The Night Manager: How To Make Great British Drama (Simon Cornwell)

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau. Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:50Hello and welcome to our second episode of the week about the world of culture and entertainment. After Thursday's episode about the music industry, we're going to turn our attention to television because the spy thriller The Night Manager has been the BBC's big play for audiences at the start of 2026. It comes a decade after Series 1, which, as you may remember, was based on John le Carre's 1993 novel, the first that he wrote after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it followed the hotelier-turned-spy Jonathan Pine, played rather brilliantly by Tom Hiddleston, as he went undercover to bring down arms dealer Richard Roper, played by Hugh Laurie.

1:30That adaptation became event television, pulling in 10 million viewers and selling to 180 countries. But there was a small problem. There wasn't actually a sequel. In other words, there wasn't another book which John le Carré had written. So for series two, the screenwriter, who was David Farr, who also wrote Spooks, McMafia, works at the Royal Shakespeare Company, really brilliant human being, he created a world based on the same characters. But the question is, how do you stay true to Le Carre whilst also creating something new? And what about the morality of how you approach Le Carre's work when Le Carre is not around to give you the thumbs up?

2:09Well, it helps if you've got his family on board and they are very on board because I've been talking to Le Carre's son, Simon Cornwall. And Simon is also the executive producer of The Night Manager. and I was talking to him about the enduring influence of his extraordinary father's work, about the deep underlying trends that are reshaping television, not just here in the UK but around the world, and indeed about the future of British television in a world of crazy competition and being squeezed by the streamers.

2:43Simon Cornwall, welcome to Radical. How are you? Very well, thank you. Very nice to meet you, Amal. It's very, very nice to meet you. I'm not going to indulge my nostalgic feelings on seeing you about the fact that I used to know your uncle, Rupert Cornwall, one of the great journalists of our times who worked at The Independent. But maybe we'll come back to that because we should start with the rather successful television show that you're responsible for. I mean, let's start with the softball questions. I mean, it's nice, isn't it? You work on a project for a very long time and broadly speaking, well, you know, there's no room for complacency.

3:16it must give you tremendous satisfaction that the night manager has done as well in terms of numbers, but also in terms of critical reception and just that it's as good a show as you might have hoped. Well, thank you. Yes. I mean, it took us an awful long time to bring it back. And, you know, one of the one of the main reasons for that was we made a solemn promise to ourselves collectively. I mean, the cast and all of the team behind the camera. And the family, presumably. And the family, that we wouldn't do it unless we felt we had at least a fighting chance of making something that was comparable to the first season.

3:51And, you know, it is very, as you say, it's nice to see both the critical reception and the numbers tracking very well at the moment. I mean, it's lovely. Can I ask you about that? Your father, the great, I was going to say post-war novelist. I don't know how to... How did your father, John le Carre, David Cornwall, think of himself? Did he think of himself as a Cold War novelist, a spy novelist? I think he very much didn't. I mean, in fact, one of the things that drove him nuts was to be pigeonholed as somebody who wrote about the Cold War when actually more than half of his career was after the Cold War, or more than half of his writing career was after the Cold War.

4:33It's just that George Smiley was quite a cool character. Yes, absolutely. But I think, you know, one of the things you have to remember even about the Cold War novels is those are not historical novels. I mean, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold was written by an angry 32-year-old man reacting to the present. And it was about, you know, young men and women in the present in situations of incredible jeopardy with the fate of the world in their hands. And, you know, that was very real and very tangible and very current in those days. When your father was alive, did you have discussions with him about continuing his work?

5:15There was a wonderful cameo that he had in a series run. Did you have conversations with him about what might happen, about the eventuality that there might be a series to even if he wasn't around to see it? Yes. I mean, I think in the specifics of the night manager, we actually spent quite a lot of time with him batting back and forth story ideas and so on. So that was was very much on the cards. I mean, alas, it didn't happen in his lifetime, but was something that he was aware of, planned, talked about. And I mean, he almost was the person who floated the idea because, you know, in the bubbly time after the first series was aired, you know, he was very much on board with the notion of a second series of The Night Manager.

