Picture from B.B.C.

Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: David Tennant, Janet Montgomery, Marcin Dorocinski, Linda Bassett, Piotr Baumann, Nicholas Blane, Kenneth Collard, Dan Fredenburgh, Adam Godley, Burn Gorman, Ellie Haddington, Julian Harries, Ann Eleonara Jorgensen, Radoslaw Kaim, Grzegorz Kowalczyk, Anton Lesser, Richard Lintern, Tuppence Middleton.

Audiences wait an eternity for television drama to make its way back to the Second World War espionage era and then two perfectly good ones come along in a matter of weeks. The second of these diverted away from the thrilling William Boyd penned Restless with the stunning Hayley Atwell as the heroine and focused on the months before the invasion of Poland in Spies of Warsaw with another television favourite, David Tennant, in the lead role.

Whereas Restless focused its attentions on the psychology of spying upon the mind, Spies of Warsaw, adapted from the novel by Alan Furst by the creative duo of Ian La Frenais and Dick Clements, saw the return of the classy no nonsense type of character portrayed so well by Matthew Macfadyen in Spooks and the brilliant Sam Neill in Reilly, Ace of Spies and carried on with stiff upper lip and the inevitable eye for the ladies, David Tennant as Jean-François Mercier.

With war looking ever more likely as the German war-machine starts to go into overdrive and Poland realising she is caught between two disparate and desperate ideologies, in steps a French First World War hero who starts a small covert war from inside Warsaw, the single most frightening place to be outside of Germany at the time, and who witnesses what the Nazis were capable of.

The Cold War may have been over for over 20 years but the demand for stories, for tales of adventure from beyond that time and when Europe was in serious danger of going over the abyss and into a cauldron of hate in which it would never return is always worth making, if for nothing else but to keep fresh in the mind what could repeat given dismissive thinking.

By no means was David Tennant the solo star of this first part of Spies of Warsaw; however in amongst some genuinely great acting, notably Janet Montgomery as Anna, Burn Gorman as the insufferable Jourdain and Anton Lesser as the German Doctor Lapp, the focus of the cameras and the viewer’s attention was firmly on Mr. Tennant.

For all his time on B.B.C.’s Doctor Who, it is pleasantly surprising, and down to his acting ability, to see him shake off the heavy tag of the Doctor and in recent years see this fine actor play all manner of roles with consummate ease, something many of his predecessors fought long and hard to do and even then didn’t succeed.

With the final scene depicting all was not going to go to plan, the scene is set for a grim finale. Well worth watching.

Spies of Warsaw concludes next Wednesday.

Ian D. Hall