Fresh from its triumphs in Iraq, BBC television has turned its attention to Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, and Anthony Blunt. The series which it has been devoting to them, Cambridge Spies, is no small affair, either. Four episodes, each an hour long; a budget of some £6 million; superior casting; buckets of advance publicity—the whole thing was plainly intended to be a jewel in the Corporation’s crown.

The early nineteenth-century prime minister Lord Melbourne is said to have remarked, after he had been persuaded to see a play by Ben Jonson, “I knew it was going to be dull, but I never thought it would be so damnably dull.” Anyone familiar with the current state of the BBC would have been naive not to foresee that Cambridge Spies was going to hold up a distorting mirror to its subject, but just how damnably distorting it was going to be would have been hard to guess.

For a start, the series gave no idea of the nature of the regime which Philby and the others chose to serve. No mention of purges or persecutions, nothing about the millions murdered and the millions more enslaved. This in turn meant that viewers didn’t have to consider the question of how much the Cambridge quartet themselves could (and should) have known about what was going on in the Soviet Union—though there was a clear implication that they couldn’t reasonably have been expected to know more than they did