‘Working with you has been the lowest point in a disappointing career...’
If there is one thing I’m not interested in, it’s spies. Or having a healthy diet or being ambitious in any way, but mainly spies. Perhaps it’s because I despise the concept of James Bond but something about the world of espionage immediately turns me off. I offer this rambling introduction as a justification for why it has taken me so long to watch Slow Horses despite everyone telling me how brilliant it is. As ever, everyone was right and I was wrong…
Slough House is where incompetent MI5 agents go to die. Not literally, of course, but figuratively. If you fuck up enough times or with enough style then you will be sent to live out your career following barked orders from chain-smoking, fast-food-eating maniac Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman). We spend much of our time with River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), a former up-and-coming MI5 agent who is banished to Slough House after a catastrophic training exercise. Elsewhere, we have misanthropic computer nerd Roddy (Christopher Chung), alcoholic widow Standish (Saskia Reeves) and a rotating cast of other ne’er-do-wells and losers. Over the course of three seasons, Slough House and its rabble of merry men (and women) become more and more significant within MI5 culminating in a kidnapping, a plane hijacking and a potential bomb threat.
So, what makes this spy thriller different. Firstly, Gary Oldman. If you want someone to play a curmudgeonly old man, there is no finer example. Jackson Lamb is a wonderful televisual creation. Lamb is Gene Hunt if he were to be massively over promoted. Having said that, one of his most compelling qualities is that when he does recapture the old fire behind his eyes he is a competent and unerring agent.
Slow Horses is properly funny, properly thrilling and features a genuinely wonderful cast firing on all cylinders. It’s a shame it’s stuck out on Apple TV+ because this is a show that fully deserves mass appeal. It’s far superior to Line of Duty, for example. I loved it.