Charlotte Rampling’s Sally Gilmartin keeps pigeons in a 1976 Oxfordshire cottage and tells strangers nothing. When her daughter Ruth, played by Michelle Dockery, is followed home from the Bodleian, Sally hands her a sheaf of papers: the story of Hayley Atwell’s Eva Delectorskaya, a Russian émigrée recruited by Rufus Sewell’s suave spymaster Lucas Romer in 1939. Two nights on BBC One follow Eva from her first assassination in Belgium through a forged-map sting in New York to the betrayal that sends her underground. William Boyd adapts his own novel, trusting the viewer to keep pace as identities shift and codenames multiply.
The present-day frame is pure 1970s paranoia: typewriters, beige Cortinas, a listening device hidden in a teapot. Edward Hall shoots the wartime sections like sepia newsreel blown up to CinemaScope, all smoke-wool tailoring and blackout torches. Lorne Balfe’s score underlines the deceit with a single, looping harp motif that never resolves. The older cast watch their younger selves on screen, literally, as Gambon’s retired lord screens 8 mm proof of treachery in a Mayfair snug.
Endor Productions filmed across Berkshire, turning Bearwood House into the gentlemen’s club where Romer signs death warrants over brandy. The two-parter aired 27–28 December 2012 and picked up 5.7 million viewers for the first instalment, then vanished into iPlayer archives. No second series was commissioned; Boyd had said everything he needed in the final close-up of Rampling’s eyes as she closes her own dossier.
Production Details
BBC One / 1 Season / 2 Episodes / 2012
Created by: William Boyd
Showrunner(s): William Boyd, Christian Vesper, Matthew Read
Writer(s): William Boyd
Producer(s): Paul Frift, Hilary Bevan Jones
Cinematography: David Higgs
Music: Lorne Balfe
Main Cast
Hayley Atwell as Eva Delectorskaya
Rufus Sewell as Lucas Romer
Michelle Dockery as Ruth Gilmartin
Michael Gambon as Baron Mansfield / Lucas Romer
Charlotte Rampling as Sally Gilmartin / Eva Delectorskaya
Alexander Fehling as Karl-Heinz
James Norton as Kolia
Adrian Scarborough as Morris Devereux
Bertie Carvel as Mason Harding
Tom Brooke as Angus Woolf
Anthony Calf as Gerald Laird
Julian Firth as Club Servant
