JAMES COWENTELEVISION
The spy
who came
in from
the khazi
Slow Horses Apple TV+
The Oscars Sky Max, Mon
Edward VIII: Britain’s
Traitor King Channel 4, Sun
Banned! The Mary
Whitehouse Story BBC2, Tue
Oooh, tie me up with
someone’s tights and whip
me with an electric flex. Gary
Oldman’s back as a spy, only
this time he isn’t George
Smiley, he’s the grunting,
dirty, foul-mouthed head of
some far-flung cell of losers
based in what looks like the
slobbiest part of Archway.
You can see why they
wanted to adapt Mick
Herron’s spy thriller Slow
Horses: the set alone is a
decaying tour de force. The
book is set in a place called
Slough House, a spooks’
Siberia where “f-ups”, as
Oldman’s character, Jackson
Lamb, calls them, from MI5
are sent to live out their days,
relegated, forgotten, sifting
rubbish in Marigolds. “MI
fing useless,” he snarls.
It is dark, swampy, damp,
filled with dead coffee cups,
ageing files and papers and
extraordinary dental
arrangements protruding
from paranoid men in
crumpled trench coats. I hope
they don’t mind it when I say
not a single moment of this
six-parter went by without me
being reminded of our own
award-winning Insight desk.
Just as journalists are
hopelessly romantic about
investigative reporters,
thriller writers are hopelessly
romantic about spies,
especially old, nasty bastards.
Slow Horses is a show that
believes even dumb, greasy,
badly dressed cast-offs have
it in them to outsmart slick,
rich, powerful villains, and,
well, that’s quite fun to watch.
We’re used to Oldman
transforming himself, but in
this role it’s the first time
we’ve seen what he truly
looks like. The quivering jowl,
the catfish whiskers, the tiny,
piercing eyes — this is the
strange, unreadable man I
interviewed ten years ago.
It is the first time, also, that
I’ve noticed the obvious
resemblance to his sister,
Laila Morse. So basically it
is like watching Mo off
EastEnders in drag.
He appears to be enjoying
himself in the role, slinging
his feet up on his desk,
taunting his secretary,
Catherine Standish, played
with iron disgust by Saskia
Reeves. I didn’t warm to the
show immediately: there’s
a lot of meandering and
flashbacks and it takes at least
three or four episodes to get
into it. But it’s a classy
production, with Kristen Scott
Thomas on ice-bitch top form
as “Lady Di”, MI5’s head of
ops, and a snaky series of plot
switchbacks.
There’s a young Muslim
who is kidnapped by a group
of fascists, car chases,
thefts, gunfights and
London glittering
murkily in the dark.
River Cartwright is
the show’s nominal
lead character, an
attractive young
spook physically notThe Oscars highlights show
on Sky ran a tasteful edit of
the electrifying smackdown,
before broadcasting Smith’s
catastrophic acceptance
speech in full. You could feel
the absolute horror and
bewilderment that gripped
the actor and the audience as
they recovered from the idea
that the Oscars just nearly
descended, as a friend said,
“into a brawl like in the
Taiwanese parliament”.
“I wanna be a vessel for
love,” Smith said, tear-
stained and quivering, a
man clearly wondering how
he managed to screw up the
most triumphant moment
of his life. It’s quite
something to watch an actor
gushingly apologise to the
Academy instead of thanking
it. I for one never knew he
had the range.
In Edward VIII: Britain’s
Traitor King we were told
that this sly and creepy
aristocrat was “like the child
in the fairy story” who had
been given everything “in theworld, but they forgot the
soul”. To say the documentary
buried him is to understate
the sheer size and depth of
the huge black pit its makers
created into which to
ceremonially slide this
snivelling, rheumy-eyed,
knock-kneed, little Nazi-loving,
narcissist tosser gargoyle.
The convention with royal
documentaries is that they
must contain nothing except
archive footage and
desiccated royal sycophants
saying: “And, of course, that
is when he realised the skiing
trip was all but over.” This
was different. It contained a
slew of shocking details,
including Edward proudly
declaring he “didn’t have a
single drop of English blood
— he was pure German” amid
footage of Wallis in her
halitotic swimsuit.
Edward was pen pals
with Hitler; he advised the
Germans to keep bombing
London so we would sue for
peace. Even after he was
made governor of theunlike Simon Pegg, who was
going great guns until he “shat
the bed”, Lamb crows, on a
training exercise. It doesn’t
take a genius to work out that
Cartwright, who is played by
Jack Lowden, will probably
triumph over his sneering
superiors at headquarters,
including Freddie Fox in a
spray-on Barbour as his
nemesis Spider Webb.
Somewhere deep in the
bowels of the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences there is a committee
tearfully kissing a golden Will
Smith statuette. On Sunday
the actor achieved the
impossible: by slapping Chris
Rock live on television he
turned the world’s
most boring,
insufferable,
self-indulgent night
of a thousand dull
stars into something
you might actually
want to watch.Forget George Smiley — Gary Oldman is
now a greasy, grunting slob of an agent
Shadow cabinet Slow Horses
is a neat twist on the genreCAMILLA
LONG
THE
CRITICS12 3 April 2022