ITV’s reboot of Len Deighton’s cold war spy thriller has Joe Cole as Harry Palmer sorting out the mess left by public school boys. Sound familiar?
One of our scientists is missing. He’s been kidnapped from the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, possibly by Kremlin minions who want him to tell them how to make a neutron bomb 3,000 times more destructive than the one that hit Hiroshima. I’m not saying Nato’s nuclear secrets are poised to fall into the lap of a latter-day Napoleon overcompensating for his shortcomings with military barbarism, but it’s too soon to rule out the possibility.
Thankfully, this is a TV review not a news story, but the contemporary resonances are unmissable, even if the makers of this six-part adaptation of Len Deighton’s 1962 thriller couldn’t have envisaged their audience would be playing extras in a real-life cold war sequel.
