Plot
Joe Lambe (Tom Hughes) is a young MI5 operative in 1972 London. The previous year, Joe had fallen in love with Yulia (Zana Marjanović), one of his Russian contacts. He had tried to defect to the Soviet Union to be with her but Joe was arrested and Yulia was shot by a KGB enforcer he had not encountered before. Joe's MI5 superior, codenamed "Daddy" (Brian Cox), covers for him and insists that the attempted defection was a sanctioned undercover operation gone wrong and that Joe was only acting on the orders given to him; the outcome of the defection had gone awry and was out of Joe's control.
Tom Hughes is an English actor, musician, and model. He is most known for his role as Prince Albert in the ITV drama Victoria and as Joe Lambe, the lead role in the 2014 BBC Cold War drama The Game. Hughes has also portrayed Michael Rogers in Agatha Christie's Marple, Jonty Millingden in the ITV drama Trinity, Chaz Jankel in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, Bruce Pearson in Cemetery Junction, and Nick Slade in the BBC legal drama Silk.
The Security Service, also known as MI5, is the United Kingdom's domestic counter-intelligence and security agency and is part of its intelligence machinery alongside the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and Defence Intelligence (DI). MI5 is directed by the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), and the service is bound by the Security Service Act 1989. The service is directed to protect British parliamentary democracy and economic interests, and counter terrorism and espionage within the UK.
Zana Marjanović is a Bosnian actress best known for her role as Alma in the 2008 film Snow. In 2010, she was cast as a lead in Angelina Jolie's directorial debut In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011). She also played Cobra in East West Theatre Company's production of Class Enemy directed by Haris Pašović. Zana studied acting at the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo. She rapped one verse in Bosnian-Croatian band Teška Industrija's "EUdala se Lijepa naša".
MI5 is contacted by Soviet university professor Arkady Malinov (Marcel Iureș), who reveals he is a KGB sleeper agent working undercover in the United Kingdom. He tells them that he has been recruited to take part in "Operation Glass", a secret plan of game-changing importance, but he wants to defect. Joe is convinced by everything Arkady tells them except for the reason he wants to defect, that he wants to be a capitalist. He will be used as a go-between to pass messages to other sleeper agents in Britain. Daddy assembles a team to look into Operation Glass, including Joe; the ambitious civil servant Bobby Waterhouse (Paul Ritter); field agent and analyst Sarah Montag (Victoria Hamilton); her husband, Alan (Jonathan Aris), who is a bugging expert; and Daddy's secretary, Wendy (Chloe Pirrie). Joining them is Special Branch detective Jim Fenchurch (Shaun Dooley). As the team investigates Operation Glass, they remain in the dark as to what it is, or even whether Arkady is a trustworthy informant or a double agent.
Marcel Iureş is a Romanian actor He is one of Romania's most acclaimed stage and film actors. He has acted in films and on stage both in Romania and internationally, as well as playing at least ten roles on Romanian and British television. He has continued to explore new artistic challenges such as voiceovers for Disney and in the world of computer games. Iureş is the president and a judge of the Anonimul International Film Festival and also the president of Ideo Ideis Festival.
Paul Ritter is an English stage and screen actor. He is most famous for his roles in films including Quantum of Solace, Son of Rambow, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and The Eagle, as well as television programmes including Vera, Friday Night Dinner, The Hollow Crown and as Peredur in The Last Kingdom.
Victoria Hamilton is an English actress. After training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Hamilton began her career in classical theatre, appearing in productions with the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre. In 2002, she appeared in the London stage play A Day in the Death of Joe Egg alongside Clive Owen and later Eddie Izzard.
Their early leads seem to confirm the worst, as they discover that a Soviet sleeper agent has been attempting to learn the contents of the letters of last resort, which instruct British nuclear submarines on whether to launch their nuclear missiles should Britain be the victim of a nuclear attack. Later, they investigate Kate Wilkinson (Rachael Stirling), an MI6 officer who has been having an affair with an American Air Force officer stationed at RAF Lakenheath, where the Americans are secretly storing nuclear weapons. Plans for a nuclear device are found in Wilkinson's possession and the team believes that the Soviets intend to detonate an American nuclear weapon in Britain, passing it off as an accident. However, Joe discovers evidence that the MI6 agent was framed, Alan realises the technical plans have been largely faked and the team comes to the conclusion that Operation Glass was an overly elaborate feint by the Russians.
