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London Spy: Ben Whishaw, dreamy lover/genius Ed Holcroft and sage Jim Broadbent
Aloysius J. Gleek:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/11980812/London-Spy-sex-spooks-and-the-perfect-murder.html
London Spy
sex, spooks
and the perfect murder
A new BBC thriller echoes
the baffling case of the 'spy in the bag’
Tom Rob Smith explains why he wrote it
By Tom Rob Smith
7:00AM GMT 09 Nov 2015
Ben Whishaw plays Danny and Edward Holcroft plays "Joe" (Alex) in London Spy
Photo: Ed Miller/ BBC
Twenty years ago, I stood on the dangerous and decrepit former incarnation of the Hungerford pedestrian bridge that connects the north and south banks of the River Thames. The old bridge was afflicted with crime and it wasn’t a place to linger. But that night, I looked out over the city skyline and asked – as though London were a wise mentor capable of answering back – whether life got any easier.
I don’t recall another occasion when I’ve seriously contemplated suicide. But standing there, I realised that death would be the end of everything good, as well as everything bad. My life, which had been a largely happy one, full of love and potential, would have been rewritten in those troubled hours, as one of perpetual despair leading to that act. I would have wound up as a statistic, engulfed by a much wider narrative about a society in which many young gay people, such as me, struggle to cope.
I’m very glad I lived to tell a different story but perhaps, because of this moment, I’m aware of how the circumstances of some people’s deaths can sometimes present a very misleading picture of their actual lives.
Herein lies the premise for my first television drama series London Spy, a thriller which opens with my character, Danny (played by the Bafta-winning actor Ben Whishaw) standing on Lambeth Bridge, feeling low and asking the London skyline whether life gets any easier.
London answers him with a chance encounter, an early morning runner who stops to ask if he’s OK. Introducing himself as Alex, an unusual connection forms between these men who are opposites in many ways. It’s unusual in the sense that it’s special to both parties, but it’s also unusual for mainstream drama on the BBC, which rarely places gay relationships at the heart of stories.
Alex claims to be working in the financial services: he’s successful and wealthy. He’s also anti-social and profoundly shy, doesn’t do drugs or hang out in clubs. A love story begins that promises happiness for both. However, eight months into their relationship Alex is found dead in a sex room designed for multiple anonymous encounters, littered with drugs and extreme bondage gear.
It is a scenario completely alien to the Alex that Danny has come to know. His perfect love is, in an instant, rewritten. He is no longer this man’s partner but merely one of many nameless sexual hook ups. In death, Danny not only loses his lover, he loses their love story too. It turns out, Alex lied about his job. He wasn’t a banker – he was a spy.
I’ve been asked whether there are parallels between my thriller and the 2010 Gareth Williams case, the GCHQ operative whose body was found in a North Face holdall, padlocked from the outside, in his flat in Pimlico. The key to the padlock was underneath his body, inside the bag.
Mystery: [The real] Gareth Williams was found dead in a locked holdall. The unsolved case
inspired London Spy
I should be clear that this series is entirely a work of fiction: none of the characters are real. It isn’t intended as a commentary on the police investigation or the security services. However, at the heart of the Press and public interest in the Williams case was the question of whether his death told a story of his life, or whether his death was staged to tell a story that would disguise and distract us from his murder. That story, presented to the public, involved the implication of cross-dressing (£20,000 worth of women’s clothing was found in his flat) and a history of bondage websites on his internet browser, leading to suggestions that 31-year-old Williams died alone in an erotic game of escapology.
If it were a murder, the concepts behind its construction were not new. Some years back I stumbled across a training manual allegedly drafted by the CIA and distributed to agents and operatives at the time of the Agency’s 1954 covert coup in Guatemala, which ousted the democratically elected president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán.
I cannot vouch for this document’s authenticity, and if it turned out to be another agency’s attempt to smear the CIA, I wouldn’t be surprised. Regardless, its ideas remain striking: “For secret assassination… the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed it causes little excitement, and is only casually investigated.”
We are now so immersed in paranoia and suspicion that an accident isn’t sufficient to divert our attention – fundamentally we don’t believe in coincidence, but we do believe in stories, or at least, we believe in stories that are well told. In order to make sure a death doesn’t become a murder, the murderer must become a storyteller. A subsection of the manual, under the label “Techniques”, declares: “A subject’s personal habits may be exploited to prepare him for a contrived accident of any kind.”
In order to create a plausible lie, you weave in elements of truth. As with all storytelling, it’s important to have your audience in mind, which means understanding how they react to certain provocations.
