Tinker, Tailor, Soldier...

The radio is playing Geoffrey Burgon's Nunc Dimittis, which reminds me that I saw the trailer for the new film Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy yesterday, even though the two have nothing in common.

Well, what links them is that the Burgon Nunc Dimittis was used as the end credits music for the 1979 BBC adaptation of the John Le Carre novel, on which the new film is based. But whereas the music fitted perfectly to the TV series and the novel, it wouldn't work at all with this new film.

The new trailer is certainly nervy and tenses. As a snarky website says, it suggests a film "so intense that even a shot of someone in goofy optometrist trial frames is super intense". It looks stylized, self-consciously edgy in mood and pace, and it's aggressively pushing that vibe to sell itself.

That little piece of music, in contrast, expresses everything that the TV version and the novel managed, in their understated way, to convey - the methodical intelligence, the sense of place and time and timelessness, the immense unspoken subtlety, and out of all that was the simmering tension and drama of the story created.

I think there's a difference there.

And, for me, the memory of the old series made the new trailer feel very awkward indeed; the camerawork was almost self-consciously different (probably because the Swedish director and Dutch cinematographer have never seen the original), but the dialogue constantly, inevitably evoked the key scenes of the TV series.

There's no question that this new film looks like a high-quality production with a top-line cast and crew, but this non-remake sums up everything that's awkward about modern Britain -- in a way I'm pretty sure isn't deliberate, and which certainly doesn't seem very satisfying.