The letters of last resort are four identically worded handwritten letters from the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom to the commanding officers of the four British ballistic missile submarines. They contain orders on what action to take in the event that an enemy nuclear strike has destroyed the British government and has killed or otherwise incapacitated both the prime minister and the "second person" whom the prime minister has designated to make a decision on how to act in the event of the prime minister's death. In the event that the orders were to be carried out, the action taken could be the last official act of Her Majesty's Government.
Rachael Atlanta Stirling is an English stage, film and television actress. She has been nominated twice for the Laurence Olivier Award for her stage work. She played Nancy Astley in the BBC drama Tipping the Velvet, and Millie in the ITV series The Bletchley Circle. She has also appeared in programmes such as Lewis, and the long-running BBC One science fiction drama Doctor Who.
Royal Air Force Lakenheath or RAF Lakenheath is a Royal Air Force station near the town of Lakenheath in Suffolk, England, UK, 4.7 miles (7.6 km) north-east of Mildenhall and 8.3 miles (13.4 km) west of Thetford.
During this time, Joe discovers that the Soviet enforcer who murdered Yulia goes by the codename "Odin" and works in the West, eliminating treacherous agents who attempt to defect or betray Russia. Joe had actually encountered Odin at one of their early investigations in London, but was unable to capture him. Arkady is persuaded to use a friend within the Russian embassy — who soon pays with his life — and is thus able to inform the group that there is a mole in MI5, codenamed "Phoenix". Arkady's motivation for defecting is revealed to be a secret French wife and young daughter, but before MI5 can reunite them, he too is murdered by Odin, who can only have been given Arkady's location by Phoenix. Inexplicably sparing Joe, Odin escapes again.
In Germanic mythology, Odin is a widely revered god. In Norse mythology, from which stems most surviving information about the god, Odin is associated with wisdom, healing, death, royalty, the gallows, knowledge, battle, sorcery, poetry, frenzy, and the runic alphabet, and is the husband of the goddess Frigg. In wider Germanic mythology and paganism, Odin was known in Old English as Wōden, in Old Saxon as Wōdan, and in Old High German as Wuotan or Wōtan, all stemming from the reconstructed Proto-Germanic theonym *wōđanaz.
As Joe and Jim Fenchurch begin investigating the possibilities of who might be the mole in MI5, they get a tip from the police about a former army officer called Philip Denmore, who has been enlisting the IRA for help in building a bomb. They send Wendy into his house posing as a nurse to gather information, but he eludes them along with his home-made device. Joe and Jim stake out a location which Phoenix had used as a dead drop and are shocked when they discover Alan coming out the booth. Under interrogation, Alan admits to being the mole but nonetheless helps MI5 analyse a phone call to determine Denmore's location. Joe recognises it as the street outside of the Conservative Party headquarters and rushes to the scene, but arrives too late to prevent the detonation by a suicidal Denmore. Later, Sarah is surprised outside her home by Odin — but invites him inside to discuss her role as the real mole inside MI5 and the compromises that have already taken place.
Still believing Alan to be the mole, the team digs into his past to discover possible motives and what secrets he may have compromised to the Russians. Wendy also discovers that a high-ranking Metropolitan Police official, whose name connects to a child who died in infancy, seems to have no official record prior to joining the force. Suspecting a plant, Bobby orders Wendy to look for other officials in the government who have mysterious and unexplainable gaps in their record, as well as former known radicals who inexplicably disappeared at coinciding times. Jim tracks down Colin Blakefield, a smuggler who had put Denmore in contact with the IRA and who also has Soviet contacts. Blakefield reveals that the Soviets had instructed him to prepare a fake passport for one of their agents: Joe Lambe. Daddy is furious at this fresh betrayal and the authorities attempt to arrest Joe, but he escapes and goes on the run, aided by Sarah, who encourages him to seek out Odin.
