Slow Horses, season 3, Apple TV+ review: Gary Oldman's spy drama deserves a bigger audience

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Slow Horses, season 3, Apple TV+ review: Gary Oldman's spy drama deserves a bigger audience

By Anita Singh, Arts and Entertainment Editor

3 minutes

Is Slow Horses the perfect TV drama? I think it might be, you know. It’s clever. It’s fun. It combines the action scenes of a spy thriller with the joy of seeing a marvellously greasy Gary Oldman contemplating washing his armpits with Fairy Liquid.

It’s on Apple TV+, which most people don’t have, but honestly – consider taking out a subscription just for this. No, I’m not getting a kickback. I just wish more people could see it. Really, I wish it was on the BBC so everyone could see it, but BBC dramas tend to take themselves extremely seriously these days. They’d never have Oldman in his yellowing vest and underpants, submitting to an MI5 medical and telling his doctor that he has quit smoking. “Really?” asks the somewhat sceptical doctor. “Yeah,” replies Lamb. “I haven’t had one for 27 minutes.” As for his alcohol intake? “I dunno. Two-three bottles a week.” “Wine?” “Whisky.”

Lamb heads up the team of disgraced spies at Slough House. One of the hallmarks of Mick Herron’s books, on which the show is based, is that these “quarter-wits” (as Kristin Scott Thomas’s elegant security chief puts it) are as far from the world of Bourne and Bond as you could get. But this third series – based on Herron’s novel Real Tigers – opens with slick scenes that would not look out of place in either franchise, taking us from a well-appointed apartment via water taxis across the Bosphorus to a car chase through the streets of Istanbul.

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Then we’re back to Britain, where one of the Slough House team is kidnapped. Lamb is the first to realise that his colleague is missing, because despite outward appearances (“You put me on a treadmill, you’ll be done for manslaughter,” he warns the doctor) he’s sharp as a tack. As River Cartwright, leading man Jack Lowden brings the energy and fulfils the action-hero role, albeit with a great deal of self-deprecation.

The drama makes great use of its London setting, filmed in and around the Barbican, and there are funny little touches that only a British show would include, such as the bungling head of security at MI5’s Regent’s Park headquarters dunking a KitKat Chunky into his cup of tea. As ever, the writing is top quality, particularly the insults. “Keep walking until you get to the sea,” Scott Thomas says, “and when you get to the sea, keep walking with your mouth open.”

Slow Horses season 3 is on Apple TV+ from Friday 1 December