Spies Of Warsaw Episode1 Press Reviews


The first episode of David Tennant's new espionage drama, Spies Of Warsaw, aired on BBC Four on Wednesday night. Here's a quick run down of what the UK press thought of the action.

The Telegraph gave the show 4 stars out of 5 with writer Christopher Howse commenting:
I was glad to find that there was no need to hide behind a cushion at any point during Spies of Warsaw (BBC Four). This yarn of émigrés and rather black-looking blueprints never became too visually brutal, nor was the love interest between David Tennant (as Lt Col Jean-François Mercier, a French spy) and the pleasing Janet Montgomery (as Anna Skarbek, a lawyer with the League of Nations) too embarrassing for intergenerational shared viewing, even when things got steamy on a steam train. No doubt, though, some railway gricer will point out that locomotives with the wheel configuration 4-6-0 never ran between Warsaw and Budapest in the Thirties.

The Independent's  Tom Sutcliffe says: Tennant plays Jean-François Mercier, a military-attaché at the French embassy in Warsaw and the only man in the building, it appears, who can see what's coming. As his boss tries to sell underpowered Renault tanks to the Poles, Mercier is trying to uncover the German plans for war with the help of a bogus countess and Anna Skarbek, a local woman who looks so stunning in a beret that even the soundtrack stops to say, "Ding-dong!" Throw in a tight-lipped Nazi or two and some stripy-pole border crossings and you've got the essential recipe.

What's On TV state:  Tennant is at his best in this stylish two-parter...


Den Of Geek's Louisa Mellor says: It’s good-looking, reliably done, and spy drama fans should find it a robust enough example of the genre.



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