Tinker Tailor

Jim Prideaux is back in Britain, alive, which is more than anyone had a right to expect, and he now teaches school. The schoolroom setting does the show a favour: it takes the spy business out of the Circus and puts it somewhere ordinary. Smiley goes to see him, and the meeting is the heart of the episode. Prideaux's account, together with testimony gathered from others along the way, throws new light on the 'Testify' fiasco and on the source known only as Merlin. Neither story has aged well, and Smiley knows it.

It was Control, in his last days, who sent Prideaux behind the Iron Curtain. The old man's final instruction was simple to state and terrible to carry out: find out which of the Circus's own men was the mole. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Rich man, or Poor man. The nursery rhyme had become a roll call of suspects. Control is gone now, and Prideaux is the one who carried his suspicions home.

John le Carré and Arthur Hopcraft wrote it, John Irvin directed it, and it aired on 8 October 1979. Alec Guinness is Smiley, Ian Bannen is Prideaux, and their scenes together carry most of the episode. Michael Jayston is Peter Guillam, Anthony Bate is Sir Oliver Lacon, George Sewell is Mendel, Alexander Knox is Control, Ian Richardson is Bill Haydon, John Standing is Sam Collins, Mandy Cuthbert is Molly Purcell and Duncan Jones is Roach. It is the episode where the puzzle starts to look like a person.

What makes it land is the history between the two men. Smiley and Prideaux have been through too much for pleasantries, and Bannen's quiet, battered dignity answers Guinness's stillness well. The weight of it settles on them the way it settles on anyone who has kept secrets too long. Nobody raises a voice, and nobody needs to. And this is the closest the series has come to an action scene: two old colleagues, telling each other the truth at last.