face. The tension is not in the plot, for in both books the plot is too close to reality to be sensational, but in when and how these men will move when they choose to.
It is only actors of the absolute first rank who can firstly succeed in making silence and greyness fascinating, and secondly succeed in convincing an executive that audiences will be enraptured by it. It is for this reason we see so few heroes as lugubrious as Oldman and Rylance (it's worth remembering that Rylance is almost exclusively a theatre man unable to count on the small gesture while Oldman is capable of this) and they are clearly revelling in their rare opportunity to dial things down.
The moment at the end of the most recent episode of Wolf Hall when Cromwell responds to a wish for God to wreak revenge on Boleyn and her cronies with "no need to trouble God - I'll take it in hand" is stunning TV precisely because the audience have been waiting so long for this sad-eyed man to reveal that hand. And Oldman's Smiley too has only a couple of moments where he properly emotes - one when he's drunk and imagining his nemesis Karla, and another one that stays with me most, for some reason. When he finally has the mole imprisoned and at his mercy, the man who stole his wife away, who drove his adopted father Control to his death, who betrayed everything Smiley believes in, Smiley still refuses to show anything. And then, in retort to Bill Haydon's protest that he isn't Karla's "office boy", Smiley raises his voice, just a little: "What are you then, Bill?" Why this line reverberates around my head I don't know. But the rage of the quiet man is something awful and awesome to behold.
As with Cromwell's threat of revenge, isn't there something terrifying about the idea that the little grey man who stands in the corner of the room and takes notes or offers the odd point to his superior - that that man is plotting to destroy you? It is the snake in the grass, the unseen terror in the dark woods. Those who keep their eyes grey are to be feared. And both Cromwell the historical figure and Smiley the fictional one are terrifically good at their jobs. Are they good or bad people? Smiley and Karla work for different systems, but are mirrors of each other. Cromwell's reputation shifts depending on who's doing the telling. And Stalin killed millions. Could any of these men have become the others? We cannot know, because we have so little to read. And that's why they are scary, impressive, and make for such good drama.
I like the fact that Straughan has found the strands linking these little grey Englishmen. As I keep saying, the memory of England is poor, our Empire conquered by accident and never properly justified, mainly due to the work of the Smileys and Cromwells, not the slightly befuddled inbred aristocrats who line Whitehall in bronze. Our greatness, if you want to call it that, is drawn in a series of grey blurs: cunning merchants, conniving lawyers who can outmanoeuvre Imperial China, and civil servants who had the foresight to build education systems to teach locals why their subservient state was just. These men do not make morally great heroes. But they do make good heroes for television. Let us have more of them.
NB: I now remember that the other Peter, Kosminsky, also directed Rylance as a slightly more heroic grey blur, weapons inspector David Kelly. A man who found himself in the history books almost by accident, but no less tenacious and impressive for that.
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