‘The trouble with treachery nowadays’: Revisiting the Age of Treason in Philby, Burgess and Maclean and Blunt

Abstract

The Cambridge spy ring has been the subject of many dramatic representations on British television. While prior scholarship has largely focused on plays by Dennis Potter and Alan Bennett depicting the later lives of such figures, this article examines an alternative tradition: representations which re-enact events at the height of their careers in the early Cold War. I focus on two productions which centre specifically on events surrounding the 1951 defection of Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, but from hugely contrasting perspectives. Firstly, Philby, Burgess and Maclean (ITV, 1977) by Ian Curteis covers a ten-year period from the 1945 ‘Volkov Incident’ to Kim Philby's exoneration in 1955. This production closely adheres to broadly accepted accounts of the case as known in the late 1970s, and I examine this is as a product of the public service-oriented drama-documentary culture of Granada Television. I then contrast this with the revised narrative presented in Robin Chapman's Blunt (BBC, 1987). Not only does this incorporate the newly revealed ‘fourth man’, Anthony Blunt, but it also offers a more humanised portrayal of Burgess and centres much of its drama on the marginal but implicated figure of Goronwy Rees. I explore how, in contrast to Curteis, Chapman takes greater artistic licence in examining the spies' personal lives, which resulted in a wave of controversy. I argue that this portrayal can be situated within a broader revisionist school of 1980s representation which mobilised these icons of an earlier generation's ideals in order to critique new political developments.