Forget the romantic, Bond-esque notion of the suave spy with fast wheels and even faster women on tap. Closer to “spook” reality may be the greasy, flatulent slob in a flasher mac.
A grubby, clandestine trade based on betrayal and secrecy deserves Jackson Lamb more than James Bond; and Gary Oldman continues to sport Lamb’s grotty, kebab-infused raincoat with distinction in the six-part third series of Slow Horses (Apple TV+).
Reluctant sometime ally Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), deputy director general of MI5, has been demoted as the British secret service faces a shake-up. And despite some dirty opening deeds done on Europe’s eastern edge, this season’s tale of treachery brings the Slow Horses’ enemies closer to home than previously, proving no one at HQ can be trusted, especially at the top.
Disparagingly named because they are a team of professional failures, Lamb’s ragtag agents, still part of MI5 but comprising a flock of espionage-family black sheep, must shelve their own bitchy differences to take on a far more powerful force, one set on obliterating them.
Not that melding into a team the likes of condescending, glory-hunting hacker Roddy (Christopher Chung) and part-time junkie Shirley (Aimée-Ffion Edwards) comes with instructions.
The upshot is what you might call a Gunfight at the OK Document Depository (actually a Cold War bunker) and beyond that requires all the guile and spy’s fieldwork expertise the seasoned Lamb can summon to keep his charges alive.
More high-end crime in London in The Chelsea Detective on BBC First
More high-end crime in London in The Chelsea Detective on BBC First
The brutally funny Lamb, so dishevelled he’s mistaken for a tramp, is the masterful creation of Mick Herron, from whose novels Slow Horses is adapted.
For his part, Herron is fast becoming a surname only – one in the hallowed company of Greene, Deighton and le Carré. If they haven’t discovered him already, fans of the espionage genre should saddle up.
Moments of madness
Rather than Love in the Time of Cholera, as Gabriel García Márquez might have put it, this is love in the time of post-Covid-19 pandemic. Barbra Streisand, on the other hand, would have expressed it more succinctly as “the way we were”.
At the Moment (Netflix) offers sharp reflections on how humans behave when abruptly disconnected from other people and how, after having been obliged to stay at home and render themselves abnormally solitary, they gradually rediscover how to be part of a tribe – and with luck, meet tribesfolk with benefits.
A Taipei-based, 10-part anthology featuring characters who cleverly recur at unexpected junctures, At the Moment flaunts no fewer than five directors, including Hong Kong’s Norris Wong Yee-lam.
It stars, among many others, Nikki Hsieh Hsin-ying, Kelly Lin Hsi-lei, Yang Ming-wei, Gingle Wang, Kuo Hsueh-fu and Berant Zhu in a broad spectrum of (mis)adventures revolving around an event that already feels strangely distant.
All 10 instalments show how virus plus lockdown can equal radical shifts in personal perspective: a flirty hairstylist falls for a blind passenger on a commuter train; a group of misfits of varying degrees star in a hit, romance-oriented reality television show and expose the insincerity of on-screen feelings (as well as the deep fakery of the show’s production values); a food delivery man from Hong Kong spends a chaotic evening with a masseuse and blunders farcically towards a happy ending, if not a happy finish; an alleged alien and a bestselling novelist who believes she’s a time-travelling tourist strike up a relationship across the hallway of their building.
Then again, post-turbulence, some characters yearn for nothing more than a steady, relatively plodding existence that promises such repeated daily excitement as eating breakfast together or talking about familiar subjects. Did the virus shrink our ambitions as much as our geographical borders?