All countries, societies and friendships run on code and some of us are more adept at reading and sending these codes than others. The work of the spy is to read and relay these codes to the enemy to the detriment of said countries, societies and friendships.

The series "A Spy Among Friends" opens with the E. M. Forster quote, "If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country," and seems to be an exercise in proving this sentiment wrong. Because once you have engaged in lies that have enabled you to betray your country and society, you have already betrayed your friends.

The latest spy drama on British television revisits an old classic, the "Cambridge Five," a group of friends who were all educated at Cambridge and came to hold positions of power. All of whom were/became KGB (foreign intelligence and domestic security agency of the Soviet Union) agents until the 1950s. Several books, films and series have already been made about these men. This latest offering focuses on the friendship between one of them, Kim Philby, and an unsuspecting member of the intelligence services, Nicholas Elliott.

The series starts with the interrogation of Philby’s friend and colleague Elliott, who is the last person from the British Intelligence Services to have seen him in Beirut. For such is the life these men lead. One day they’re fighting the Nazis in Berlin, another day they are executing them in Istanbul, and on yet another, they are having a disgraced spell in Beirut. In gray London, Elliott is being interrogated about how he let Philby go in and, it turns out, grayer Beirut. Greyish gloomy Istanbul is all very well because Orhan Pamuk has made us believe melancholy is the riding emotion in the town, but the color palette of Beirut in the series is so dull and beige one thinks the producers must have asked the artificial intelligence (AI) to sketch a Beirut under Soviet rule.

When one tries to find out who is responsible for this outrage and sees that the credits list Nick Murphy as the director and then Alexander Cary as one of the writers of the show, and with him, the fault must lie, as he was also the writer for the series "Homeland," a show that has been torn to pieces several times by people from the region for inaccuracies, and not least for Arabic graffiti on walls written backward.

But our main concern here, for better or worse, is not Beirut. It is the relationship between Kim Philby, played by Guy Pearce, and Elliott, played by Damian Lewis (yes, of "Homeland" fame). There is some dispute about which of these excellent actors steal the show in the show, but my money’s on Guy Pearce, who exudes charisma and whose lies you know you would have fallen for had he been your friend.

The interrogation scenes with Elliott and the fictional Lily Thomas, the investigating officer, serve to give us the back story and to lay bare as if it needs laying bare once again, the class differences in the U.K. There are whole Elliott's sequences trying to locate Lily’s northern accent, and her calling him a "posh boy with privilege who is above the law" in several different ways and it’s tiresomely performative. This is sad because there is actually some interesting conversation and witticisms that get lost in all the class war talk we have to endure. Such as when Elliott, oblivious to the fact that he is under serious investigation keeps telling his stale Russian jokes to colleagues. He is telling one about a doctor and a patient, and he does a "Russian accent" only when he speaks the part of the patient. This, of course, doesn’t escape Lily who then quips, "Isn’t the doctor Russian too?" which ought to be an internal joke because the British entertainment industry itself is very cavalier about who speaks with accents when "foreigners" are represented on radio or screen.

The class war framing of the investigation, perhaps, alerts the audience to the fact that everyone, and not just professional spies, speaks in code. Lily is then trying to decipher a double-coded narrative, one of social and the other of governmental subterfuge. As far as posh code goes, the series’ writer Cary doesn’t go very deep and peppers the conversation with "back in a jiffy’s," references to nanny, squashed flies (for biscuits with flattened raisins), and people who go into paroxysms of laughter when the word "common" is merely pronounced. As in any spy thriller worth its salt, the series makes a trip to the swimming pool of the Royal Automobile Club, where we meet an aspiring Ian Fleming (yes, the author of the Bond novels) who’s testing a swimsuit that would keep 007’s dinner suit dry and presentable for when he gets out of the water in Monte Carlo and heads straight to one of the roulette tables.

There are several such references to the period and the milieux, such as the parliamentarian John Profumo, who Elliott keeps suggesting will be getting into trouble soon, which of course he does for a sex scandal. Such declarations by Elliot are there, one supposes, to make the audience understand he is brilliant and au fait with what is happening in the upper echelons of society.

Which then, makes his blindness when it comes to his own friend even more poignant. The interrogation scenes with Lilly recap how when the cover of two of the "Cambridge Five" was blown, Philby was very much on the scene, and how improbable it was that he did not know that these men were KGB spies. For such is the world they lived in, where being guilty by association was a peril of the job. A shadow falls over Philby, but he comes out of the investigation clear, never perhaps trusted to the same degree, and hence ending up in Beirut.

Now while Beirut seems random for someone whose official job has been to fight the KGB (and who by the way, does not speak Russian), there is an early reference to how Philby’s dad was disgusted by the way the British failed to keep their promise to the Arabs who were funded to rebel against Istanbul. A quick search reveals that the dad was St. John, one of the team of British Intelligence officers charged with organizing the Arab revolt. While Lawrence rooted for the house of Hussein, he rooted for the house of Saud, and it is curious that although St. John Philby backed the winning camp, we hear so little of him. A further curiosity is that St. John was born in Ceylon and Kim Philby in Punjab, Kim being his nickname nicked from Rudyard Kipling’s novel "Kim," about a white boy spy in India. It is to this class of colonial Englishmen the British Empire seems to turn to time and again for intelligence. And then you win some, and then you lose some. This background helps us speculate that while St. John Philby was disappointed by the way Arabs were not given full sovereignty (though possibly never betrayed the U.K. to the Arabs) Kim was similarly disappointed by the way the antifascist Communists were side-lined after the Americans took virtual power in Germany. Communists, and by extension Russians being betrayed in the settlement after World War II is a persistent narrative, and you’ll find Russian President Vladimir Putin one of its staunch propagators.

While the complex political framework within which all these betrayals happened would take many more pages to lay out, the core of the series remains the relationship between the two men, and I found myself almost in tears along with Elliot at the end of episode one when there is a magic realist moment where a performer on the theatre stage transforms into his friend Kim, who is singing "Are you lonesome tonight?".

This betrayal, of keeping someone in the dark, is paid back years later when Elliott himself performs a disappearing trick against Kim which sets the record straight and which I believe is the great scene of pathos. For who among us does not have that one (possibly more) disappearing friend, whom we’d like to pay in turn?