Slow spies, quick wit

Published date13 December 2022
Publication titleSignal
SPIES never stop being spies, even when they’ve been out of the game for a while, and even when they know the game is up. Season two of Slow Horses (AppleTV+) starts with an old geezer standing behind the counter of a Soho sex shop, minding his own business — until he recognises a passerby and immediately sets off in pursuit, tailing the mystery man to a railway station, on to a train, then through the rain to catch a rail replacement bus bound for Oxford Parkway. On the bus, the sex shop proprietor begins to feel unwell, but before he drops dead, he types a single codeword into his phone and hides the device down the side of his seat. The man he was following gets away

Much of what makes Slow Horses a tasty mis-shape of a drama can be found in that sequence, from the way it’s in bustling London one minute and an unglamorous provincial car park the next, to the fact that a bristly shambles of a man is the protagonist in an exciting chase. Star casting, too: the sex-shop guy, who is clearly a retired intelligence agent, has no lines and carks it before the opening credits, and yet he’s played by the great Phil Davis (Poldark, Whitechapel).

At the helm of Slow Horses is an even bigger name playing another wily codger: Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, the boss of Slough House. That’s the run-down London building, imagined by Mick Herron in the novels the series is based on, to which MI5 spies are sent when they’ve screwed up too badly to continue their regular duties, but not quite badly enough to be fired outright. Instead, they linger in professional purgatory, performing tedious admin tasks and dodgy off-the-books jobs that have a tendency to lead them into grave peril. But the worst thing about Slough House is having to work for Lamb.

Rude, actively unhelpful and looking like he has been sleeping in the same clothes since last Tuesday — a tang of fags, whisky, old sweat and dry coffee breath nearly radiates out of the screen — Lamb is a rich creation, played with coarse relish by Oldman and scripted with glee by showrunner Will Smith. The writer’s pedigree comes from The Thick of It and Veep, and it shows in the Slough House scenes where Lamb abrasively holds court. When two underlings decline a mission because they’ve been seconded elsewhere: “Seconded? Who by, Twats R Us?”

Lamb is, however, a master of old-school tradecraft who knows immediately that the dead man on the bus is Richard ‘‘Dickie’’ Bow, a spook...

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