Having failed a counter-terrorism exercise, MI5 agent Jack Lowden is relegated to 'Slough House', the pits, run by the most jaded man on television, played by Gary Oldman (though you already know the old has-been is going to come into his own at some point). But rather than keep his head down, he breaks open a secure despatch case and steals information about a right wing journalist of interest to the intelligence service. Then a Pakistani comic is kidnapped...
With Kristin Scott Thomas, Freddie Fox, Saskia Reeves, the irrepressible Olivia Cooke, Samuel West, Jonathan Pryce. Lowden was in Small Axe, Fighting with My Family, The Long Song, Dunkirk, The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth, A United Kingdom
Written by Will Smith (not that one; a writer on things like The Thick of It, Veep and Paddington 2), from Mick Herron's novel. When Oldman tells Lowden not to leave the sensitive data 'on the bus', you can't help feeling that's a deliberate reference to some government person who did in real life leave a load of sensitive data on a bus - just the kind of writing you'd expect from someone with these credits.
It's an exciting tale, laced with humour - I like the right-wing nutter doesn't realise the 'castle' is a more recent folly - but his Asian-British captive does. The perpetrators of all the double-dealing, namely Scott Thomas and West, get away with everything, of course - the scapegoat journalist (the unlovely Paul Hilton) goes under a bus (almost) literally. But there's a shock denouement involving the truth behind Reeves' husband's 'suicide'. Liked also the developing story between 'Slow Horses' Rosalind Eleazar and Dustin Demri-Burns. The main nutter: Brian Vernel (also Gangs of London).
Jack Hawes directed them all, and other writers were involved.
Apple TV. Theme tune, sung by Mick Jagger, is a sort of twangy Peaky Blinders-alike.
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| "Explaining it to you lot's like trying to explain Norway to a dog", and other lines that aren't quite as funny as they think they are |
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