- by Floyd Kermode
- The Guardian
- Issue #2130
Do you like a spy story? More specifically, do you like a British spy story? Don’t mind class issues in your face? Step right up, Slow Horses is here for you.
Ever since 1963 The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, The Ipcress File (turned into the very anti-Bond series of Harry Palmer spy movies starring a young Michael Caine) and later on, the grimetastic TV series Callan, the British have been turning out spy movies and TV shows pitched directly against the glamour and conspicuous consumption of the Bond movies.
If you’re a fan of this genre, you know the drill by now: upper-class bosses lord it over and betray the working-class underling who succeeds despite having the odds against them.
Slow Horses fits right into this tradition. A sterling young spy, Jack Lowden (River Cartwright) messes up a training exercise involving ethnic stereotyping causing a minor disaster. He’s demoted to “Slough House,” a surveillance operation in a scungy house on the other side of town from the big rooms full of TV monitors where lucky, successful spies get to do their stuff. There’s a strong hint that Slough House is really just a way of parking the agents who’ve stuffed things up. It’s in London, but the house is nicknamed Slough House because the quality spies say it might as well be in Slough, famed for being unfashionable and lower class.
Yes, this series is full of class consciousness, but as it’s a British TV show, that’s like revealing that a car has wheels. This kind of drama does not have the kind of class consciousness that leads to anyone joining up with the rest of the working class and taking action, mind, more the grumpy but stoic “that’s the way it always is” variety.
To add to the demoted spy’s misery, Slough House is run by Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman, who will definitely represent the UK if irate swearing ever becomes an Olympic sport. He sits around chain-smoking, farting, and swearing, occasionally taking time out to drink whisky amidst piles of dusty rubbish. Oldman spends his every non-drunken moment piling foul-mouthed abuse on the unlucky spies who have to work for him.
Our downtrodden hero thinks he’s on to something though, and is dangerously going off reservation by tracking down an evil racist far right politician.
Could this lead to danger, and clashes with the successful snooty spies, led by a languid and world-weary Kristin Scott-Thomas? As sure as Gary Oldman’s next swearing fit, it could.
Despite the predictability of its attempts to shock, Slow Horses gets you in. We want to see the downtrodden hero succeed, and we want to see the far-right racists and their cynical upper-class exploiters go down in a heap. We know that Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott-Stewart are going to be cynical and nasty, but we don’t know exactly how far they’ll go and who will get hurt while they’re doing it. With all this and a great theme song by, of all people, Mick Jagger, there’s a lot to like.
The in-your-face class stuff, not unknown in British drama, mirrors real life tensions in the UK, where decades of conservative governments have made it increasingly harder for people to come from a working-class background and make acting a profession the way Gary Oldman did.
