Peter Fincham on a witty drama series that cleverly subverts the spy genre

Word of mouth might be the most powerful form of marketing but it moves at its own pace. When the first series of Slow Horses was released in April 2022, I don’t remember it immediately being appointment viewing. It was on Apple, and Apple know what they’re doing, so I gave it a try, but I got bogged down after a few episodes – I got lost following the plot and couldn’t work out which ones were the baddies.

Also, the production design confused me. Was this the modern world, or had time stood still in the days of lever-arch files and smoking in offices? For a long while I thought it was a period piece. And Gary Oldman’s greasy hair and revolting raincoat – all good character stuff, but a bit revolting? You never saw Rupert Penry-Jones with a hair out of place in Spooks.

It wasn’t long since I’d finished watching Le Bureau, the French spy thriller which remains my favourite French TV series ever. (Yes, ahead of Call My Agent.) And going back further, my literal all-time favourite TV series was Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy with Alec Guinness. Far better, I thought, than the movie remake of it with Gary Oldman who, of course, is the lead in Slow Horses.

So I was a sceptic. Then things changed – people started saying, “Have you seen Slow Horses?’ or “You’ve got to watch Slow Horses” or simply “Slow Horses is my favourite thing on TV.”

Apple obviously realised they were onto something because they commissioned two follow-up series almost as soon as the first one dropped, the result being that what is currently playing is season 3 of a show that premiered only 18 months ago.

Mick Herron, who wrote the original novels, had often been called the “new John Le Carré”, but then so had everyone else who’d written decent spy fiction over the last 50 years. And the conventional wisdom was that Le Carré was, like Eric Clapton in the sixties, essentially God.

This changed a bit when it turned out that, as well as being a deep thinker, former spy and Hampstead intellectual who had achieved literary respectability writing brilliant novels that were a parable for our times, he was also an inveterate shagger. When you imagined him bearing down on willowy young publishing assistants with his pants around his ankles, his halo slipped.

Then I started watching Slow Horses again, and I realised that it has a quality entirely lacking in the entire Le Carré oeuvre: it doesn’t take itself too seriously. It’s funny! Led by Oldman, the cast seem to fully understand the instrinsic absurdity of the genre.

Take Jack Lowden, the brilliant Scottish actor who played road rage murderer Kenneth Noye in The Gold. Lowden plays a character called River Cartwright who is apparently the worst spy ever. He gets beaten up by his own colleagues, rejected by his superiors and patronised by his grandfather (Jonathan Pryce, fresh from his final turn as Prince Philip in The Crown). Cartwright spends a lot of time looking as if he’d rather retrain as a supply teacher, and yet we love him.

Oldman himself has fully embraced the farting, belching repulsiveness of Jackson Lamb (the names of the characters would get rejected on a creative writing course for implausibility, by the way).

Yes, he’s dysfunctional, yes he smells, but so what? He might be a tramp but he’s our tramp. And what he stands for is something indefinable that the other lot, the people who work in Regent’s Park, led by the immaculately turned-out Diana Taversham (Kristin Scott Thomas) don’t.

At its heart Slow Horses is a roundheads-versus-cavaliers drama, and we’re always glad to see the cavaliers – Sam West’s horribly smooth Peter Judd, Freddie Fox’s James “Spider” Webb – get their comeuppance.

Slow Horses also understands that if you’re going to have spies, you need action. It’s a mistake to think that, compared with the obvious example of Ian Fleming, it represents the unglamorous end of MI5. One of my favourite characters is Aimée-Ffion Edwards’ Shirley Dander. She dresses like a student and would pass unnoticed in a scene from a James Bond film. But that’s the point – when the bullets start flying and the tyres start screeching, it’s her everyday ordinariness that makes her so relatable.

Ditto Christopher Chung’s tech-bro-on-the-spectrum Roddy Ho. We’ve seen this character countless times in Hollywood movies, but somehow it comes up fresh and original here.

Where will Slow Horses end up in the pantheon of great TV spy series? Too early to tell. But at the moment it’s well ahead of the pack. If you haven’t started it, go back to the beginning. Hopefully the above will help sort out the goodies v baddies thing that confused me.

And let’s hope Apple keep it coming – there are plenty of novels to go back to. No, I haven’t read them but I might do that too.

Peter Fincham is co-founder of Expectation TV. Previously he was Managing Director of Talkback, Controller of BBC One and Director of Television at ITV.

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