Sleepers

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!