6:01I think generally he was incredibly, I mean, as in so many areas, he had a lot of foresight about how his body of work should be managed. And, you know, when I think when a lot of authors die, particularly well-regarded authors, they, you know, they leave complicated messages about thou shalt not do this and thou shalt keep it in period and thou shouldn't change anything. and my dad kind of said the opposite. He said, you know, you know what I'm about. You know what my work stands for.

6:37And you are the people who have to take it forwards. Do what you think is right. Do what you think is right. Do you think, I mean, that's interesting. He was your dad. But don't you think that's quite a remarkable thing for an author to say? You know, it's a bit like, it's not like a management consultant who goes into a business and says, I think you should trim some costs here, and then you end up trimming different costs. You know, an author's business, his or her life, is their words, their story. And I think it's quite a remarkable thing. I know, obviously, you're his son, and this is a family project in many ways.

7:07But don't you think it was a remarkable act of sort of generosity or maybe sort of selflessness or an absence of self-centeredness to say, sure, if you want to do a second series and continue my themes, go for it? Yes, I think it was an extraordinary act of generosity. I think in some ways it's also an act of confidence. He, you know, trust. Nothing, well, also that nothing that we will do will ever change the words he wrote on the page. So those will always be there. And yes, but beyond that absolutely was trust. It was an invitation. And he loved the process of film and television. He loved the notion that his work, you know, the book that he had finished was the starting point for somebody else's creative journey.

7:57And, you know, he loved... I mean, writing is a very solitary thing. And suddenly you come into the world of film and television and it's the ultimate team game. And so he adored it. Who chose David Farr? Because series one and series two, written by this brilliant, brilliant, brilliant screenwriter called David Farr, he's written lots of plays, Plays as well as adaptations screen things like Spooks and McMafia. I mean, that's a hell of a task. David Farr obviously does it brilliantly. Who chose him? Well, I guess I chose him ultimately or he chose us. I mean, one or the other. I'd actually been talking to David Farr probably almost 15 years ago now about adapting another Le Carré novel that in the end he didn't do.

8:49but I got to know him a little bit then and David, I mean, David is an incredible writer. He also directs at the Royal Shakespeare Company which is very helpful for when you're writing and he's also a massive Le Carre fan and knows the work inside out. And that has to be very important to you, a feeling of attachment and sort of intimate knowledge of a kind of creative universe. I think it was very important at an emotional level that he was clearly approaching this from a starting point of love, if you like. But I think it's also very important at a technical level in that when he came to shape new characters or find new context for things, he didn't even really have to think about it.

9:36Of course, he thought about it a lot. But his instincts are absolutely aligned with the world that my father created. It must be, it's not bittersweet, There must be an element of sadness that your father's not around to see this. There must be an element of sort of you must ask yourself, as anyone who's lost a dad would, what would he have made of this? Every day. I mean, you know, of course, all the time. And, you know, I'm sure there's a very real way in which I mean, we all, you know, all in all of us in the family, all of all of his kids, one way or another, are involved with taking his his work and his reputation forwards.

10:15and I don't think there's a day goes by when any of us, all of us, don't think and frequently even talk about, you know, what would Dad have thought about this? Inevitably, that also comes with the sense that you can now stand on your own two feet and find your own path in life. Not that we weren't finding our path in life before then, But, you know, I think parental relationships are complicated. And, you know, one of the exciting things here is, you know, to take things forwards in a way that's consistent, I hope, with what he thought about and cared about. But at the same time, in a way where we're liberated to take our own path.

11:06And so it is when you get into the psychology of it, it's quite complicated. I want to get into both the psychology and the practicality of it. If I may, just before we do that, just for the hundreds of millions of people who know the name John Le Carre, which was a pen name, his real name was David Cornwall, your father, that pen name puts a sort of distance between the man and the creative universe. What was David Cornwall like? Just tell us about your father. What was he like as a father, like as a man? Well, I think as a father, I mean, he cared terribly about being a good father. He had a terrible father, and so terrible, actually, that his mother left in the middle of the night when he was five years old, and he was brought up by his stepmother, by Rupert's mum.

