Ten years on, Tom Hiddleston is back as the dashing, bed-hopping spy – but the world now prefers Jackson Lamb to James Bond
It’s been almost exactly 10 years since the first series of The Night Manager dazzled the world. The BBC’s unusually lavish 2016 John le Carré adaptation sold to 180 countries and bagged three Golden Globes, two Emmys, three Baftas. No pressure on this belated sequel, then.
With its mega-budget, luxurious foreign locations, cinematic direction, sexy opening credits and Tom Hiddleston as a dashing, bed-hopping spy, the original series was le Carré infused with Bond. But espionage drama has moved on since 2016 and the ghost at the sequel’s equally opulent feast is Apple TV’s Slow Horses.
Jackson Lamb is today’s eminent fictional spook and he is no James Bond – less of a martini sipped in a casino lounge and more a desk-drawer Scotch swigged from a paper cup.
Whether by chance, osmosis or design, there is an element of Slow Horses in the set-up to the new series of The Night Manager. Several years have passed since Jonathan Pine (Hiddleston) infiltrated the coterie of arms dealer Richard Roper. Still scarred from this experience, Pine – now living under the assumed name of Alex Goodwin – has opted for a quiet life in an MI6 unit called the “Night Owls”, a nocturnal surveillance unit with the backwater feel of Lamb’s Slough House.
“We’re watchers, Alex, eyes and ears… we’re not the show,” a Night Owls colleague reminds him when our hero finally decides he needs to spring into action. The reason for his sudden reanimation? He’s just spotted one of Roper’s old associates at large in London.
What really made the original series for me was less the sumptuous production and more the inspired casting of Hugh Laurie as Roper and Tom Hollander as his lethal sidekick Corky. Having watched Hollander’s performance, le Carré apparently expressed regret at having killed off Corky, while Laurie was a revelation; his posho arms dealer smoothly blended charm and menace.
It remains to be seen whether Mexican actor Diego Calva, as the arch villain of the new series, can exude such charisma – his character, a Colombian “businessman” called Teddy de Santos, only emerges later in the series. In the coming episodes, the action moves to South America, which – given Donald Trump’s recent bellicosity against Venezuela – now looks hotly topical.
The action in the opening instalment is largely confined to London, with a later trip to Barcelona and a suitably explosive cliffhanger. And, yes, the hotel where the bomb goes off is on a cliff edge.
The 10 years that Hiddleston has aged since the first series suit his character; he’s leaner and tougher looking. Also returning to the cast are Olivia Colman and Douglas Hodge as Pine’s supportive superiors at the Foreign Office, Angela Burr and Rex Mayhew. Hodge is one of my favourite actors, equally at home with comedy and the straight stuff, so I was genuinely sad to see his character bumped off early on.
With no le Carré novel on which to base his storyline, returning writer David Farr has said that the idea for the new series came to him in a dream. There are certainly fantastical elements here, especially the way in which the baddies openly meet in parks and hotel lobbies and discuss their nefarious plans within earshot of Pine.
What’s missing, however, is the humour with which both Laurie and Hollander smoothed over the credibility cracks in the original series (and, of course, which Slow Horses supplies in spades). This new cocktail of le Carré and Bond left me slightly shaken, but not stirred.
‘The Night Manager’ continues on Sunday at 9pm on BBC One
