The Spy Who Went Into the Cold, BBC Four, review Charming, popular and dangerously fond of a drink, Kim Philby, one of the "Cambridge Five" who passed information to the Soviet Union during the Second World War, was not one to pass up the opportunity of a good party. It is no surprise then that concerns were raised when he failed to show for dinner at the British Embassy in Beirut in January 1963. Those concerns were justified: by the following morning Philby was on a Russian freighter to the Soviet Union, where he remained until his death in 1988. George Carey's surprisingly sympathetic documentary, The Spy Who Went into the Cold (BBC Four), was a meticulously researched, exhaustive examination of the events leading up to and following Philby's departure. Chronologically split into sections, beginning at Cambridge in 1930 and concluding with Philby's death in Moscow in 1988, it did a fine job of untangling what remains a knotted saga - Philby held down a number of jobs for MI6, spending time in the US and Turkey and later as a journalist in Beirut, before he fled to Russia as evidence of his history in espionage became ever clearer. More controversially and most interestingly, it also presented as a tragedy the tepid reaction Philby received on arrival in the Soviet Union, the country he had betrayed his home for, but which now refused to trust him given his slippery past. Carey's documentary was brave enough to hint at a more human side to a much vilified character. Clearly he struggled with alcoholism - "he was always drunk and always stuttering" - an affliction which intensified during his exile in Russia, "among a people whose language he never mastered." He collected Jeeves and Wooster novels and "missed kippers, marmalade, English mustard and good whisky." Meanwhile his daughter Josephine, who spoke with a stoic breeziness and grim humour throughout, described his open-coffin funeral held in Russia: "I loved him dearly but I wasn't going to kiss his body." That said, this was not an apology for Philby. He was described as "ungrieving" when he received news of his wife's death, while the disclosure that Philby "felt his heart pounding with excitement" at the prospect of working for the KGB again in Beirut portrayed a man with deeply unsavoury motivations. Carey has illuminated a side to Philby not often seen with this brave film but, as he explained last night: "Scores of books have been written about what Philby did but the man inside remains elusive." Last night's documentary went some way to changing that.