Revolutionary for TV, these series were also rehabilitative for Le Carré. Tom Hiddleston and Elizabeth Debicki in The Night Manager. The then pioneering experiment continued with a sequel, Smiley’s People (BBC Two, 1982), with Guinness bringing his glasses to an even brighter shine, and A Perfect Spy (BBC Two, 1987), an adaptation of the author’s most autobiographical novel, in which Magnus Pym (Peter Egan) becomes a secret agent after learning the dark arts of deceit from his conman dad, Rick (Ray McAnally).

Few viewers now would think to complain that a show is too convoluted, involving or leaves space for actors to unravel layered characters: the epic suspect-quizzing scenes in Jed Mercurio’s police corruption series Line of Duty are clearly influenced by the Le Carré series. In retrospect, as confirmed by recent re-screenings on BBC Four, the show was a harbinger of “box set TV”, decades before the concept existed. The pacing was so radical that even as clever a reviewer as Clive James declared the first episode “dull … turgid … incomprehensible”, and, after the third, dismissed the series as “a concerted attempt to inflate a thin book into a fat series”. Guinness’s signature mannerism in the role was taken from the novels – where Smiley was observed to “polish his spectacles with the fat end of his tie” – but, on TV, it served the purpose of animating the long silences necessary to show the spy’s slow laying of interrogational traps into which his quarry might fall. Healing some BBC wounds by reaching TV in September 1979, two years before ITV’s Brideshead, BBC Two’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, had Alec Guinness’s Smiley taking reaction shots to new levels of attentive reflection in episodes of such deliberative pace that, at this early stage in the era of home video recorders, viewers sometimes wondered if they had accidentally engaged the freeze-frame function. He settled on the 1974 first volume of Le Carré’s trilogy (later umbrella-titled The Quest for Karla) about the search by George Smiley, a Sherlock Holmes of the spook world, for Russian double-agents in the British secret service. When, unexpectedly, the estate sold the book to Granada Television, Jonathan Powell, running BBC Drama, was asked to quickly find a replacement brainy treat. In the 1970s, the BBC, during one of its periodic crises over justifying the licence fee to politicians and the media, craved a starry, classy, filmed book, and had been negotiating the rights to Waugh’s story of a Catholic aristocratic family.

John le carre the honorable schoolboy