It begins with a spectacularly staged airport-set action set-piece which wouldn’t look out of place in a Bond or Bourne movie. Kristin Scott Thomas, proving she’d make a brilliant M, is MI5 Head Of Ops Diana Taverner, watching from her vast, shiny espionage HQ as young agent River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) does his level best to screw up his mission to apprehend a suspected terrorist bomber. The revelation that this tense, taut sequence isn’t quite what it appears only adds to the overall sense of audacity.
After this dazzling opening, the storytelling settles down into something calmer yet always absorbing, as Cartwright is sent to Slough House, the MI5 equivalent of Siberia — a grim, back-street London office where a seemingly pointless admin department is based, run by veteran misanthrope Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman). This is the main setting of the show’s source material, Mick Herron’s 2010 novel Slow Horses, and the subsequent 11 books in his ‘Slough House’ series. The grimy, decaying locale is undoubtedly reminiscent of the workplace of Sandra Oh’s Eve in Series 1 of fellow prestige espionage drama Killing Eve — where Fiona Shaw’s MI6 boss famously “once saw a rat drink from a can of Coke”.
Gary Oldman's performance here is a tour de force of wheezily profane indifference.
In fact, Herron’s novel was published seven years before the Luke Jennings novella that inspired Killing Eve. The two shows do share a lot of wryly funny tonal DNA, though, as well as the central theme that the donkey-work of global intelligence-gathering can be comically unglamorous — more The Office than Casino Royale. Indeed, if Bourne and Bond are at the glitzy, hi-octane peak of the spying game, and John le Carré’s George Smiley occupies the dignified middle-ground, then Jackson Lamb is shamelessly rooted to the bottom rung, and his entire staff of has-been and never-was misfits occupy the naughty step.
It’s a delightful and cunning casting coup that Lamb is played by the great Gary Oldman, over a decade on from his beautifully modulated, Oscar-nominated version of Smiley in the superb 2011 film of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. His performance here is a tour de force of wheezily profane indifference. You can almost smell the musty odour emanating from his manky old suit, as he rules his crumbling empire with gleeful hostility, and tries to stop any of them from actually doing any proper espionage work. And yet… there are hints that deep down, Lamb kind of, almost, a bit, does care. At one point during a riveting tête-à-tête with Scott Thomas’ chilly supremo, Taverner, he explains that while his team may be a bunch of fucking losers, they are, at least, his bunch of fucking losers. Writer Will Smith (Veep) and director James Hawes (Penny Dreadful) do a great job convincing us this is probably what the intelligence business is really like, while providing an immensely entertaining plot for this rabble to solve.
