‘Insubordinate, insolent, a trickster’: Is secret agent Harry Palmer a viable alternative to Bond?

As ITV revives ‘The Ipcress File’ with Joe Cole as Harry Palmer, Geoffrey Macnab looks back at the original films and asks whether the spy could still serve as a useful counterweight to 007

Michael Caine was seen as British cinema’s newest ‘heart-throb’ when he starred in ‘The Ipcress File’ (ITV/Shutterstock)

Liverpool city centre underwent a strange transformation last month. All of a sudden, vintage cars and people dressed in their Carnaby Street best thronged the streets, turning it into a little corner of Sixties London as filmmakers shot their new version of an espionage classic, The Ipcress File. Joe Cole, the young star of Peaky Blinders and Gangs of London, was seen wearing a mac and thickset glasses. He is taking over the role of Harry Palmer, the renegade secret agent played so memorably by Michael Caine in the 1965 adaptation of Len Deighton’s novel.  

London itself has changed dramatically since the film was shot. That is why the new TV drama is being made in Liverpool. It is directed by James Watkins (best known for McMafia and The Woman in Black) and scripted by John Hodge (who wrote the Trainspotting screenplay). 

Harry Palmer’s comeback, which co-stars Tom Hollander and Lucy Boynton, is being pitched as the perfect pick-me-up for fans exasperated by the long wait for a new James Bond adventure, and the producers are promising that it will have the same dark, cerebral quality found in John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People.