11:58And so he had the most fractured childhood, and his father was in and out of jail, in and out of bankruptcy, and I think he made a vow to himself that he would never inflict that kind of thing on his children. You know, having said that, it's fascinating to me that he kept himself so separate or the perception of himself so separate from the man because actually he was inseparable from his writing. I mean, his writing was his being ultimately And, you know, I think he cared deeply about his family. And the only thing he cared about more was his writing, which actually was why it was so lovely, particularly towards the end of his life, to be working with him on adaptation of his writing, because that sort of brought everything close together.

12:55Why did David Cornwall invent John le Carre? I think the narrow reason at the time was that he was working for MI6, as we now know. And so he wasn't allowed to publish under his own name. And, you know, the story he always told was that his publisher told him to find a fine Anglo-Saxon name. And this was the answer.

13:28and I'm you know I'm sure the the squareness of it was a was a joke for himself as well when you um think about the um talk a bit about the psychology the morality of keeping as it were your father's uh creative universe going even in his absence what did you want to continue from the night manager series one and what did you think about actually we want to slightly change I mean, it's been a series one, very much still available on the iPlayer, came out in 2016, a tumultuous year, some might say, in modern history. Brexit, Trump, populism surging all around the world. Ten years on, quite a lot has happened.

14:05How did you want to kind of, as it were, update it? And how did you want it to stay the same? Well, I think the key thing, the key decision that we and David Farr made early on was to accept the fact that we are 10 years on in the process and not to write a second series that pretended it was happening the year after the first series. Why did you make that decision? It's so interesting. Well, I think for all the reasons you've highlighted, that the world had moved on. The world is an even more complicated, grittier, more unpleasant place. Volatile. Volatile is exactly the right word. And actually our actors had grown up too.

14:57I think there's a lovely maturity in performance that comes with age. Tom Hiddleston had become a parent in the intervening years, hadn't he? He's very much become a parent. And he's not exactly old. But at the same time, he's become quite an extraordinary actor, actually, in the last 10 years, built on what was already a very strong foundation. And, yeah, so he brings great sort of depth and maturity to it. And so that sort of opened up the world for us a bit. How does the conversation in this kind of, and we'll talk about the business television in a moment, but how does the conversation go?

15:49You come in to say to David Farr, look, we want to do this. We always talk about doing season two. We want to do it. Dad's not around. Who comes up with the story? Well, David Farr very much came up with the story. I mean, you know, he actually during the pandemic, he cycled over to my house one day. And at the time, we could only sit at opposite ends of the garden table and talk to each other. And he basically said, I finally had an idea. And we began talking back and forth and round and round. And that grew into the idea that we are now seeing play out on our screen. So, yeah, the ideas very much came from him.

16:39You know, he borrows pieces. You know, if you're a sort of geeky student of my dad's work, you'll spot little things in the night manager that are borrowed from other places. Tell us, tell us, come on, come on. Can you give us a couple of just little hints of other things from the Le Carre universe that have been carried across? I think there are, I mean, there are things from, even from the, from the smiley sequence. There are little pieces of Tinker Tailor which work their way into the night manager. You know, the, I think the evolution in my dad's, and this was an evolution that took place very much in his, in my dad's work, is that the enemy in the Cold War novels is the Russians, it's the communists.

17:31By the time we roll into the present, the enemy is very much within. The enemy is often ourselves. It's the government that we work for, not the ones that we're going up against. But the mechanics that he deployed, that David Farr deployed, and indeed often that my dad deployed were the same mechanics as when the enemy was external. Because The Night Manager was the first novel published post-Cold War, wasn't it, of your father's, 1993. That's right. Did he write it, do you know, in that euphoria post the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was 89? Did he write it in a kind of... Did he want it, did he set it out to be about the world after the Cold War or not particularly...

18:13Was that not really front of mind? No, I think, I mean, for him, the thing that... Sorry, the thing that triggered the night manager was actually the story of Colonel Oliver North and the Iran-Contra affair. And I think the sense that the wall had come down, but there was still corruption, duplicity to be found actually in almost in worse places. and so I think you know that that that seeded the ground for a lot of his future work and then the notion that you know the privatization of intelligence that corporate power is replacing government power those were all themes that I think began to develop in in the night manager and there's a sense in which the lens turns on ourselves you know that's what sort of at least a series one Olivia Colman's character is about.