Prejudices are useful because they are stories people believe without requiring any evidence. For example, the murder of an alcoholic would be much less suspicious if you killed him with alcohol; the execution of someone with a history of speeding would be less toxic if it was implied that he or she was driving too fast.
In London Spy, the character Danny argues that storytelling of a different kind is at play.
Danny has had his heart broken many times already and the death of Alex seems to confirm a powerful fear that any intimate relationship is doomed (a fear that is particularly prevalent in the gay community, many of whose members grow up believing that their attraction to the same sex could end their careers and could also, thanks to HIV/Aids, end their lives).
He’s certain that even though his partner lied about his job as a spy, he didn’t lie about his true nature. Danny is sure that the “sex room” has been staged. There were no other sexual partners. They were destined to spend the rest of their life together. That is why Danny must fight: if he can prove that the Alex he knew – decent and genuinely looking for love – was the real Alex, then he can prove to himself that intimacy does not necessarily end in despair.
But as with any tale of espionage and double-dealing, Danny’s battle to uncover the truth about his partner is far from straightforward.
London Spy will air on Monday November 9 at 9pm on BBC2
Aloysius J. Gleek:
:( :( :( :(
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on April 05, 2016, 06:54:23 pm ---http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/11980812/London-Spy-sex-spooks-and-the-perfect-murder.html
By Tom Rob Smith
7:00AM GMT 09 Nov 2015
Twenty years ago, I stood on the dangerous and decrepit former incarnation of the Hungerford pedestrian bridge that connects the north and south banks of the River Thames. The old bridge was afflicted with crime and it wasn’t a place to linger. But that night, I looked out over the city skyline and asked – as though London were a wise mentor capable of answering back – whether life got any easier.
I don’t recall another occasion when I’ve seriously contemplated suicide. But standing there, I realised that death would be the end of everything good, as well as everything bad. My life, which had been a largely happy one, full of love and potential, would have been rewritten in those troubled hours, as one of perpetual despair leading to that act. I would have wound up as a statistic, engulfed by a much wider narrative about a society in which many young gay people, such as me, struggle to cope.
I’m very glad I lived to tell a different story but perhaps, because of this moment, I’m aware of how the circumstances of some people’s deaths can sometimes present a very misleading picture of their actual lives.
Herein lies the premise for my first television drama series London Spy, a thriller which opens with my character, Danny (played by the Bafta-winning actor Ben Whishaw) standing on Lambeth Bridge, feeling low and asking the London skyline whether life gets any easier.
--- End quote ---
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on April 05, 2016, 06:54:23 pm ---Twenty years ago, I stood on the dangerous and decrepit former incarnation of the Hungerford pedestrian bridge that connects the north and south banks of the River Thames. The old bridge was afflicted with crime and it wasn’t a place to linger. But that night, I looked out over the city skyline and asked – as though London were a wise mentor capable of answering back – whether life got any easier.
--- End quote ---
Charing Cross Bridge [later to become the Hungerford Bridge] was portrayed in a series of oil paintings by French artist Claude Monet. Painted in between 1899 and 1904, they depict a misty,
impressionistic Charing Cross Bridge in London. The two separate pedestrian paths flanking either side the railway bridge were added much later in 2002.
Poor Tom! I guess in 1995/1996, the Hungerford pedestrian bridge must have been pretty dire. But around 2002 or so, the new paired Hungerford pedestrian 'Golden Jubilee Bridges' opened, one either side nearly touching the old Hungerford Railway Bridge (the tracks lead to Charing Cross Station on the North side of the Thames). At that time, I used to visit London a lot, four or five times a year, and, hearing about the spanking new walkways, I went to look. Beautiful!! I became obsessed. It became my daily walk--I'd charge through Trafalgar Square, down Northumberland Avenue, bound up the steps and walk across the river to Southbank to the National Theatre or the Globe or South to the Old Vic, or the Anchor and Hope gastropub or whatever/wherever. The pedestrian bridges opened South London for me and I loved it. No Danny or Alex though, unfortunately! ::) ::)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_Bridge_and_Golden_Jubilee_Bridges
Aloysius J. Gleek:
LONDONSPYMI6_KIM PHILBY
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on April 04, 2016, 10:00:30 pm ---http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/05/world/europe/kim-philby-bbc-lecture.html
But it was the career of Mr. Philby, who set up MI6’s section to spy on the Soviet Union to which he was loyal, that was most astonishing, as he rose to head the very counterintelligence department that should have discovered his treachery.
In 1965, the Russians awarded him the Red Banner of Honor for his services to the K.G.B., and he later received the privileges of a K.G.B. general.
