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"Cambridge Spies (2003) Starring Toby Stephens" Details & Series Overview

humm... i saw one of the eposdes on tv sometime ago last summer i believe, or was it around new years can't remember, but anyways where can i get the DVD?

Here's the amazon.com link MrDraco.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00...6090015-1616125

I saw this series on BBC America a few months ago. We probably got a cut down version unfortunately. But I loved what I saw. I thought it was a wonderful production, excellent acting and writing. I'd love to see the complete version. Thanks for your post on the dvd, I'll check it out.

Perhaps the most repulsive BBC (or British)programme ever.......a complete whitewash of traitors with invented scenes and supposedly real dialogue.Many from layman to academic are appalled at this series.Read the links(the comment from Jane Tranter says it all........)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml...4/23/nspy23.xml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml...4/13/nspy13.xml

I think it was worthwhile. I did mention the liberties taken with the storytelling. I like the fact that it's a controversial program. As the article says, they didn't want to make it boring. And there is historical material on the DVD that's a little less varnished.

Check the Main Page Story. I put in links at the bottom to the pages on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk

Good post Athena. There is much written about Philby and the boys, that tells it how it really was. It's good reading.

4A

Here is a rebuttal against all the criticisms of this series:

Comment
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They were both traitors and idealists
Attacks on the BBC's Cambridge Spies series misunderstand history

Francis Beckett
Thursday May 8, 2003
The Guardian

It's not surprising that the onslaught against the BBC over tomorrow's television programme, Cambridge Spies, was led by Oleg Gordievsky. He complains that they are represented as idealists when they were really "traitors".

Can an idealist not be a traitor? Gordievsky was a traitor. We call him a defector, but that's just politeness. Like Kim Philby and his friends, Gordievsky used his position in the security services of his own country - the USSR - to spy for his country's enemies. Ah but, I hear you cry, that's different. Gordievsky's country was run by scoundrels. There are more important things than patriotism. You have to understand why he betrayed his country.

And that's true. We need to look, not just at Gordievsky's treachery, but at the reasons for it, before we judge him. We need to understand the social and political context of treachery. Simply to portray him as evil is simplistic, dangerous and wrong. So with the Cambridge spies, and anyone else we might want to accuse of treason.

The Cambridge spies became communists in the 1930s in an atmosphere described by an anonymous parody of Sir Walter Scott: "Lives there a man with soul so dead/ Who was not, in the thirties, red?" There was mass unemployment, great hardship, a huge imbalance of wealth and poverty, and the British political system seemed to offer no means of redressing these evils.

Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald responded to his 1929 election victory with the words: "Did Labour people ever live in such an inspiring moment as this?" It was rather like Tony Blair's famous: "It is wonderful, is it not?" and it meant just as little. Within months, the leader of the leftwing Independent Labour party, Jimmy Maxton, was asking: "Has any human being benefited from the fact that there has been a Labour government in office?"

It failed to tackle unemployment because the only solution offered was the Keynesian one of public works, which it feared would be thought too socialistic. It increased the hardship of the unemployed. By the time of the 1931 crisis, most people thought there was little difference between Labour and the Conservatives, and MacDonald seemed to prove them right by handing in the resignation of his Labour government and at once becoming prime minister in a national government effectively run by the Conservatives.

For those who wanted Labour to speak for the underdog, it was proof that the parliamentary system could never deliver change. Democracy was a fraud on the poorest in the land. Within two years Maxton and his friends were out of the Labour party. Others who had hoped for a change in the balance of wealth and poverty splintered off in all directions. Many joined the Communist party, which enjoyed a resurgence. As the 1930s progressed, they could see an even more compelling reason for being communists: no mainstream political party was prepared to side with the democratic forces in the Spanish civil war, though it was well known that Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were supporting General Franco.

Many people in the 1930s thought the hope for the future lay in Moscow. Some, like communist leader Harry Pollitt, visited Moscow regularly for inspiration and an ideological makeover. Others took their battered idealism to Moscow permanently, living with the expatriate community in a rundown hotel and working for the Communist International. And a few stayed in Britain and helped the cause along by spying.

So desperate were the times that some even threw in their lot with Oswald Mosley's fascist thugs. My own father, a leftwing Labour MP until 1931, did this. This was a far more desperate measure than becoming a communist, for at least the communists had a programme for social change. All fascists had was a mystical belief in the power of a great leader to make things better. Yet even my poor, deluded fascist father started with a muddled idealism.

Gordievsky accuses the BBC of portraying the English upper-class of the 1930s as "indolent, stupid and viciously anti-semitic, lording it over the poor". That is exactly how Blunt and his friends saw them, and not without cause. Flaunting wealth in the face of poverty was a popular pastime.

When the Labour party ceases to speak for the underdog, when Labour leaders fawn over the wealthy and seem to have forgotten who Labour was created for, then democratic British politics offers no way of creating a fairer society. That was the atmosphere that created the Cambridge spies. Those, like me, who have left the Labour party, will become neither fascists, nor spies, nor (mostly) communists. But we are part of the same phenomenon that created the Cambridge spies.

· Francis Beckett is the author of The Rebel Who Lost His Cause (Allison and Busby)

Excellent article, Jaelle. Thanks

Interesting, but terribly flawed series. Good performance by Sam West as Blunt. Great costumes and all the usual BBC stuff. Dreadful mess of the source material - Cairncross nonexistent, and the scene where the traitors stick up for the poor boys of the union is a disgraceful way of trying to make out that they were good guys, after all. It doesn't work, because the entire incident is invented. They were flawed human beings, and it's time to go beyond the gung-ho hang-em mentality, perhaps - but they weren't heroes. Not once does this series address the hundreds of British agents who were killed as a result of the treachery of this lot.

Toby Stephens is excruciating as Philby - he's one perpetual sneer masquerading as an upright Buchaneseque hero. He's totally miscast.

It were rubbish.