Filming Treachery: British Cinema and Television's Fascination with the Cambridge Five

The article examines the cultural importance of the ‘Cambridge spies’, the infamous traitors who betrayed British secrets to the Soviets over a period of several decades. In particular, it looks at the various ‘screen fictions’ which have drew inspiration from the well-known tale of treachery, and argues the centrality of the Cambridge spies as a Cold War narrative in British culture in the second part of the twentieth century. Aspects of the story has figured in such screen dramas as Traitor (1971), Philby, Burgess and Maclean (1977), Another Country (1984), and The Cambridge Spies (2003), while this article pays particular attention to the classic BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1979), and the screen versions of Alan Bennett's An Englishman Abroad (1983) and A Question of Attribution (1991). The article argues the transformative effect of the narrative of the Cambridge spies on the spy genre and its centrality to a wider critical reassessment of nationalism, state power, individual identity and citizenship in the context of imperial decline in the postwar period.