19:13What is the night manager really about? It's about the morality of the state, isn't it? It's partly about the kind of the nature of how we kind of give great power to the state over ourselves. It's kind of Hobbesian, this kind of idea of the Leviathan, which has this enormous power over us. And it's about the sort of the application of that power to seemingly external threats. For instance, a chap called Richard Roper. What's the night manager's, What are the underlying themes in your view? I think that's the canvas in which we play out. I think, if you like, the character, the archetype that became more and more important to my dad as his life progressed and was maybe articulated for the first time in The Night Manager, although actually you can trace it back into his prior work as well, is sort of the character of the lonely decider, That we as the individual faced with the corruption of the world around us, the decay of values of some kind of absolute morality, ultimately reach the point where we have to make our decisions.

20:24Those are not decisions we make for the state, for our boss, for anything else. They're decisions we make because we feel the moral imperative to make those decisions. You know, I think the flip side of what The Night Manager is about, and maybe it's the secret to the sort of universality of the appeal of my dad's writing generally, is it's a love story. It's a complicated, many-cornered love story. In fact, there are almost many love stories embedded within it. There is a, you know, a triangular relationship at its centre. there's a love for between father and son, you know, a wistful desire from Roper to have been Pine, Pine in some ways, you know, taken to the top of the mountain and shown the world wants to be Roper, yearns for some of the things that Roper can do and have.

21:25So I think it's this combination of the exploration of the moral centre of the human being with old-fashioned love stories and actually just within the context of a really smart plot. Why Colombia? And before I let you answer that question, is it because Colombia, I should say, it's not giving too much away. People see the first scene, they'll see it set in Syria, but the plot moves on to Colombia. Colombia, I've got a really banal thing to say. Columbia just looks gorgeous. There's nothing wrong with gorgeous looking television. We're getting to, I mean, it's such a lavish production. There's a sort of opulence and glory and excess and beauty about it.

22:12And we'll get into the finances of that. Why Columbia? Well, I think because it was, I mean, first of all, because it was a different theatre from the Middle East. and to some extent because it was going back to the roots of the novel, which didn't come from Colombia but did come from South America. And look, I mean, we're crass producers and we also have an imperative to entertain. And, you know, we sent people with cameras to a lot of countries in South America and we found amazing places to shoot in Colombia. And so we set the story there. I mean, it turns out there is quite a lot of long history between England and Colombia, that the historical relationship between the two countries goes back to the time of Simon Bolivar and British support for Bolivar against the Spanish, which is something that the Colombians remain grateful to the British for to this day.

23:17but I, in all honesty, the political history reverse engineered itself very conveniently. And was it largely filmed in Colombia? We filmed a lot in Colombia. I mean, we were there for six, seven weeks, I think, of actual filming and obviously a long time before that preparing everything. We also shot quite a lot in Spain. I mean, it's the magic of cinema. And in fact, again, these accidents of history. We shot quite a lot in the Canary Islands. Now, the architects who designed some of the towns in the Canary Islands were also people who designed the cities of Colombia. So it was actually in terms of being able to match Tenerife to Medellin or to Leicester, Cartagena, which is a very unique environment.

24:15But we were able to match between Colombia and Spain quite a lot. So apart from the importance of the producers having a good time in nice, gorgeous places, one of the things that's so remarkable about the night manager. And let me just say, because some people will be expecting, they'll be listening to this before seeing the, as it were, the finale on Linear TV. But it's been a huge success, and it's got significantly more viewers on the iPlayer. The way iPlayer numbers work, obviously, is it carries on and on and on. Linear, you get a sort of definitive number overnight, but it's already got more players on iPlayer than it did in Linear.

24:50And that's a difference between 2016 Series 1 and now, isn't it? Because in 2016, the weighting between linear and catch-up services would have been more even, whereas now it's mostly iPlayer, isn't it? Although it's done very well on linear too. Yes. I mean, I think in 2016, you know, iPlayer was already becoming established then. But I think about a third of our ultimate audience watched the show on iPlayer rather than on linear TV. I think this series, I don't know where we'll end up in the numbers, but I'd expect two thirds to three quarters of the audience will be on iPlayer Ultimate. OK, so that is a remarkable change and it speaks to the underlying trends in TV.

