Slow Horses, Series 5, Apple TV+ review - terror, trauma and impeccable comic timing

Fifth time around, Slow Horses continues to show the rest of the field a clean pair of heels. Or hooves. The adventures of Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman) and his peculiar little band of secret service misfits have come to exert a fierce stranglehold on the viewing public. Horses must be perilously close to being officially declared a cult.

Anyway, this fifth series is derived from Mick Herron’s novel London Rules, and the specific London-ness of the show continues to be an indispensable component in its success. Where TV drama often fakes up a fictional not-quite-anywhereland, Horses remains defiantly rooted in its base on Aldersgate Street opposite the Barbican in London EC1, with diversions to Regent’s Park from where the imperious Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) controls her MI5 empire. The grime and squalor of the Horses’ HQ, mirroring Lamb’s disgusting habits and lack of personal hygiene, has proved strangely alluring to viewers. For instance, in this series, he manages to emit a super-fart which successfully clears a room-full of people in double-quick time.After opening with a massacre of innocent bystanders by a lone gunman, the show brings us to an even more unpalatable scenario, which is that of computer nerd Roddy Ho (Christopher Chung) having a seemingly passionate affair with the outlandishly glamorous Tara (Hiba Bennani, pictured above with Chung). Ho is a scorched-earth empathy-free zone, notable for his spectacular charm-deficit and absence of social skills, so his sudden acquisition of a hot girlfriend instantly raises all kinds of red flags among his colleagues. Shirley Dander (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) is convinced Ho has been targeted in a honeytrap plot, but Ho has another explanation. Tara lusts after him, he proclaims, because he has “the finest mind and finest body in MI5”.

Of course, not everyone agrees. Anyway, as the story unfolds, we meet a gang of terrorists of uncertain origin who have all kinds of despicable stunts up their sleeves. They will, for instance, perpetrate an outrage in the penguin enclosure at London Zoo. They also have their sights on slimy, cliche-spouting London mayor Zafar Jaffrey (Nick Mohammed), as well as his gammon-esque opponent Dennis Gimball (Christopher Villiers).

But the mechanics of the plot aside, Horses excels when it lays on a dramatic set-piece, and there are some choice specimens here. One of the most fun characters is MI5’s Claude Whelan (James Callis), seemingly an ineffectual fop until he finds himself under scrutiny by the tabloid press. He summons the full range of his secret powers to dredge up a wealth of incriminating evidence to discredit his accusers, evidently far more energised in the cause of self-preservation than he is by saving the nation (pictured below, the Slow Horses collective).The show is peppered with Jackson Lamb highlights, but he has a particularly fine moment when he outwits the spooks from the Park by spinning an outrageously horrific tale from the old Cold War days, which is in fact an ingenious set of coded instructions to his staff. And the moment when an unsuspecting character is felled by a falling tin of paint has been worked out with the painstaking comic exactitude of Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin. Love it!

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