The Night Manager

Mm, so sleek. Le Carre has been made all Ian Fleming and Cubby Broccoli - no more the real phlegm and soggy broccoli of the school dinner atmosphere of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. There are diamonds, martinis, fast cars, expensive watches, and an opening titles sequence straight out of Shirley Bassey. In fact, I think Tom Hiddleston is probably using this as his casting reel to be the next 007, once he gets a little craggier. He's certainly got the charm for it. Although his charm had well and truly tipped over into psychopath territory by the middle of the second episode.

The Night Manager's M is a very pregnant Olivia Colman as Angela Burr, with an unidentifiable northern accent and no budget for central heating. (Here, in the cold, there is real phlegm.) I am not sure who she is working for. She seems to be half of a two-person team who occasionally have meetings at MI6 in Vauxhall or the Foreign Office in Whitehall, but otherwise are rogue roamers. Mrs Burr can fly to Zermatt in an instant, despite being in her third trimester, and is able to eavesdrop on conversations from Cairo to Mallorca.

There is no Q. Hiddleston, as Jonathan Pine, has to raid dustbins to retrieve Sim cards, and break into his own safe. But Pine's army training means he's a dab hand at breaking a man's arm, ejecting someone from a snooker room, or tying an electrical extension lead round their neck. But he'll also pour your champagne perfectly, seduce you Bond-style in a flash, relocate you to the back of rural beyond, and never seems to sleep.

The baddie is Hugh Laurie, who is charming too, but with a dash of snake poison just below the surface. He is Richard Roper, a wealthy philanthropist giving speeches in front of a Unicef flag while dealing arms to the evil warlords behind it. He is calm, affable, terribly reasonable - but the terrifying is unmistakably there. It will surface, and soon. For now, Pine is lying in Roper's Mallorcan villa with two black eyes and a broken nose. He is a mystery to them. Is he mussel man or muscle man? We're not sure how they are going to find out. They've done the Google side of things, unearthing his CV and Burr's false trail of identity for him. But they aren't yet convinced. I suspect there may be a waterboard in the wardrobe.

Tom Hollander, Roper's sidekick Corcoran, is more openly threatening. But even he is jolly nice about it. Affable Rev, laced with strychnine. "I will hood you and hang you up by those lovely ankles until the truth falls out of you by gravity. Toodleoo."

Maadi, Cairo

What a difference between the luxurious hotels where the Night Manager works and the places we have stayed. It must be because we aren't multi-billionaires or illegal arms dealers and don't tend to arrive places by luxury yacht or helicopter. Our abode in Maadi, Cairo wasn't grotty so much as basic. A skyscraper hotel of brown glass, with an empty swimming pool on the roof and slightly creaky plumbing. But it did have a view of the Pyramids, glimpsed across the Nile behind the minarets of the mosque next door. Loudspeakers perched on the minarets woke us daily at four with the morning call to prayer.

Empty rooftop pool

View of the Pyramids and River Nile

Or you could say that the Pyramids had a view of our hotel

Cairo seemed even busier and crazier than the chaotic Cairo in the midst of the Arab Spring depicted in The Night Manager. We didn't dare cross a road in our attempt to find somewhere for dinner. The traffic was lethal. We ate pizza in a restaurant down the street, surrounded by potted palms and men smoking hookah pipes.

More The Night Manager's style

And then the action moves to Switzerland. Not being a skier, the only time I have been to Zermatt, I was 15 and staying in a Eurocamp tent with my family somewhere near Susten. The train from Visp was more rickety than the streamlined red SBB models ridden by Pine, and for some reason I have in my head that it was powered by steam. Once there, the shops were full of tat, and my mum got locked in a public loo while my brother made up a jingle for Peugeot cars. Which he pronounced Pee-go. But I do remember the beautiful Matterhorn; a wisp of cloud clutching at its pinnacle that would never quite leave.

Zermatt tourist tat

My family munching at the Matterhorn

80s glamping in Susten

Only in Devon has our holiday accommodation looked similar. My parents had quite the knack for finding dodgy cottage rentals. No TripAdvisor then, you see. Farmhouses with bad carpets, stubborn chickens in the garden refusing to lay eggs, and Alan Wells winning the 100 metre gold at the Moscow Olympics on a fuzzy black and white television screen. Here it was my brother's turn to get locked in the toilet.

Rev.

It's impossible not to find Rev. utterly brilliant. It manages to be realistic, farcical, serious and incredibly funny all at the same time. Despite being primarily a comedy series, it highlights very real issues affecting the church today, such as dwindling congregations, gay marriage, financial problems, the promotion of women, the role of church schools, and trying to cohabit East End city life with other religions. The lead characters are funny because they are people with genuine human frailties rather than raucous comedy stereotypes, so they are completely believable. Tom Hollander and Olivia Colman are perfectly cast, showing how it is that an atheist and a devout Christian fell in love with one another and make their marriage work, come what may. They find looking after their new baby as exhausting and emotionally overwhelming as the rest of us. As for the scary characters, and by this I mean the bishops and archdeacons (rather than the homeless people with mental health and substance abuse issues who are forever ringing the doorbell at the vicarage), they are subtle with their menace, yet truly terrifying. Plus it’s nice to see Miles Jupp, as the intolerant lay reader, do something other than panel shows and playing Archie the Inventor in Balamory. 

The church playing the part of St Saviour By The Marshes looks like so many I have wandered past in London over the years – in Kennington, Shoreditch, Camden and Waterloo. It’s that Wren style of narrow tower and steeple over a Greek style portico, with sides built of brown brick. (Look at me, trying to pretend I know something about architecture.) The only one of these churches I have been inside, St John The Evangelist opposite Waterloo station near the IMAX cinema, was when I sang Mozart’s Requiem and Bach's St John Passion in concerts with Morley College Choir. Our choirmaster wore biker leathers and had a pathological hatred of John Eliot Gardiner. One particularly doddery bass (known uncharitably to everyone as Old Man) came with a minder and insisted on singing a third of an octave below the rest of his section. Halfway through the Bach concert, he stood up to take a photo of the audience, with a camera that was about as subtle as the one Martin Crane uses at Freddie’s bar mitzvah in Frasier. Old Man had dressed up, and was sporting several medals on his jacket lapel - medals which were not for armed services bravery in a bygone war, but rather for being a blood donor. The concert was a disaster, and the beer afterwards left me slightly hysterical.

I was a member of a London church congregation for approximately one month, the month when my future husband and I had to get our wedding banns read out in our Crouch End parish. The parish boundaries were rather strange, so instead of going to the rather grand looking church on Tottenham Lane that we could see from our flat, we had to walk up the hill behind us and down towards Finsbury Park, to a building that didn’t look much more permanent than a Portakabin and contained such a heady odour of incense mixed with fustiness and decay that it knocked you sideways. It was a thoroughly depressing place. The congregation was about 60% Afro-Caribbean, but with none of the colour and gospel exuberance you could hear ringing out from other local churches on Sundays. The other 40% of the congregation were couples wanting their wedding banns read out. The priest didn’t seem to like any of us. We did the legal necessities, stayed for a cup of tea and a stale bun, and never went back.

My husband says I should also write about a New Year’s Eve we once spent in the company of three gay vicars on a rooftop in Knaresborough. But given the difficulties faced by Rev Adam Smallbone when wishing to conduct a gay marriage of two close friends, until the church demonstrates a more universally enlightened attitude, I will keep quiet for now.