Trotting With "Slow Horses"
Jackson Lamb's Demoted Spies Get the Job Done
The last month, I've been embedded in Slough House, the fictional purgatory for incompetent or supremely unlucky British spies. Their ramshackle residence is a slight pun on Slow Horses, the Apple TV+ series, is in its third season, a stream in which I was swept too fast, too soon.
Based on a series of books by British author Mick Herron, Slough House is where the burnouts and the failures are sent to live in misery, most unaware that their return to Regent's House, the gleaming modern headquarters of the domestic spy agency MI5, is a delusional dream. They're done, stuck in a bureaucratic nothing-burger in a house too dilapidated for most rodents. It is there that they are abused and belittled by Slough House's leader, the equally dilapidated Jackson Lamb.
If you haven't seen Slow Horses, I recommend commencing, because it features a career-topping performance by one of the English-speaking world's greatest actors, Gary Oldman.
Oldman plays Jackson Lamb, the slovenly overseer of Slough House. Oldman has been an ace for more than 40 years, so thoroughly invested in his characters you sometimes don't immediately notice that he has brought to the screen most convincing depictions of Sid Vicious, Count Dracula, Winston Churchill, Lee Harvey Oswald, Beethoven, Inspector Gordon in some Batman movies, Sirius Black in some Harry Potter films, Herman J. Mankiewicz in Mank, right up to and including Harry S. Truman in Oppenheimer. His espionage bona fides are also top tier, having played John LeCarre's most prominent character in one of the best adaptations of LeCarre, as George Smiley, in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
If LeCarre created Smiley to show the more realistically mundane, internal treachery of the British spy game, Slow Horses is largely about England's MI5 domestic intelligence agency as a bureaucratic labyrinth, constantly at war with itself. The counterpoint to Lamb is Diana Taverner, whose position is referred to as "First Desk," the cunning, imperious, yet insecure-by-definition ruler of Regent's Park. Taverner plays three-dimensional careerist mental chess matches with her rivals and enemies, usually lackeys and overambitious swine with ties to Westminster, which means both Parliament and the Prime Minister. Kristin Scott Thomas, the British-French actress whose resume and deserved accolades is nearly as long as Oldman's, is perfectly cast as Taverner. Each hi-heeled footstep is a knife thrust; every word, a scalpel. This is what is meant by prestige television: some of the best actors of their era, slipping triumphantly into the slipstream of streaming TV.
Taverner and Lamb have a quiet alliance: There's often a scene of them meeting furtively near the water, their chat tit-for-tat. Neither gets from the other exactly what they want, but usually what they need, in these cloak and dagger games.
There is residual, mostly unspoken respect between Taverner and Lamb; "frenemies" would be the current word, though there are hints of deeper attachments, if Lamb ever bathed. Lamb became the resident advisor for Slough House after a still unrevealed disaster occurred under his watch when he was a "joe": an active field agent, and a great one. He was betrayed by a mole, in Berlin if I have it right. Only Taverner knows how much worse it would have been if Lamb hadn't done whatever he had to do to minimize the carnage that got him relegated from Regent's Park to Slough House.
Lamb and his minions no longer have security clearance to even enter Regent's Park, so wouldn't you know, they often have need for particular files in the basement archives of headquarters. If they are caught on premises, they are subject to the shoot-to-kill brutality of the sadistic physical enforcement crew of MI5, known as "The Dogs." In an episode in season three, this is exactly what happens: some Slough House agents need a file, are locked in the basement archives, and The Dogs are sent to attack, the amount of ammunition dispensed more typical of Mortal Kombat or Call of Duty video games than a literate streaming series.
Jackson Lamb may haze his unwanted protégés, but if they are losers, they are his losers. He is a man who succeeds by his wits, and his smell. By that I mean his instinct, but also his offensive body odor. If James Bond had been captured and kept in a Russian gulag early in the Cold War; had been force-fed five-alarm curries and burgers and gyros for decades; had been denied showers, a change of clothes, and any other human comforts save unlimited amounts of cigarettes and cheap whiskey, he may have emerged from captivity as Jackson Lamb. Instead of a briefcase full of hidden weaponry, as Bond was supplied, Lamb carries his own weapon of destruction literally in his gut: his own poisoned digestive system, and his willful use of what is commonly known as a fart.
Lamb especially enjoys being in a car, as an unwilling guest or as a means of ending the conversation with his too chatty Slough House flunkies, rolling up all the windows and cutting a massive blow of intestinal gas from his arse, leaving the recipients of that odor gasping for escape. I'd want to ask Oldman whether, in the inevitable fart scenes, if he uses a body double; or if an expert farter is dubbed on the soundtrack; or if he takes his method to the brink, and does the farting himself. Anyway you like it, Slow Horses (you must know it's coming) is a gas.
Part of the delight of Slow Horses is the back stories of the agents who end up at Slough House; River Cartwright is the overzealous grandson of a retired, respected former spy chief. Roddy Ho is a brilliant, impossibly egocentric computer hacker who was sent to Slough because he was as obnoxious as he was gifted. In Herron's latest novel, The Secret Hours, a different cast of characters does an investigation into a failed project at MI5, that is as entertaining as any of the Slow Horses books.
But maybe your British policing fancy is more of a "just the facts, ma'am," documentary style drama. I would recommend the minimalist Suspects on Acorn TV and PBS Masterpiece. The first three seasons ran from 2014-2016, and feature just three characters: the detective team of DI Martha Bellamy (Fay Ripley), DS Jack Weston (Damien Molony), and DC Charlie Steele (Claire-Hope Ashitey).
All the rest: the "Suspects," if you will, are just walk-in actors, and like the trio of detectives, they are winging it: the show is unscripted. We know nothing about the home life, dating habits, lifestyle troubles that permeate so many cop shows. In 2014, the first season, Molony told Andrew Collins of the Guardian: "It's not the alcoholic police officer whose wife has left him and he's struggling with rent payments."
Yet each episode has the dramatic tension of a police procedural. They interview a lot of suspects. They hold some of them in lockdown for the 24 hours allowed, then have to let them go. Sometimes, the most obvious suspect is guilty; sometimes, they have nothing to do with the crime.
These characters aren't automatons, though. In one episode, Jack insists that a paranoid-schizophrenic living in a halfway house across from a murder scene has to be the guilty one; his insistence makes Bellamy tell him not to be biased because of what happened to his brother. That's all we know. In another, there are a series of rapes, and one victim is the wife of a high ranking police commissioner. The dogged, fearless junior detective, Charlie, a 26 year old black woman, interviews the commissioner, ignoring his threats and insults. The medical examination of his wife showed bruising on her face that long preceded the sexual attack. They see his insistent control and bullying. He's not the rapist, but they get to cuff him anyway for assault.
In another episode, the usually tactful but firm Jack loses his temper in an interview room. Bellamy reprimands him, keeps him at a distance for a little while. At the end of the episode, Bellamy tells Jack he's a great detective, but "don't be so premenstrual." If they made that up on the spot, that is genius you won't find in the best writer's rooms.