Slow Horses, Season 4, Apple TV+ review - Gary Oldman returns as the 'gross and inappropriate' Jackson Lamb

News reaches us that Gary Oldman has mysteriously been vetoed from playing George Smiley in a new film version of Smiley’s People, despite his Oscar-nominated performance as John le Carre’s wiley spymaster in 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Oldman’s people have described this decision as “the damnedest thing”.

But never mind that now, because Oldman is back to play Jackson Lamb in the latest instalment of Slow Horses. Indeed, perhaps it’s this performance which has soured the le Carre estate’s view of him, since Lamb is a bit like Smiley’s portrait in the attic, growing increasingly grotesque and anti-social. MI5’s new head of security, Emma Flyte (Ruth Bradley), gets her first experience of the unsightly, foul-smelling Lamb, and isn’t impressed. “You are gross and inappropriate,” she declares icily, following another of Lamb’s farting episodes.

You have to admire her mastery of understatement. With his lank, greasy hair, bloated physique and addiction to alcohol and junk food, Lamb looks like something that got dumped outside with the garbage and which the bin-men refused to touch. Throw in his inability to say anything which isn’t abusive or sarcastic and you have one of the most anti-social characters ever seen in a TV drama. Though odious computer whizz Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung), a man with the warmth and empathy of a murderous sex-pest, runs him a distant second.

But of course it’s the central paradox of Slow Horses that although Lamb has been exiled to the backwater of Slough House, a sort of land-based prison hulk for assorted reprobates and wrong ’uns from spy-world, he’s a bit of a genius behind his elaborately repulsive exterior. Indeed, the whole premise (derived from Mick Herron’s novels) is an exercise in misdirection. The secret services are awash with misfits and weirdos, since “normal” people wouldn’t want the job. It’s just that this lot lack that vital ingredient of careerist self-preservation which is so crucial for climbing the treacherous career ladder (pictured above, Jack Lowden as River Cartwright).

The way Slough House is specifically situated across from the Barbican in the City of London (Carthusian Street is regularly pinpointed) roots the show in a plausible sense of place, avoiding the common TV-drama trick of stitching together various unrelated locations. Meanwhile the depiction of the power-game shenanigans going on overhead, across town at the service’s Regents Park nerve centre, is another of its many joys.

Kristin Scott Thomas (pictured above with Oldman) is back as the imperious Diana Taverner, fiercely protective of her professional turf, but now having to contend with the new “First Desk”, Claude Whelan. This is a nifty little performance by James Callis, who portrays Whelan as needy and shamelessly ingratiating, while remorselessly planning his upward career path. Political to the core, he understands that his spineless incompetence needn’t be a handicap if he can play the game skilfully enough.

The story is another instance of the past coming back to haunt the present. The action is kicked off by a car bomber blowing up the Westacres shopping centre in London, and the driver’s identity turns out to be a fake secret service ID issued three decades earlier. This interfaces with the attempted murder of retired MI5 veteran David Cartwright (Jonathan Pryce), now suffering from confusion and memory loss.

Long story short, the old boy finds a strange man in his country cottage and blows him away with a shotgun. He’s distraught when he thinks he’s just killed his grandson, River (Jack Lowden). This all serves to kick the plot into overdrive, and we find ourselves rolling across rural France to the faintly sinister ghost town of Lavande. Here, it seems, many of the actual or metaphorical bodies are buried...

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