London Spy

Tom Rob Smith’s London Spy is two programmes joined in the middle. The first is a love story, two hours long, about a young man who has had too many lovers and a young man who has had none. The second is a spy story that takes the remaining three hours and does not know what to do with them. Jakob Verbruggen directs all five episodes and the look never changes; the writing does. The first half is good enough to make the second worth sitting through, but only just.

Danny (Ben Whishaw) comes out of a nightclub at dawn and walks to the river, where a runner stops to speak to him. The runner is Alex (Edward Holcroft), who behaves as if he has learned conversation from a manual. Danny has been every kind of careless; Alex has never been anything at all. Over months they become a couple, while Danny’s older friend Scottie (Jim Broadbent) watches with a worry he cannot say aloud. Then Alex stops answering his phone.

Whishaw is the reason to watch. He plays Danny as someone who has never known what to do with his hands and has stopped trying to hide it; he listens with his whole body and lies badly. Holcroft is given less, because Alex is absent for most of it, but in the hours he has he makes stillness look like fear. Their courtship is written in small permissions: Alex asks before he touches Danny’s hand, and asks again before anything more, and Danny, who has never been asked, does not know what to do with the question. What Danny finds when he goes looking for Alex we watched with a hand over our mouth, and not for what it was: Laurie Rose keeps the camera on Whishaw’s face long before he shows us anything, and it was the face that did it.

Rose shoots a London with nobody in it. Streets are empty at all hours, the river is the colour of slate and Danny stands small at the edge of wide frames. Lisa Marie Hall gives Alex a flat of white walls and bare shelves and Danny a room with clothes on the floor. Suzanne Cave dresses Danny in hooded tops, Alex in a coat buttoned to the neck and Scottie in tweed that has outlasted several governments. Keefus Ciancia and David Holmes score it with a low electronic hum and strings that arrive only when someone is alone. Victoria Boydell lets silences run to their full length, and in the first two episodes that patience is exactly right.

Then the plot arrives. From the third hour, men in good suits wait in cars, a man known only as the American (Clarke Peters) says quiet things, and a journalist (Michaela Coel) and her editor (Kate Dickie) are handed Danny’s story. The conspiracy we will not describe, except to say it only works if every person in it does one thing and never a second. Smith cares more about what the plot does to Danny than whether it holds together, which is defensible until the fourth and fifth hours have to explain it, and the explanations are silly. Somewhere in the fourth hour a man told Danny how the world worked, and we felt the series slip away from us.

Broadbent holds the second half together. Scottie is a man who has been kind for so long that kindness has become his way of hiding, and Broadbent lets us see the cost in how carefully he pours a drink. He has one long speech about his own past that is the best-acted scene in the programme and has almost nothing to do with the mystery.

The spy dramas this wants to sit beside show us how the machine works; Smith shows us men in coats and asks us to take it on trust, and Boydell’s patience leaves the thriller becalmed. Each episode runs an hour and carries an 18. If you stop after the second you will have seen the best of it. If you go on, go on for Whishaw, who never behaves as if he is in a lesser programme than the one he started.