"It was not the case that I gave Patrick Lau or anyone else a free hand with the TV adaptation. Casting issues were, as Deighton advised the Deighton Dossier, behind much of his decision: The reason is Len Deighton bought all the rights to the series to prevent re-transmission. It has always disappointed fans that this show, though transmitted, has never been re-transmitted or released on DVD. The company was not allowed to film in East Berlin itself, so different sets in Manchester and Bolton, England, doubled convincingly as Eastern bloc settings - not a great endorsement of these two towns at the time! Granada TV was interestingly the first company allowed to stage dramatic action in and around Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin and the Oberbaumbrücke, although a studio set of the checkpoint - which used to be in situ next to the Coronation Street set on the Granada lot - was built. The £8 million budget allowed for significant location filming in Mexico and West Berlin. That required a lot of the pre-Christmas TV audience on ITV (not, one would have thought, its natural station) and clearly many did not last the pace. In covering all three books, it ended up at nearly fifteen hours of broadcast programming. Nonetheless the adaptation is faithful to the books on the whole but therein lies a weakness. Of particular note is the extent to which the directors play up the close relationship between Bernard Samson and Werner Volkmann - how they both look out for each other against enemies on both sides of the Wall - and the lengths to which Bernard will go to wind up and annoy his boss Dicky Cruyer, who despite being portrayed as a bit of a twit is shown to be clearly the master of the dark arts of office politics which Deighton portrays him as in the books. For example, the mission to Poland in 1978 to rescue Yuri Rostov, which was the reason Samson was desk-bound, is a story which is referred to in the book through narrative flashbacks but which is shown in full in episode one. The creation of thirteen cohesive and self-contained episodes did require significants parts of the dialogue in the original books to be trimmed or cut and new material added in where it was required to give Samson some instant background characteristics. It was received well critically - Ian Holm, playing Bernard Samson, went on to receive a BAFTA nomination for best actor (and the series also received a nomination for best film editing) - and was promoted heavily by Granada TV and ITV as one of their hit autumn series for 1988. It also employed a good range of quality British and German actors, so the omens appeared to be right that it would be a hit. This series was, at the time, the highest-priced TV mini-series on British TV with a budget of £8 million, much of it spent on location filming. Let's hope it's not going to be left on the shelf.Īs a result, this original series is your only chance to see Bernard Samson on the small screen … for now. Twenty-seven years later, a new TV adaptation of all three trilogies in the series has been optioned by Clerkenwell films, although no information on the progress beyond pre-production development has yet been made available in the three years since the options were purchased. As a result, Deighton declined to license further broadcasts or DVD distributions, instead buying up the rights. However, the ITV adaptation - with Ian Holm as Bernard Samson - failed to match Deighton's expectations and the producers, evidently, had their own vision for how things would proceed. It was replete with an all-star cast of top British actors and received well - mostly - by critics. The series was presented as Game, Set and Match. In 1988 Granada TV broadcast a 13-part TV adaptation - in prime time - of the first three novels in Deighton's Samson series: Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match.
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