Return to the Circus

George Smiley's retirement is quiet until it isn't. Messengers arrive from London Station, and the old intelligence officer finds himself back in the game he thought he had left behind. He is brought before Sir Oliver and told the thing nobody wants to hear. A Soviet agent of real influence has been operating out of the Circus for years, close to the top, never once suspected. The rot, in other words, is inside the building.

His job is to go back in and find the mole, a top secret assignment with no fanfare and no public thanks. No grand gestures, no chase sequences. Just the slow, patient work of watching people who are very good at not being watched. Smiley is the right man for that work, which is part of the melancholy of it. The qualities that make him good at this are the same ones that made him easy to push out in the first place.

The episode fills the screen with faces, and it is a pleasure to meet them. Alec Guinness gives Smiley his quiet, courteous gravity, the sort that gets him overlooked until he is needed. Bernard Hepton is Toby Esterhase, Terence Rigby is Roy Bland, Michael Aldridge is Percy Alleline. Ian Richardson's Bill Haydon, Alexander Knox's Control, George Sewell's Mendel, Ian Bannen's Jim Prideaux, Michael Jayston's Peter Guillam and Nigel Stock's Roddy Martindale all come crowding in. Nobody gets a full scene to themselves, quite. Still, everyone makes an impression.

John le Carré and Arthur Hopcraft wrote it, with John Irvin directing, and the literate tone is set right here. It went out on 10 September 1979, in the days when a spy drama was allowed to be slow. But the clever thing about this opening is what it doesn't do: it doesn't point a finger. Everyone looks a little compromised. That's the point of the nursery-rhyme title, the four names, the business of elimination. And the show trusts you to keep up.