Joe Cole as Harry Palmer
(Picture: ALTITUDE FILM FOR ITV)When ITV commissioned this new series based on Len Deighton’s novel of Cold War espionage, which was previously adapted into the iconic Sixties film starring a square-specced Michael Caine, they envisaged a modern spin on an old classic.
They would have had no way of knowing, though, that The Ipcress File would land on screens in a week where screaming headlines about nuclear war would dominate the news cycle. “It seems more and more likely every day that we are all shortly to be blown to smithereens,” one character muses with remarkable laissez-faire while flicking through a newspaper in episode one. What horrible proof that history is prone to repeating itself.