Not without humor, Mr. Philby told the Stasi audience how his Soviet controllers told him to become chief of the anti-Soviet section of MI6 by removing his boss, Felix Cowgill.
“I said, ‘Are you proposing to shoot him or something?’ ” Mr. Philby recalled.
Told to use bureaucratic methods, “I set about the business of removing my own chief,” he said, then added dryly: “You oughtn’t to listen to this,” prompting laughter.
“It was a very dirty story,” said Mr. Philby, whose treachery was responsible for the deaths of hundreds. “But after all, our work does imply getting dirty hands from time to time, but we do it for a cause that is not dirty in any way.”
--- End quote ---
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on February 28, 2016, 10:51:19 pm ---London Spy
Episode 3
"Blue"
Scottie (Jim Broadbent): I remember taking you to hospital--all those years ago.
There was a chance you'd been infected. We barely knew each other.
You were so young. More child than adult.
I made you promise never to take a risk like that again.
Danny: Scottie, I swear!
Scottie: You promised. You promised me.
Danny: I never broke that promise. I swear to you!
If you don't believe me, I don't have anyone else, Scottie, I don't have anyone else!
You have to believe.
Scottie: I believe you. I knew you were a young man who'd make a lot of mistakes.
But never the same one twice. I believe you.
I believe they deliberately infected you. Not to kill you, obviously.
With medication, you'll live a long and normal life.
They did it to discredit you.
They'll say you took risks with your own health.
You were reckless--and irresponsible.
Perhaps they'll even say that you infected Alex.
Danny: No. He, he was--
Scottie: He was negative. But what will the test say?
The story of you two has been written. It was written many months ago.
A sordid tale--the details of which will leak out into the public sphere.
People will recoil.
Many will think you got what you deserved.
No one will campaign for answers. No one will demand justice.
Danny: These people--
Scottie: Yes.
Danny: They'd do anything.
--- End quote ---
Yes.
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on April 05, 2016, 06:54:23 pm ---http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/11980812/London-Spy-sex-spooks-and-the-perfect-murder.html
Herein lies the premise for my first television drama series London Spy, a thriller which opens with my character, Danny (played by the Bafta-winning actor Ben Whishaw) standing on Lambeth Bridge, feeling low and asking the London skyline whether life gets any easier.
--- End quote ---
"I want to tell you a story about--"
a bridge. In fact,
a city of bridges--
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dsi3r_FokI[/youtube]
http://mangobango2.tumblr.com/
Published on Dec 26, 2015
"All I Want"
by Kodaline
2012
All I want is nothing more
To hear you knocking at my door
'Cause if I could see your face once more
I could die a happy man I'm sure
When you said your last goodbye
I died a little bit inside
I lay in tears in bed all night
Alone without you by my side
But If you loved me
Why'd you leave me?
Take my body
Take my body
All I want is
And all I need is
To find somebody
I'll find somebody like you
So you brought out the best of me
A part of me I've never seen
You took my soul and wiped it clean
Our love was made for movie screens
But If you loved me
Why'd you leave me?
Take my body
Take my body
All I want is
And all I need is
To find somebody
I'll find somebody
If you loved me
Why'd you leave me?
Take my body
Take my body
All I want is
All I need is
To find somebody
I'll find somebody like you
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodaline
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtf7hC17IBM[/youtube]
Published on Sep 9, 2012
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzuXZfKg2YM[/youtube]
Published on Oct 3, 2013
--- Quote from: Aloysius J. Gleek on February 27, 2016, 02:15:17 pm ---
London Spy Quotable Quote:
http://www.vulture.com/2016/01/london-spy-recap-season-1-episode-1.html
Jack Mirkinson
January 21, 2016 11:19 p.m.
(....)
--Cut to the morning. Danny exits the club, looking decidedly worse for wear. He's jittery, high, and lost. We follow him down to the edge of the Thames, where he shatters his phone into pieces. As he slumps to the ground, a beautiful man runs by. He stops, then picks up the pieces of Danny's phone. Their eyes meet. You know the rest.
If you're thinking that this handsome stranger would turn out to be important, you're correct. (How did you know?) His name is "Joe". He's closeted, he's an investment banker, and he lives a regimented life in the kind of gleaming fantasy flat that either inspires jealousy or revolutions. The two make an intriguing pair. Edward Holcroft has that overripe, full-lipped, halting delicacy a besotted Victorian might extol in a love poem; Ben Whishaw is a bedraggled alien with a heart of gold. Danny, who works in a warehouse, is also living a decidedly boho-scrounger life, whereas "Joe" is possibly the poshest person in London. No matter, though. Both are thunderstruck.
(....)
--- End quote ---
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