Sleepers

More than a decade after its first airing on "Masterpiece Theatre," I still pull out my copy of "Sleepers" to watch once a year or so.

"Sleepers" has it all: wonderfully witty, satiric commentary on post-Cold War politics; superb acting by Nigel Havers & Warren Clarke & Company, in turns farcical, funny, & poignant; a script that pokes fun at the Yanks, the Brits, the Soviets, & all of our cultures simultaneously. It's a travesty that it's never surfaced on video or DVD, & that it got a mere passing mention in the recent "Masterpiece Theatre" anniversary book. "Sleepers" is one of the finest, & unfortunately most overlooked, installments of the "Masterpiece Theatre" series.

Now if you'll excuse me, Episodes 3 & 4 are cued up in the VCR & awaiting my return to the sofa....

This has everything: comedy, suspense, brilliant acting, and first-rate direction. Why on earth isn't it on video? It's a ten. Notice especially the casting. Marvelous. Nothing this good has appeared since on the tube!

This mini series is endlessly entertaining, whether you're a student of the Cold War, an Anglophile, or an espionage buff. It captures brilliantly the guarded peace developing among the world's remaining superpowers in the last days of the Soviet Union, and it makes you howl with laughter in the process.

Havers and Clarke (who was also a dialogue coach on the project) play Soviet agents sent underground as sleepers to the UK in the Mod '60s by enigmatic KGB guru Gough. Now it's the 1980s, glasnost has begun the Soviet thaw, Gough is shut up in a mental hospital, and Havers and Clarke have become very British indeed--the former a successful investment banker, and the latter a union boss in northern England (married and with children, no less). The sleeper project is discovered in Moscow, and the two agents are contacted, much to their dismay (as Havers observes, why should he give up his posh and comfortable life "for a bowl of red cabbage and a bed-sit in Vladivostok?"). Hilarity ensues, as an uptight KGB agent (a woman who makes Ninotchka come off like Pollyanna) is dispatched to bring the wayward sleepers home. Add in a KGB contact who looks just like Gorbachev (though named Chekhov--"No relation"), classic odd-couple pairings, a suspicious mother-in-law, and Britain's World Cup star Bobby Charlton, and you've got something worth watching, my friend.

Every couple of years or so, I send off a message to the BBC, recommending this title for VHS or DVD release, and I always get a kind note thanking me for my interest. So far, no result. I can't even begin to imagine why. Should this surface again on television, run for your VCRs and DVRs!

A clever concept about people left behind - except that they aren't: they have left behind their past, and when they are called upon to act roles ordained in the past, they simply won't. A witty and human subversion of the Ian Fleming/John Le Carre spy story, a tale of what goes right and what goes wrong, of cultural clashes, class warfare (remember that?), identity, politics, greed and happiness. The cultural artefact (I can't spoil it) that sends the storyline spinning into a new orbit is chosen with wit and imagination. Nigel Havers has rarely been so funny although Warren Clarke has always been capable of dominating the screen in comedy like a working-class Jack Nicholson. A mini like no other - because it never flags in pace, intensity, observation or commentary.

"Sleepers" is the story of two KGB moles sent to Britain in the mid-60s for the purpose of establishing legends. After twenty-five years the KGB has forgotten all about these guys, but that is soon to change. The KGB accidentally stumbles across their identities in a database and starts researching who they are and why the were sent to England. The KGB now wants to find them and bring them back. Only problem is these two guys have essentially crossed cultural lines and become more British than Russian and, needless to say, do not want to return to the Soviet Union. This story is both funny and somewhat melancholy. Superb performances by all the cast. A great story that puts a rather novel spin on the spy genre. You won't be disappointed.