I recently had the pleasure of speaking with playwright David Eldridge about his adaptation of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. We also had a chance to discuss his newly announce ITV series Betrayal. David was kind enough to give us a sneak peek of what to expect from the show.

This conversation has been lightly edited.

Spy Write: Your latest project was just announced, the ITV show Betrayal.

You’re back working with Endeavor‘s Shaun Evans. He was in The Scandalous Lady W that you wrote but this is in the espionage world based around an MI5 agent. What can you tell us about that?

David Eldridge: Yeah, it’s been really fun. I mean, again, like The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, it’s been something that we’ve been working on for a really long time. I started it a bit after Spy Came in from the Cold.

The TV company first approached me in 2019 about it, and I suppose the thing that it’s really interesting in, it has a very different theme to Spy who came in from the Cold. I think really what Betrayal is about, is about how we value experience in a way.

In my TV show Betrayal, there’s an MI5 guy who joined the intelligence service as a graduate, not long after 9/11. You’ve got the war on terror at its height. You’re in a culture in which, in some ways, is a bit like the Wild West, because all sorts of things are being overlooked, because people are so worried about the terrorist threats from Al Qaeda and Islamic extremism. You have these awful black sites in different bits of the world.

Also domestically, there’s all sorts of shortcuts that are being made. I suppose my drama is about when an intelligence officer who has joined the service in that sort of environment, been a great success, foiled really dangerous terrorist plots. Then they suddenly find themselves in 2024, 2025, where the threats are different and also that cultures in workplaces have changed a lot. Not least post #MeToo, which you see across the English speaking world in America and in the UK and in Western Europe. The idea of proper and appropriate behavior at work. So we were kind of really interested in, if you’ve got an intelligence officer who is really great at what he does and who should be on the basis of all of his experience and instincts, really valued by that organization but finds that the organization has really changed culturally. That maybe some people are more concerned that he doesn’t have his pronouns on the bottom of his email because he doesn’t think that’s important. Not because he’s some horrible reactionary. It’s just that he doesn’t think that that’s important compared to some of the other stuff.

Whereas for lots of people in his work culture it’s really important now how we treat each other and that there are proper processes for operations. That operations, there’s a budget for them, they’re risk assessed, and that someone upstairs signs them off. When our guy just wants to go out and get the bad guys and stop the plot.

It’s been heaps of fun to write. As I say, very different from Spy Who Came in from the Cold, but lots of fun. 14 year old me is very happy at the moment. The idea that I would, all these years later, be writing a TV show with spies and threats from Iran and China; really, really fun.

Probably as much as I can say there, really.

SW: Well, that’s great. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing that. Hopefully Shaun Evans will have that nice long flowing hair he had in The Scandalous Lady W for this one as well. Bring that back.

DE: Might be, might be. Yeah, it’s been fun and really interesting to write with a particular actor in mind as well. It’s really interesting.

I think it does change things a bit when you know he’s going to do it. If you know the actor a bit, you can have a feeling about how you might stretch the actor a bit in the part to maybe get some really interesting work out of them in some way.

SW: Well, he played a dastardly villain in your last work with him. So it’ll be interesting to see where you take him this time.

DE: Yeah, not quite such a villain for sure. Much more the hero of the hour, I’m thinking.

Listen to the entire interview here.