PICK OF THE WEEK
SLOW HORSES, SEASON FOUR
Apple TV+
It has been quite something to behold the speed with which this down-at-heel spy drama has become a national institution. The first season premiered as recently as April 2022, and yet it is hard to imagine our televisual culture without Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, the crumpled, embittered MI5 veteran, and his fellow screw-up spooks at Slough House.
Adapted from Mick Herron’s Spook Street, the fourth season opens with a car bomb at a shopping centre, and a lethal shooting at the home of David Cartwright (Jonathan Pryce), a legend of the service, now suffering from dementia. Is his grandson, River (Jack Lowden) – one of Lamb’s agents – the victim?
Cue an action-packed six-episode thriller that embraces a shadowy circle of assassins, a high-street arms dealer, poisonous politics at “the Park” (Herron’s fictional location for MI5’s head office) and the unearthing of dark secrets from the service’s past.
Part of the genius of Slow Horses lies in its sheer bathos. Computer ace Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) thinks he has a new online girlfriend; Marcus Longridge (Kadiff Kirwan) can’t stop gambling; Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) is driven mad by Marcus. Meanwhile, there are new arrivals: JK Coe (Tom Brooke), a taciturn figure in a hoodie who claims to be an expert in “psych eval”, and Moira Tregorian (Joanna Scanlan), who has been banished from the Park to work for Lamb and cannot believe the stench and mess at Slough House.
Oldman’s performance is, again, riveting: a mixture of Falstaffian flatulence and resilient Cold War guile. His duelling with Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) – still denied the First Desk top job at the Park, this time by the hapless bureaucrat Claude Whelan (James Callis) – is at the heart of the show: as much as Taverner disdains Lamb, she knows how useful he is.
Though Herron’s novels emerged from the aftermath of 7/7, the series feels supremely well-suited to the post-Brexit world, with its landscape of shoddiness, disappointment and public sector decline.
The Britain of Slow Horses is not the Britain of George Smiley, much less of James Bond. Unmissable television – already renewed, I’m delighted to say, for a fifth season.
FILM
BETWEEN THE TEMPLES
Selected cinemas
Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman) is a cantor in upstate New York who has lost his voice since the accidental death of his novelist wife and has moved back in with his mothers (Caroline Aaron and Dolly De Leon).
In a dive bar, he encounters his grade-school music teacher, Carla Kessler O’Connor (Carol Kane, superb) who surprises him by requesting instruction for a belated bat mitzvah – denied to her when she was a girl by her communist parents. Ben agrees, and, conscious of Carla’s failing health, persuades Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel) to bring the ceremony forward. Meanwhile, the rabbi is hoping that Ben will court his daughter Gabby (Madeleine Weinstein).
Instead, a May-December relationship blossoms between Ben and Carla that instantly recalls Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971). Is their bond platonic, or something more? Nathan Silver’s delightful movie about loneliness and belonging navigates the shoals of their developing love with compassion, wit and delicacy. An indie gem.
TV
SHERWOOD, SEASON TWO
BBC One; iPlayer
Remarkably, the second season of James Graham’s drama series, set in his native Nottinghamshire, is even better than the first. Ten years have passed, and Ian St Clair (David Morrissey) has retired from the police and assumed the role of regional “anti-violence tsar”. Lesley Manville is back, too, as Julie, the widow of murdered NUM activist, Gary Jackson; as is Lorraine Ashbourne, compelling as Daphne Sparrow, the matriarch of a local drug-dealing family.
As if to reverse the flow of time, the ruthless tycoon Franklin Warner (Robert Lindsay) plans to reopen the mine – a proposal resisted by green protesters and the young sheriff, Lisa Waters (Ria Zmitrowicz), who soon discovers that she, her wife and their child are in mortal danger.
When an underworld blood feud erupts, St Clair is drawn back in to solve the case – and is dismayed by the code of violence that has taken such a savage hold in this deindustrialised, demoralised community. Monica Dolan is especially good as the fearsome gang chieftain Ann Branson.
It’s a measure of Graham’s talent that the series is as pacy and gripping as it is, while still exploring deeper themes such as the relationship between geography and destiny; the collapsed faith in institutions; the meaning of honour; and the crassness of “levelling up” (“tossing some red meat to the red wall,” as the sheriff puts it).
I keep reading that the golden age of prestige TV is over, but it looks pretty sprightly to me.
BOOK
THE ART OF POWER: MY STORY AS AMERICA’S FIRST WOMAN SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE by Nancy Pelosi
Simon & Schuster
If Kamala Harris wins the US presidency in November, former speaker Nancy Pelosi will go down in history as the Brutus that dispatched Joe Biden’s Caesar and paved the way for a nominee who could deny Donald Trump a second term.
Yet – as this very readable memoir makes clear – that act of political euthanasia was only one chapter of many in her remarkable story. First elected to Congress in 1987, she has twice held the office of speaker, the first woman to do so, and has long acted as the Democratic Party’s fixer-in-chief.
Her accounts of congressional antics during the financial crisis and the agonising passage of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act are eye-opening, but the most chilling chapter recounts the inside story of January 6 and what it felt like to be one of the targets of the murderous mob that, incited by Trump, broke into the US Capitol. To be read alongside Molly Ball’s excellent biography.
