The drawn out style and meticulous character studies of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy initially confused some viewers, but today the 1979 adaptation couldn’t feel more relevant
In polls of the greatest British TV drama series, the BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy ranks highly, alongside ITV’s version of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
Curiously, though, the first of these landmarks in upmarket screen drama owed its existence to the second.