Freely adapted from prolific spy scribe Le Carre's 1993 novel, this quickly gets going - and gripping - but is every bit as far-fetched as a Bond movie. Ex-army officer Jonathan Pine (Tom Hiddleston) is a night manager at the swanky Nefertiti hotel in uptown Cairo. During the Arab Spring, the beautiful mistress of a dodgy local playboy entrusts him with a document implicating famous businessman/philanthropist Richard Roper (Hugh Laurie) in arming terrorists. When he leaks it to Simon Ogilvy (Russell Tovey) at the British Consulate, the consequences for them both are shattering.
This has all the right ingredients: glamorous locations, a good-looking cast, subterfuge, violence, sex, good vs. bad and so on. It's engrossing in the same way as a well-put-together, handsomely mounted Hollywood movie. The slight glitch for an English audience is the self-same cast. Hiddleston is a great hero, but an unlikely night manager, while we kept expecting Laurie to reprise his goggle-eyed Regency Prince from 'Blackadder' and Tovey to be the cheeky chappie he usually plays. Horribly unfair to the actors, who turn in top-class performances, along with Olivia Colman as gutsy intelligence agent and mum-to-be Angela Burr, and several other staple Brits besides.
Escapist and a good ad for the intelligence services if you are reckless. It isn't after all the governments who wield the power and pose the threat these days. Businessmen are rather less exposed.
Capital is BBC 1's 3-part dramatisation of John Lanchester's credit-crunch novel, set in an affluent Clapham (South London) street. The crux of the book, and the serialisation, is that many different aspects of life can exist in a single street, from wealthy bankers to cornershop owners, from Eastern European builders to African traffic wardens - though the latter works in the street rather than lives there.
A problem with all books like this is that they are prone to using well-worn stereotypes - see also Amanda Craig's Hearts & Minds, and Sebastian Faulks' A Week in December - and this is even more likely to happen on the screen because you don't have the depth of a book, or the luxury of descriptive narrative. On screen, the story unfolds with residents receiving postcards, sometimes photographs of themselves going about their business, with the ominous statement, "We want what you have". What they all have, of-course, from the banker to elderly Petunia (Gemma Jones) who moved in as a bride forty years ago, is prime London real estate where prices are rising virtually by the day. The likes of Petunia, who moved into an unimposing terrace, would no longer be able to afford to move here.
Capital has been updated from 2008 to 2015, because essentially nothing has changed in banking and property prices, which removes the need to try to do 2008 details, but instead concentrate on the story. The other major change is the omission of the African footballer character and his dad - apparently some of the dad's lines have been given to other characters.
We enjoyed it more than we thought we would. Performances are generally very good, although we disagreed about the casting of Toby Jones as the banker. For Dan he was well cast against type (very different from Lance in The Detectorists, for example) and believable as a brainy but essentially lucky and over-privileged banker. It's nowhere near as good as 'Marvellous', Jones's last work with Peter Bowker, but it's good. The banker going broke story has been done lots of times before - for example Sherman McCoy explaining why he's going broke on £2m a year in the 1980s in 'Bonfire of the Vanities', but we liked Jones performance.
We need a great 'house prices' drama, and we need a great 'London as a melting pot' drama, and this was neither, but it's well written and well directed, so we'll stick with it to the end.
