YouHeart I gave it a 7.5 out of 10

JinRoz For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

CrawlerChunky In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

rusoviet 1. the script writer did not provide enough information of new cast members when the new cast members 'pop up'. Unless one had read the novel it makes no real sense. So many of the cast seem to be being filmed on their first read through that or the director made no real demands on what skill they 'had' to be cast to begin with.The other is the miscasting esp. of 'Jean-Francoise Mercier as played by David Tennant. He is dull, weak and completely one dimensional in his delivery.The film omitted a major part of the novel, prior to 1st Sept. 1939, where Mercier contacts German 'agents' inside Germany who take a hiking trip into the border region of Germany and Belgium/Luxemborg and document the German panzers 'measuring' the width of the forest roads in the Ardennes for the invasion of June 1940. It was a well crafted passage in the novel and a shame it was not added.It is a shame for the novel is very good but you'd never know it watching this series and sadly it doesn't bode well for future film adaptations of Furst's work

Remittance Man I gave it 1 because I couldn't give it 0.Ian La Frenais and Dick Clement may be good writers of comedy series, but the BBC utterly failed when it appointed them to make what turned out to be a very bad adaptation of a very good book.They completely failed to develop the story as it unfolded in the original work by Alan Furst. They failed to develop the original sub-plots that made this story work and added all sorts of unnecessary ones that were not even in the book. Presumably this was done to Make the programme more "exciting". I know adapting books to the screen (big or small) requires changes but I was left wondering whether these two had even read the book before they set to work.Oh, and as for the uniforms. Good in the most, but Tennant's dress uniform in Episode 1 was completely wrong and looked about three sizes too big for him. He ended up looking like an extra from an Italian comic opera. Mercier, the aristocratic cavalry officer, would not have been seen dead in it.All in all wasted opportunity to turn a good book into a good TV series brought down by an obviously small budget, poor direction and poor choice of writers. Gods help us if they ever get turned loose on other works by Furst.

kieran-mclaughlin1 Why do they have to tinker with a great story? Alan Furst's novel is moody, atmospheric and evocative of the period, pre-WW2 Warsaw. The BBC adaptation is lifeless and sterile. The screenwriters have tried to cherry-pick the salient parts of the novel, but all this has achieved is a confusing storyline with no sense of continuity. David Tennant is hopelessly miscast as Mercier, which in turn ensures the viewer will find the series pretty unbelievable. Janet Montgomery's portrayal of Anna Szarbek(Skarbek? Why?) is unfortunately not very likable, which in turn means their relationship suffers on the screen. Both Tennant and Montgomery have mishandled the relationship between Mercier and Szarbek, which is one of the critical drivers of Mercier's actions. A number of other characters (Jourdain, Dr Lapp) have been similarly poorly written and portrayed. Very disappointing all round. I just hope they don't try and adapt any more of Alan Furst's novels - fans of Furst's novels will be very disheartened.

Mouth Box Spies of Warsaw (BBC Four) was probably meant for BBC1, but then someone at the BBC sat down and watched it.As we know, it's not currently very fashionable for BBC executives to take an interest in BBC programmes, but on this occasion it's just as well one of them looked at it before making the mistake of showing it to a larger audience.Adapted by the usually brilliant Dick Clement and Ian la Frenais from a novel by Alan Furst, the first episode was actually only about ninety minutes long. It felt, however, like it was on the air for about 12 weeks.Even in the first ten minutes one could have timed the action by calendar. Sorry, did I use the word, "action"? Slip of the pen. At one point, near the end of the episode, I found myself asking the question, "Is this still on?" It's difficult to say what happened, the plot being revealed at such a painfully leisurely pace. The gist of it appeared to be that David Tennant – a French spy in bright red pantaloons with stripes down the side – fell very slowly in love with Janet Montgomery, the mistress of a dull, whiskered Russian exile.Then we were very slowly introduced to a mysterious Countess, who very slowly turned out not to be a Countess, and was then very slowly strangled by some Nazis. Oh, there was a brasserie with a bullet-hole in the mirror above table 14. I think this might have been significant in some way. Or maybe it wasn't.There was certainly great attention to period detail, which helped to slow down the action even more. Then there was the usual confusion when it came to who should speak with which accent. The Nazis spoke in German with subtitles in English. The Polish spoke English with Polish accents. The French spoke English with 'Allo 'Allo accents. Everyone spoke very, very, slowly indeed.Tennant was wasted as the enigmatic, complex and conflicted Mercier. He doesn't really do enigmatic and complex, does he? He does quirky and eccentric. About twenty minutes in, he had a stab at being deep and conflicted, but all we really wanted was to see him whip out his sonic screwdriver and pull one of his funny faces.Did I mention that it was quite slow? I still have episode two of Spies of Warsaw on my TIVO. I think it's going to be there for a very, very long time.Read regular TV reviews at Mouthbox.co.uk