Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

ITV have commissioned a TV version of The Ipcress File, Len Deighton’s spy thriller filmed starring Michael Caine as the unnamed narrator of the book, called Harry Palmer for the movie.

According to Deadline, John Hodge is penning the script with Joe Cole, Lucy Boynton and Tom Hollander in the cast. According to Hodge, “This is a wonderful opportunity to inhabit a time when the post-war world was morphing into the way we live now, when social mobility, civil rights, and modern feminism were forcing their way into public consciousness, and all of it happening with the world divided in two and both halves threatening to blow the whole thing sky high.”

In the TV version,  Harry Palmer is a working-class British sergeant in Berlin as the Cold War rages in the 1960s. He is a sharp and savvy operator, with varied side-hustles that ultimately land him trouble with the law for crimes that could mean an eight-year stretch in a grim English military jail. But spotting Palmer’s potential, and his network in Berlin, an intelligence officer offers him a way to avoid prison by becoming a spy. His first case is The Ipcress File — a dangerous undercover mission on which Palmer must use his links to a man suspected of kidnapping a missing British nuclear scientist.