Prior to his going on the run, Wendy had told Joe she had discovered an audio tape where a drunk Russian agent brags openly about knowing Phoenix. Every reference to the person's real name has been removed, presumably by Alan. When Joe listens to the tape, he discovers that not only the name but also the pronouns referring to this person have been removed; he deduces that what's missing are all instances of "her" and "she", meaning that Sarah is the mole and Alan has only confessed to cover for her as he still loves her. When Joe confronts Sarah, she tells him that Yulia is still alive in Soviet custody and that if he wants to see her, he should report to a given address — Daddy will never believe she is the real Phoenix anyway. She then goes to see her imprisoned husband, to give him a cover story which he can use until her compatriots rescue him (in fact, Odin has already tried to have him killed). Alan, however, uses a threat of suicide to prove she cares about him.
Wendy and Bobby reveal to Daddy that they have discovered a dozen highly placed figures in government who lack any early history and have names taken from dead infants, so are potential Communist moles. Daddy realises that all of the people on the list have significant ties to the Deputy Prime Minister, who is in effect the operator of the real Operation Glass: it is still ongoing, with the silent coup d'etat to be the shooting by a sniper of the Prime Minister as he tours the site of the bombing at Conservative Party HQ. It is planned that, in the aftermath of this assassination, various heads would roll (including Daddy's) and all of the Communist moles would move up in the bureaucracy. The Deputy Prime Minister would be free to run the country as Prime Minister, effectively placing Britain under Communist rule with the Deputy Prime Minister taking orders from Soviet Russia.
When Joe goes to the address Sarah had given him, he finds Odin and a sniper about to kill the prime minister. Joe will be given a passport and allowed to escape with Yulia, thus MI5's downfall will be complete. Odin has a gun to her head and Joe's prints are put on the sniper rifle — but it is not the PM who arrives outside at the bombing site, but Jim. Joe is wearing a wire, having gone to Daddy with his information on Sarah. An MI5 sniper shoots Odin, Joe tackles the KGB sniper and rescues Yulia. Odin attempts to escape once more but Joe finally corners him. Odin dies, having taken a cyanide pill, telling Joe that Yulia has been working for them and continues to do so.
Production
On 30 November 2012, BBC Cymru Wales, the division of the BBC for Wales, announced the commissioning of the series. [4] [5] The drama was commissioned by Danny Cohen, the controller of BBC One, and Ben Stephenson, the controller of drama commissioning for the BBC. [1] [4] Filming began in Birmingham, London and Wales in August 2013. [1] [6] Birmingham Central Library was used as the headquarters of MI5 with both exterior and interior used for filming, a notable example of Brutalist architecture. Other places which play a role in The Game include Birmingham Moor Street railway station, Warstone Lane Cemetery, Cannon Hill Park, the Old Rep, Grand Hotel, Moseley Road Baths, Methodist Central Hall, Merevale Hall, Lickey Hills, the canals in Smethwick, Newhall Street, and the Birmingham old Central Fire Station. [7] [8] The interior railway scenes were shot on the Ecclesbourne Valley Railway in Derbyshire.
The series consists of six episodes, with each episode lasting for sixty minutes. [4] The executive producers for the series were Faith Penhale, head of drama at BBC Cymru Wales; Hilary Salmon, the senior executive producer for the BBC, and Toby Whithouse. [1] [4] Brian Minchin was originally an executive producer for the series. [4] The producer was Radford Neville for BBC Cymru Wales. [1] Whithouse said in 2017 that The Game "had not been a particularly enjoyable experience". [9]
Tom Hughes said of the role, "Joe is the type of character that you come across very rarely – on the surface one person, but inside someone entirely different." [1] Brian Cox, who plays Daddy, said that "the rich character-driven storylines were a real draw and really capture the intense feeling of the cold war period." [1] The series was showcased by BBC Worldwide in Liverpool in 2014. [10]
