There was doubly good news this week for any SAS Rogue Heroes fans who may have been missing their fix of Boy’s Own thrills after the first series finished in that blaze of glory last Sunday.
Seriously, if you haven’t seen it yet you should definitely get stuck in on iPlayer.
It’s hands down one of the best dramas I’ve seen all year.
No wonder the BBC wisely decided on Monday to order a second series.
That news was followed last night by ITV kindly launching an adaptation of another Ben MacIntyre book, A Spy Among Friends , the opening episode of which made me want to do exactly what the opening episode of Rogue Heroes made me want to do: Dive in and watch the whole bally thing in one go.
That was a possibility, thanks to it being available on ITV’s new streaming platform ITVX. (No, me neither - but it’s the future, apparently.)
However, I decided that the small screen spectacle of Damian Lewis, Guy Pearce and Anna Maxwell Martin at the top of their games should be savoured, not devoured.
Plus, I figured I’d be too busy binge-watching Keeping Up With The HarMeghians – or whatever Harry and Meghan’s new reality show is called – on Netflix.
In A Spy Among Friends, Pearce plays infamous Cold War defector Kim Philby, while Lewis plays his dear friend, MI6 colleague and (suspected) enabler Nicholas Elliot.
As a viewer, it perhaps works best if you don’t know too much about the story – but if you are a Cold War buff, you can always spend your time raging about the fact that a fictional character has been introduced.
That’s Maxwell Martin as MI5 investigator/interrogator Lily Taylor, whose mission is to discover how much Elliott knew about Philby’s treachery.
Basically, she’s Ted Hastings’s nemesis Patricia Bloody Carmichael from Line Of Duty, only with a North East accent and dreadful woolly tights.
And once she gets Elliott in the interview room and pulls out the old tape recorder?
Well, as Hastings might have said had he lived in the 1960s, that’s when we’re really sucking National Benzole.
