Bettie's Books

bookshelves: film-only, play-dramatisation, published-1984, under-10-ratings, spring-2014, suicide, slavic, spies, cold-war

Description from cream tv: Entertaining and sumptuously bizarre look at upper-middle-class English life from Stephen Poliakoff, seen through the eyes of minor Soviet official Alexei Varyov (Ian Holm). Living quietly by himself in a west London compound with other Russian journalists and civil servants, Alexei’s rather humdrum life of typing up Time Out-style articles for the Soviet press, with a side-line in posting videotapes of British TV to Russian broadcasters made from the twin VCRs in his flat, is livened up with a hefty dose of Cold War paranoia.

While sending some tapes of Top of the Pops abroad on an Aeroflot charter flight, he’s accosted at Heathrow by upper crust, impetuous foreign office agent Harman (Nigel Havers) who, after a rather showy demonstration of the reasons he was, entirely coincidentally, at the airport, drags Alexei off in his car to the early Sunday morning remains of a party at a Hampstead flat, where two young women Frances (Celia Gregory) and Celia (Helen Mirren), as well as assorted hangers-on including Rupert Everett, regard the nervous Russian with a mixture of suspicion and condescension.

Helen Mirren
Ian Holm
Nigel Havers

A disappointing number from Poliakoff's oeuvre: a something-of-a-nothing, star-studded and polished production for BBC's 'Play for Today' series. In later interviews Mirren was rather embarassed at her overt exhibition of how far her elocution lessons had progressed, and it was jarringly noticeable in this play.









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