The Secret Agent, Television Review.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 7/10

Cast: Toby Jones, Charlie Hamblett, Vicky McClure, Marie Critchley, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Raphael Acloque, Stephen Graham, Ian Hart, Tom Goodman-Hill, David Dawson, Ash Hunter, George Costigan, Pennie Downie, Selina Boyack, Philip Rosch, Christopher Fairbank, Chris Ryman.

It can only be a good thing that television is prepared at times to look back through the innumerable amount of books and novels from before the second world war, the wealth of words wrapped up in long forgotten dust sheets and only admired by students of English literature. At times, it is good that television does this, for it reminds the multitude that there is such a thing as a story without sensationalism and the need for lust to be shown at every possible moment.

Violence though, that is a different matter, the world never changes on that score, revolution, death and destruction, not only a matter for writers in the 21st Century to get their teeth around, nor for those that can remember the bad days of war, of so called troubles between England and Ireland, terrorism has been going on so much longer and it was left to likes of Joseph Conrad to make people think of what harm could actually be done on this fertile soil in the name of anarchy and mayhem.

Joseph Conrad’s seminal work, The Secret Agent, is a book ripe for television, having been worked quite well into a film under the title Sabotage with distinction by Alfred Hitchcock and a fairly faithful version of the main title with Bob Hoskins, yet somehow the genteelness of the era, the urgency of the situation only really came into effect as the third part of the serial came into play of this new and at times uninspiring adaptation took place.

The tension really only caught the attention when Toby Jones, a more disorganised figure and portrayal of Verloc than was probably necessary, was confronted by his wife over the affair in which the Greenwich Observatory was to be targeted, the sheer look of disgust and anger on the face of Vicky McClure’s Winnie Verloc was both haunting and beautifully captured and made the series as whole worthwhile. This was further enhanced by the mental disintegration before the viewer’s eyes of Winnie and the sad realisation that this was a woman driven to an act that could not be returned from.

With a very good performance by Ian Hart as the anarchist bomb maker The Professor, The Secret Agent was at least given the semblance of gravitas required to make a genuinely great novel stand out in parts on screen, partly chilling as the viewers were left in no doubt just how manipulation works, slightly underwhelming as most of the elements from the original book were cast aside; at least though it was a drama series that took stock away from the usual suspects.

Ian D. Hall