Like 007’s Martini, the Beeb’s got the perfect recipe for a spy thriller: CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews last night's TV 

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A satisfying spy serial must have, just like the perfect Martini, certain ingredients. First, smart attire — no trainers or sweatpants. Second, girls — including a platinum blonde and a wide-eyed secretary, with extra points for a sultry jazz singer.

There must be a morally complicated German defector, and a little East European man with round glasses. The setting should be opulent but louche, and the fate of the nation must rest on the hero’s mission.

Oh, and Sean Connery... the whole thing has to star Sean Connery.

Close To The Enemy (BBC2) achieved the lot, ticking all the boxes as it delivered punch-ups and sardonic quips galore. This show wants to be a classic spy drama in the Tinker Tailor mould, and doesn’t care who knows it.

Jim Sturgess plays intelligence officer Callum Ferguson, detailed to babysit a captured Luftwaffe rocket scientist and coax him to work for the British government in the aftermath of World War II.

Jim Sturgess plays intelligence officer Callum Ferguson in BBC drama Close To The Enemy

He does this by invoking the debonair, ruthless cool of Connery. It isn’t a straight impression — he doesn’t attempt the lisp or the Edinburgh accent. But his voice has the same playful cadences, the same way of letting his phrases end on descending notes.

His head tilts in the same quizzical manner, and the corner of his mouth twitches wryly. And he has the identical way of saying ‘H’yes’ for ‘yes’.

Stephen Poliakoff’s script is crammed with dry asides that wouldn’t be out of place in a 007 movie either.

After Ferguson batters a British Fascist and half drowns him for good measure, the hero’s brother comments airily: ‘I’d have loved to see you kill him but, in the end it, might have spoiled our day a bit.’

There’s a little too much script, in fact. Poliakoff likes to fill every shot with dialogue, when sometimes silence would say more.

Phoebe Fox, as the brisk investigator from the War Crimes Department, explained her role at least four times to three different people. While Alfred Molina spent so long introducing himself with cryptic hints and knowing allusions that his arrival had to be spread over three scenes.

Phoebe Fox stars as Kathy Griffiths, a brisk investigator from the War Crimes Department

The setting was just right, though — a posh London hotel, marooned amid bombsites, where the chefs tried to cook Cordon-Bleu dinners on a ration-book budget. Elderly ladies in frayed silk gowns ate boiled cabbage, while a string quartet wheezed through a selection of Mozart and surreptitiously passed round a hip-flask.

In the rooms booked by the spies, hidden microphones were glued behind the furniture, so that earnest young women with headsets could eavesdrop from the secret HQ in the attic. It had all the seediness of a Graham Greene novel, blended with John le Carré’s tradecraft and a dash of Fawlty Towers.

Nick Knowles had a secret HQ in the attic, or at least on the roof, in DIY SOS At Great Ormond Street Hospital (BBC1). He and his team of builders were commissioned to uproot a gold medal-winning garden from the Chelsea Flower Show and replant it as a roof-garden, an oasis for the parents of sick children in the wards below.

It was an admirable idea, and when it was finished it looked a treat. The problem was that the whole scheme ran flawlessly, giving Nick just about enough material for a ten-minute segment on The One Show.

To pad it out, he asked every doctor, nurse, patient and volunteer he could find whether they liked the plan. Naturally, they did. We didn’t need to hear everybody say so.

With little to do but load a couple of lorries with greenery at one end and unload at the other, the workmen were larking about more than usual. It started in Chelsea, where they wore paisley shirts and teased the garden designer they were going to take their strimmers to his creation.

All day they were making off-colour jokes and kidding about burying Nick in one of the flowerbeds: ‘We haven’t got enough soil to cover his nose.’ Oi, you lot — shut up and do some work.