You will all have gathered by now that your friendly reviewer has square eyes. I do spend a lot of time gazing into flickering boxes of light, whether in the corner of the lounge room or on my lap. My figure and fitness reflect the level of physical activity involved – there are definite health hazards in being a TV critic and not many organisations will include coach-potato danger money in their lavish remuneration packages. On the other hand, the old grey cells get a continual workout that I wish could be taken into consideration by the Apple Watch that I’m going to be inflicted with next month, because I fear I am about to be slob-shamed by it.
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In the meantime, I will continue to put life and unfit limb in peril to report from the viewing front as I mentally abseil down the conceptual cliffs of unreason and bad art. But today I’ve been reprieved, because I can joyfully report on the new fourth series of Slow Horses (Apple TV+), comparing its virtues to those in Endeavour and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Prime/Britbox), the series from the ‘80s, before the BBC lost its mojo.
Occasionally in the critic’s dismal journey there are sunny uplands of good thinking, oases of common sense & rational sensibility: well-crafted, nicely conceived renditions of the endless battle between good and evil, especially when they’re showing you the workings of the moral and dramatic decisions made.
Slow Horses is one of those dramas that are even better than the books they’re based on. Mick Herron’s book Slough House is engaging and strikes me sometimes as Le Carré-Lite. Will Smith, the main scriptwriter, is faithful and respectful to Herron’s tone and character development, but the TV series is blessed by having Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, whose character would be, I think, impossible to portray by anyone else. The Le Carré vibe is all there, since Oldman played George Smiley so well in the 2011 version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. It was no disgrace that he wasn’t quite as good as Alec Guinness’s Smiley – that’s like saying it’s no disgrace that you came second to Usain Bolt. But in Lamb, Oldman has found his unicorn: no-one will ever be able to follow him in the role. He is having such obvious naughty fun being Lamb, farting, swearing, all greasy straggly hair and unwashed clothes. It makes you wonder about the people he lives with in real life: does he, like Jim Carrey, have to stay in character at home? How do they cope? Jeremy Brett, the only credible Holmes since Basil Rathbone (and better than that one), immersed himself and his unfortunate family and partners in the role for the decade it took for the series to complete. More about that later.
In Slow Horses we see a darkly comic view of the shambolic organisation of British (and, I’m sure, US and Australian) realpolitik and how the security services operate – or don’t operate. Jackson Lamb heads a motley group of misfit spies at the books’ titular Slough House, a rambling building in London where problematic but useful candidates for securing the continuance of Britain have their talents weaponised in various ways. Above (or nominally above) Lamb are a few interesting MI5 heads and sub-heads who wage war on Britain’s declared enemies – and each other.
That line in Hamlet about ‘custom being more honoured in the breach rather than the observance’ applies solidly here, if you substitute ‘ethics’ for ‘custom’. Machiavelli wrote this playbook, and while Lamb is no titular Prince (all obvious honours and status being arrogated by the hierarchies of useless idiots in government), you see the layers of power and authority peeling away above him as he just gets jobs done. He knows it all, he is unshockable. And his fearlessness is borne of a steely survivalism, a preternatural instinct for where to sniff out motive and reality. He knows all the people and has no respect.
The supporting cast is really good: the older women, Kristin Scott Thomas as Diana and Saskia Reeves as Catherine Standish in particular would be hard to replace. The younger ones are good, especially Jack Lowden as River Cartwright, the grandson of David Cartwright, now retired and bonkers but once a respected high-up in MI5. In Series One and Three, Sophie Okonedo was a satisfyingly nasty ‘First Desk’, aka MI5’s boss. No spoilers. But at some points I absolutely expected her to go 'mwa-haha!' She was always one of the ones to watch: who was she going to shaft next? Lucky for us viewers, our favourites have Lamb at their back, burping, farting and occasionally using a gun effectively.
'Oldman has found his unicorn: no-one will ever be able to follow him in the role. He is having such obvious naughty fun being Lamb, farting, swearing, all greasy straggly hair and unwashed clothes.'
So, given that Slow Horses is so well executed and such great fun to watch, what can stand next to it? Obviously Bosch, which if you haven’t seen, is one of the greatest crime series ever televised bar none, if only for the strange and wondrous names you’ll encounter. Harry (actually short for Hieronymus) Bosch is played by the excellent Titus Welliver, whom I recognised as a really psychopathic villain in an ep of that also-laudable series The Mentalist. This is an actor with range indeed.
But to Sherlock Holmes and Endeavour. The latter is a prequel to the John Thaw Inspector Morse series. Set in the 1960s in Oxford, it recreates the time in a way that shows respect for more than the look of the time – it faithfully offers dialogue that at times would now be considered sexist and racist. In today’s over-regulated drama environment, all such snippets of verité would be either omitted or used as a vice-signal, the opposite, one might say, of a virtue-signal. It’s a salutary reminder of how things have changed, especially acceptable public dialogue in the arts, but contemporary acceptability is rarely conducive to historical authenticity. I’m put in mind of the recent puzzling and concerted attacks on the character of the actress Blake Lively. Some interviews she gave 13 years ago have been unearthed and are being used as ‘evidence’ that she doesn’t fit the criteria of public political correctitude in 2024, even though the terms she used were in wide use at the time. Such attitudes have a chilling effect on people trying to recreate a drama in a historical time and place.
There was very little tyranny of this kind in the mid 1980s when Jeremy Brett was cast as Sherlock Holmes. There was, for anyone who remembers those times, a vivid sense of improving liberation, of hope in a better world even as we deplored Thatcher’s and Reagan’s economic slash-an- burn of public ownership. There was very little to stop people saying how they felt, what they wanted from life and politics and certainly there was a sense of progressing towards tolerance and acceptance of gay people and fairness to women. But speech was not policed, as far as I remember. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes was created by John Hawkesworth and is a monument of authenticity. The books were more faithfully evoked than any other rendition before and especially since. Like Gary Oldman, Jeremy Brett inhabited the character intensely and recreated a character with a verisimilitude that gladdens the heart of the grumpiest aficionado of historical literacy.
(And just to save youse all the trouble of commenting: don’t even try to talk to me about the Beneflop Cumbersome abomination; I can’t abide it and the family will have more ammunition for their complaints about my complaints … you get the picture. But I insist that I am easy to live with. Just ask my latest shrink.)
Juliette Hughes is a freelance writer.