BBC TV's Cambridge Spies

No matter where you live, it's surely only a matter of time before this new big-budget series will be broadcast in your area. As this review from the New Criterion notes, its commitment to historical accuracy leaves something to be desired:

The early nineteenth-century prime minister Lord Melbourne is said to have remarked, after he had been persuaded to see a play by Ben Jonson, “I knew it was going to be dull, but I never thought it would be so damnably dull.” Anyone familiar with the current state of the BBC would have been naive not to foresee that Cambridge Spies was going to hold up a distorting mirror to its subject, but just how damnably distorting it was going to be would have been hard to guess.

Posted by David on July 12, 2003 3:43 PM