Post-TGC Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy AU where presumed-dead!Merlin is living a quiet life in a caravan and has a job as a teacher and some of the children tease him about his prosthetics but Merlin doesn’t take any of their shit.
There’s one boy who comes to chat whose name is Harry and Merlin says “I’ve known some Harry’s in my time. They’ve all been good ‘uns.”
Then Champ finds Merlin and tells him Harry Hart’s gone rogue and if you’ve seen TTSS then you know how this ends.
"All the Secrets and No One to Tell."
A soundtrack-mix for Jim Prideaux of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Listen (YT)
Lyrics/excerpts:
“They were at Oxford together before the war.”
“And stablemates in the Circus during and after. The famous Haydon-Prideaux partnership.”
1. Charade - Matt Monro
Oh what a hit we made
We came on next to closing
Best on the bill, lovers until
Love left the masquerade
Fate seemed to pull the strings
I turned and you were gone
While from the darkened wings
That music box played on
“'Drop out,’ he said. ‘You’re a lucky man, Jim,’ he kept saying. ‘You’ve been ordered to become a lotus-eater.’ I could forget it. Right? Forget it. Just behave as if it had never happened.” He was shouting. “And that’s what I’ve been doing: obeying orders and forgetting!”
2. Eminence Front – The Who
That big wheel spins, the hair thins
People forget
Forget they're hiding
The news slows
People forget
Their shares crash, hopes are dashed
People forget
Forget they're hiding
Sometimes he thought of the wound as a memory he couldn’t keep down. He tried his damnedest to patch it over and forget but even his damnedest wasn’t always enough.
3. The Story of a Hero – Dmitri Kabalevsky
He also imagined that, like himself, Jim had had a great attachment that had failed him, and which he longed to replace. But here Bill Roach’s speculation met a dead end: he had no idea how adults loved each other.
4. Loneliness – Sergei Rachmaninov
And hearing Tom Tower strike the evening six he found himself thinking of Bill Haydon and Jim Prideaux, who must have arrived here the year that Smiley went down and were gathered up by the war; and he wondered idly how they must have looked together then, Bill the painter, polemicist, and socialite; Jim the athlete, hanging on his words. In their heyday together in the Circus, he reflected, that distinction had all but evened out… Only at the end, the old polarity asserted itself…
5. High Hopes – Pink Floyd
Encumbered forever by desire and ambition
There's a hunger still unsatisfied
Our weary eyes still stray to the horizon
Though down this road we've been so many times
The grass was greener
The light was brighter
The taste was sweeter
The nights of wonder
With friends surrounded
“And did you take to it, Jim, to Control’s theory? How did the idea strike you, overall?”
“Damn silly. Poppycock.”
“Why?”
“Just damn silly,” he repeated in a tone of military stubbornness. “Think of any one of you – mole – mad!”
6. Love Is Blindness – Morten Schantz Trio
Not for the first time, Smiley had the distinct sense of stumbling not on Jim’s ignorance but on the relic of a willed determination not to remember. In the dark, Jim Prideaux’s breathing became suddenly deep and greedy. He had lifted his hands to the top of the wheel and was resting his chin on them, peering blankly at the frosted windscreen.
7. Found Song For P. – Max Richter
When finally the big session started – the one he remembered as the marathon – he had the disadvantage of feeling half defeated when he went in.
“Matter of health, much as anything,” he explained, very tense now.
“We could take a break if you want,” said Smiley, but where Jim was there were no breaks, and what he wanted was irrelevant.
8. Novelette – Dmitri Kabalevsky
“And no word from Bill?” he went on. “Not even a postcard.”
“Bill was abroad,” said Jim shortly.
9. Why – Pyotr Tchaikovsky
Why is the sun cold and dull in the sky, as if it were winter?
Why – tell me quickly – did you forget me?
Only once, when Guillam forgot Smiley and out of instinct turned upon his own tracks, did he have a suspicion of a third figure walking with them: a fanged shadow thrown against the broadloom brickwork of an empty street, but when he started forward it was gone.
10. Circles from the Rue Simon-Crubellier – Max Richter
Then for a moment, one part of Smiley broke into open revolt against the other. The wave of angry doubt that had swept over him in Lacon’s garden, and that ever since had pulled against his progress like a worrying tide, drove him now onto the rocks of despair, and then to mutiny: I refuse.
11. Brain Damage / Eclipse – Pink Floyd
And all that you love, and all that you hate
All you distrust, all you save
And all that you give and all that you deal
And all that you buy, beg, borrow, or steal
And all you create, and all you destroy
And all that is now, and all that is gone
And all that's to come
And everything under the sun is in tune
But the sun is eclipsed by the moon
“Well, damn it, I got him back,” Haydon snapped.
“Yes, that was good of you. Tell me, did Jim come to see you before he left on that Testify mission?”
“Yes, he did, as a matter of fact.”
…He came to warn you, Smiley thought; because he loved you… Jim was watching your back for you right till the end.
12. Comrades – Clint Mansell
Smiley shrugged it all aside, distrustful as ever of the standard shapes of human motive, and settled instead for a picture of one of those wooden Russian dolls that open up, revealing one person inside the other, and another inside him. Of all men living, only Karla had seen the last little doll inside Bill Haydon.
13. Exile - Killing Joke
Outside the boundaries where all the streets are empty
In such a lonely moment we reach the same conclusion
Chants of cathedral choirs, stations of iron cogs grind
Primeval screams we heard, release cannot be found
We that have tasted such beauties of corruption
Triumphal arches raised designed to fall again
My kingdom and place of exile
…in the open night under a clear sky, lit by several hand torches and stared at by several white-faced inmates of the Nursery, sat Bill Haydon on a garden bench facing the moonlit cricket field. He was wearing striped pyjamas under his overcoat; they looked more like prison clothes. His eyes were open and his head was propped unnaturally to one side, like the head of a bird when its neck has been expertly broken.
14. Like Two Strangers – Trentemøller
For the rest of that term, Jim Prideaux behaved in the eyes of Bill Roach much as his mother had behaved when his father went away… Worst of all was his staring, empty look when Roach caught him unawares, and the way he forgot things in class, even the red marks for merit: Roach had to remind him to hand them in each week.
15. Love Is Blindness – U2
Love is clockworks, and cold steel
Fingers too numb to feel
Squeeze the handle, blow out the candle
Love is blindness, I don’t want to see
Won’t you wrap the night around me?
Love is drowning in a deep well
All the secrets and no one to tell
With time, Jim seemed to respond to treatment, however. His eye grew clearer and he became alert again, as the shadow of his mother’s death withdrew. By the end of the play, he was more light-hearted than Roach had ever known him.
16. Time – Hans Zimmer
“But Jim acts from instinct… he is functional… He’s my other half; between us we’d make one marvellous man, except that neither of us can sing.”
17. You Always Hurt the One You Love – Connie Francis
You always hurt the one you love
The one you shouldn't hurt at all
You always take the sweetest rose
And crush it till the petals fall
You always break the kindest heart
With a hasty word you can't recall
So if I broke your heart last night
It's because I love you most of all
It’s impossible to see Jim’s actions as driven by ideology or duty. We know, as Jim kills the man we assume was once his lover, that he experiences Bill’s betrayal not to Queen and country, but as a betrayal of the heart.
- Joanna Di Mattia, Senses of Cinema
COLIN FIRTH and MARK STRONG as BILL HAYDON and JIM PRIDEAUX in
TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY (2011) dir. Tomas Alfredson
