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A filthy slob leading a team of MI5 rejects? It’s TV gold

Slow Horses

Apple TV+ ★★★★★

Three Salons At The Seaside

BBC iPlayer ★★★★★

The best drama series of recent years by a country mile, or any other mile of your choosing, is Slow Horses. Or is it The White Lotus? Or is it Succession? OK. One of the best drama series of recent years is Slow Horses, the espionage thriller that has returned for a second series and has reinvented the genre as not only followable – you can’t always rely on following the plot of an espionage thriller – but also extremely funny.

There are never many laughs in a John le Carré. But it’s not a comedy. Or is it? Maybe it is, but it’s of the darkest kind, and teamed with stories that are genuinely high-stakes and characters you care about. It’s not a Johnny English-style knockabout affair, in short.

Based on the books by Mick Herron, it has a cast that’s starrier than a starry sky at its starriest: Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Jonathan Pryce, Jack Lowden and Saskia Reeves – while Mick Jagger, a Herron fan, recorded its theme song, Strange Game. I don’t know how it could get starrier, unless you were to have, for instance, an actor of the calibre of Phil Davis truck up and then almost immediately be bumped off. But that wouldn’t happen. Or would it?

And so it’s back to Slough House, the place where MI5 puts its bad spies out to pasture. They are the slow horses. That is, the screwups and losers who, if given sufficient administrative harassment – usually in the form of endless paperwork – will, MI5 hopes, hand in their cards. The section is headed by Jackson Lamb (Oldman), a man whose grooming habits can’t be called habits, as they never happen, and whose table manners are entirely disgusting.

At one point, River Cartwright (Lowden), the agent who, you may recall from the first season, was demoted after a training exercise went wrong, has to join Lamb at a Chinese restaurant. Cartwright can’t look. He has to avert his gaze as Lamb slurps noodles sprayingly.

The screenplays are by Will Smith. Not the Oscar-punch Will Smith but the one who also wrote for The Thick Of It. So it’s wonderfully sarcastic. When River finds Lamb in the restaurant, which is empty, and asks if he can take the chair opposite, Lamb says: ‘No, sorry. It’s taken.’ ‘By who?’ asks River. ‘Gillian Anderson. She’s in the lav.’ Alas, as with all these things, they’re not as funny on paper. It’s the delivery. I really laughed.

This outing opens in a Soho porn shop where the owner (Davis), a former spy, spots a familiar figure, decides to tail him and is later found dead on a bus. (Yes, he’s in and out in ten minutes flat.) A heart attack, says Diana ‘Lady Di’ Taverner (Scott Thomas), deputy director general of MI5 and head of operations. Murder, insists Lamb. They meet on a bench by the canal in Camden. She says: ‘If this bench marks my coat, I will send you the cleaning bill.’ ‘You can get coats cleaned?’ asks Lamb. ‘Coats cleaned, hair washed, teeth fixed. I know this is all news to you,’ she says. ‘I’ve been busy. I’ve let myself go,’ he explains. I did really laugh. Again.

We’re back in business and it’s hugely entertaining, while the cast appear to be having a ball. The plot is complicated and involves Russian ‘cicadas’ (sleeper agents), yet it’s followable. My one reservation is that the slow horses are not useless. They are smart, quick thinkers. Even the computer guy, Roddy (Christopher Chung), whom everyone disses, is extremely capable. Are we expected to go on and on not noticing that?

On to the strangest event of the week: the BBC documentary from 1994 set in three Blackpool hair salons that has become a sensation. The BBC was prompted to dust off Three Salons At The Seaside and put it up on iPlayer when it was selected as one of the best documentaries of the past 50 years by The Grierson Trust, which promotes documentary film-making.

It’s in the observational style and directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, who would go on to direct Three Girls, as well as episodes of The Crown and Call The Midwife. The three salons are Mary’s Way, Vanity Box and Tricia’s. It was only 28 years ago, which isn’t that long, but it does feel like another age, and you’ll certainly be put in mind of your own mother and her weekly shampoo and set that had to be preserved between appointments. Rain bonnets and bath caps were heavily utilised, as I recall.

The women, who are mostly elderly, are never set up or looked down on. The dialogue is gossipy – ‘Fancy that new couple having new windows in their street… are they having a new door as well?’ – and is sometimes pure Alan Bennett. ‘I didn’t have a fall! I was knocked down outside Kwik Save!’

There is warmth, consolation and mournful accounts of frailty and mortality. They talk about husbands lost – ‘It’s a terrible thing to become a widow, a terrible thing’ – and care homes and colostomies and bypasses, and there’s no self-pity. ‘We’re tough old birds,’ says one. It’s one of those programmes where you could say nothing happens. But everything does.

Tv & Critics

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2022-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

2022-12-04T08:00:00.0000000Z

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