Twenty years ago, when I was seventeen years old, I stood one night on the dangerous and decrepit former incarnation of the Hungerford pedestrian bridge which connects the north and south sides of the river Thames. The old bridge was narrow, grotty and afflicted with crime, in one horrific incident, a law student had been thrown to his death, and it wasn’t a place to linger. But that night the bridge matched my state of mind and I looked out over the London skyline and asked, as though London were a wise mentor capable of answering back, whether life got any easier. I don’t recall another occasion when I’ve seriously contemplated suicide but standing there, I realized that death would be the end of everything good, as well as everything bad. What I didn’t realize at the time was that had I arrived at a different decision my suicide would’ve wound up as a statistic, engulfed by a much wider narrative of a society in which many young gay people struggle to cope. My life, which in reality, had been a largely happy one, full of love and potential, would’ve been rewritten in those troubled hours, as one of perpetual despair leading to that act. I’m very glad I lived to tell a different story but perhaps because of this moment I’m acutely aware of how our deaths can tell a story separate to the story of our lives.
Herein lies the premise for my first television drama series London Spy, a thriller which opens with Ben Whishaw’s character Danny, standing on Lambeth Bridge, feeling low and wretched, and asking the London skyline whether life gets any easier. London answers him with a chance encounter, an early morning runner who stops to ask if he’s okay – a question that can be both trivial and also profoundly human. So begins a love story that promises happiness for both. However, eight months into their relationship his lover is found dead in circumstances that appear to tell a story of a life entirely different to one that Danny has come to share with his partner. Danny’s perfect love, which has rejuvenated him, is, in an instant, rewritten. He is no longer this man’s partner but merely one of many nameless sexual hook ups, with a preference for extreme bondage, high risk kink fuelled by drugs and an appetite for exploring the outer limits of sensuality. In this death, Danny not only loses his lover, he loses their love story too, and so his battle begins for the truth, to find out what really happened, and to try and recover the story of their love and life together.
The question has been asked of me whether there are any parallels to the Gareth Williams case, the GCHQ operative found dead in his apartment in Pimlico. I should be clear at this point that this series is entirely a work of fiction, none of the characters are real. In addition, it isn’t intended as a commentary on the police investigation, the security services, or what might have happened. I haven’t sat through the evidence, or heard the testimonies, and I’m in no position to make a judgement. However, it is an indisputable fact that at the heart of the press, the public and indeed my interest in this case, is the question of whether his death told a story of his life, or whether his death was staged to tell a story that would disguise and distract us from his murder.
If it were a murder, the concepts behind its construction are not new. While researching another project some years back, I stumbled across a training manual allegedly drafted by the CIA and distributed to agents and operatives at the time of the Agency’s 1954 covert coup in Guatemala, which ousted the democratically elected president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. I cannot vouch for this document’s authenticity, and there is so much misinformation in circulation, if it turned out to be another agency’s attempt to smear the CIA, I wouldn’t be surprised. Regardless, it remains a striking document for the ideas embedded in it. Here is a direct quote:
‘For secret assassination . . . the contrived accident is the most effective technique. When successfully executed it causes little excitement, and is only casually investigated’
We are now so immersed in paranoia and suspicion that an accident isn’t sufficient to divert our attention – fundamentally we don’t believe in coincidence, but we do believe in stories, or at least, we believe in stories that are well told. In order to make sure a death doesn’t become a murder, the murderer must become a story teller. In a subsection of the manual, under the label “Techniques” it declares: “A subject’s personal habits may be exploited to prepare him for a contrived accident of any kind.” Which is to say, in order to create a plausible lie, you weave in elements of truth. I would go much further in my analysis of this approach, as with all story telling, it’s important to have your audience in mind, which means understanding, or trying to, how they’d react to certain story elements. Prejudices are useful in this context because they’re stories people believe without requiring any evidence. For example, the murder of a charity worker would be much less toxic if it was implied that he or she was embezzling money from the charity they worked for, after all, deep down we believe bad people get what they deserve, and people who flirt with the underworld of our society, do so at their peril.
In London Spy, Danny argues that storytelling of a different kind is at play. The death of his lover draws on my own very powerful fear that I’ve experienced throughout my teenage years, and adult life, that the intimacy I crave will ultimately be my destruction. At school I thought my attraction to the same sex would end my career before it had begun. Desire was sublimated, configured in my brain as a threat to my ambitions, my place in this world, and with the arrival of HIV/AIDS as a threat to my life. I reasoned that if I could convince myself that I was straight maybe I could convince other people too, as if sexuality were merely a matter of presentation. My thoughts were distorted by this self-appointed undercover operation to such an extent that it’s taken many years to unpick the damage, indeed, perhaps some of the damage is not yet undone. So, in London Spy, when Danny finds love and intimacy, on a deeper level he fears it will end badly because that is the narrative lodged in his mind. For this very reason Danny does everything possible to avoid the pitfalls of a relationship ending badly – he promises to tell the truth, he avoids drugs, or excessive drink, he’s faithful, committed, he’s devoted. He does everything right. That is why Danny must fight, because that narrative of death and despair is from the past. Just as that old Hungerford bridge has been ripped down and replaced with a bridge where many linger and enjoy the view, we are in a new world, with new narratives. But as with anyone trying to tell a new story, a story previously untold, the stories of old have great weight behind them. What is worse, they often have some element of truth, and the battle is not as straightforward as Danny might think.