Hurrah! I finally located a copy of Cambridge Spies. It's been on my list for a good 5 years now and I've long resisted the temptation to buy it, though hovering at $20, that averages to $5 per spy. Not a bad deal when you consider they are played by Toby Stephens, Rupert Penry-Jones, Tom Hollander, and Timothy West. The lot of them are...the Cambridge spies, or Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, and Anthony Blunt, or the most dastardly double agents in the history of espionage, or plain English toffs. The 4 part BBC1 series chronicles the spies' early days at Cambridge up to Burgess and Maclean's defection to the Soviet Union in 1951. Though it didn't tear up the ratings or win the hearts and minds of most critics, I'm hopeful. Toby Stephens and Tom Hollander are generally a sound insurance policy against defective storytelling and substandard acting, as is the BAFTA winning scribe Peter Moffat. He also brought us North Square (another RPJ vehicle), Macbeth in the Shakespeare Re-Told series (featuring 'spies' Keeley Hawes and Richard Armitage), and Hawking (with Tom Ward who looks like David Tennant, just saying). What an inbred family, that British television. The lady in the picture, by the way, is Anna-Louise Plowman, or Mrs Toby Stephens to you.