25:35And I want to talk about a few of those. The first is, when the series which came out in 2016 was originally commissioned, even though I'm sure some senior executives at the BBC who now perhaps run Oxbridge Colleges would say otherwise, the truth is, basically, they were commissioning for linear TV and the need to have this village pump moment, this water cooler moment, getting the nation watching. And that still has its place, as it does with this new series. But the iPlayer was essentially kind of catch-up service. If you missed it, then X. it's true to say because of the extraordinary surge in streaming services and the changing nature of viewer behavior that this time they would have commissioned it knowing that the world was moving to kind of as it were on demand first how does the fact that now it's kind of flipped and it's iPlayer first and linear it's almost iPlayer is almost like a shop window for linear does that in any way change the creative process I know it affects the scheduling and how you release it and get to the funding but does it change how you write it more cliffhangers more endings that really have to drag you into the next show well but i think that that actually is is a sort of a universal theme of television because in the old days you had to leave people on a cliffhanger to make sure they came back next week um you know if you're binge watching that becomes quite a physically exhausting experience after a while so you've got to provide the cliffhangers to keep people going from one episode to the next so i think that's actually probably one of the one of the things that hasn't changed i mean i think the thing that's come along more than anything else with the rise of the iPlayer and the rise of netflix and amazon and the other the other streaming services is uh is is ever better choice ever more choice that you're no longer dictated to but when you have to watch or what you have to watch And the range of choice that you have is extraordinary.

27:26And I think one of the things that was fantastic from my point of view is actually to see the BBC embracing that from a strategic point of view as well, in terms of saying, actually, what matters in terms of what the BBC doing is having a few, a smaller number of really heavyweight shows that compete with the best in the world. because that's ultimately what draws audiences. We have so much choice of what to watch that simply because it's on and coming up next doesn't mean you're going to watch it. Was this series funded in a different way to the first series as a co-production with Amazon? Was it different?

28:11The first season, the first series was funded in a somewhat similar way because we did that with AMC in the States and with a network of broadcasters in different territories. And essentially what happened in the intervening time is that Amazon stepped up to take the place of AMC in the mix and take on the rest of the world. But it's still a co-production and that's worked very well. The Night Manager, if I may say, looks like, and I say this as a compliment, it looks expensive. It looks incredibly glossy. I mean, it's got beautiful people in beautiful places with big guns and astonishing drone shots.

29:00So there is a sense in which the night manager goes against one of the kind of seeming prevailing trends in our industry towards the attractiveness of cheaper television. Was the night manager expensive and how do you make the case for expensive TV in the age of streamers and podcasts? Well, I mean, I think The Nightmare was expensive. There's no way around it. And it, you know, I would have to say, compared to the big shows on the streamers, it wasn't particularly expensive. But, you know, all of those shows cost eye-watering amounts of money. And you... They cost millions per episode, don't they?

29:41If you're going to get a succession, you've got amounts. You've got five, ten million in episodes. More. More, really. More. well more and and by the way you know one of the things that's happened in the last 10 years since we made the first season is it you know we everything costs a multiple of what it costs just inflation yeah yes i mean inflation in film and tv has been far faster than inflation in the rest of the world so it is eye-wateringly expensive i mean i think the answer is we want Both, you know, we don't eat the same thing for breakfast every day. Or maybe you do. But the, you know, I think it's about the way we live our lives.

30:24I think I mean, I think what falls away is the kind of the middle. If you look at what's happening in the world of television drama, then, you know, a few years ago, we had peak TV in the way that we had peak oil. But the numbers of television shows, television dramas being made is now probably 60 % of what it was five years ago. Is that right? Yes, it is. Why has there been such a sharp reduction in the number of dramas being made? Because people gravitate towards the few, the relatively small number of dramas, which are really good. So there was a recognition in the industry that there'd been a problem of oversupply.

31:05Absolutely, absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, and the pandemic had a lot to do with it and things like that. But, yes, I mean, and you kind of have to recognise it because the numbers don't lie. Right. In streaming in the old days, you could argue about how many people watched your TV show. It's amazing. You still get on radio with this weird system called Ray Jars or where people to argue about sort of, you know, exactly how many people listen to your radio show. It's mad. With streaming, you've got the data. You've got the data. So, you know, you know what people what people are watching and you can make the economic decisions.