rashbre central: Strange Games : Slow Horses S1 and start of S2

Thursday 8 December 2022

Strange Games : Slow Horses S1 and start of S2

I should have posted about Slow Horses sooner, but the second series (aka Dead Lions) has just popped up on Apple TV. 

It's been sympahetically redrafted for television and has some cracking actors including a shapeshifting Gary Oldman and ice-cold calculating Kirsten Scott Thomas. There's a London atmosphere often in close so the exact setting isn't immediately obvious unless you've been there. 

Plenty of the action takes place at night or in dimly-lit bars or cellars, yet the filming of the series is like the olden days of film noir when they knew how to put haloes around people and brighten up the pieces where there was action. Even an out of focus baby alarm is dramatically filmed. I really appreciate that they've taken some care over making the dark parts watchable. It is the same with the narrative jump edits. Something as simple as going up some stairs will have two 'up closes' and a flicker of a long view between them. Nice and almost non-linear - they didn't have to, but they did anyway and all the better for it. 

 Then there's the blend of dialogue between serious spy talk and bits of ribbing banter and occasionally daft scenes that just get sprung - like the jammed car CD playing Coldplay.

I can see the setup of the Slough House department with its manilla civil service folders is similar to the way the off-the-books setup is played in Killing Eve, and I wonder whether there were any inspirational points borrowed between them? 

 Gary Oldman, who has also played Le Carre's George Smiley, seems to take a delight in this world turned upside down view of espionage. Put all the slow horses (presumed failures) together and rain down often un-PC abuse upon them. A sure fire formula, but I'm not sure for what, exactly. 
 
I'm enjoying this series: 
  1. Because it forced me to go back to the first series and watch it all over again. 
  2. Because we are now only on book 2, and I'm eagerly waiting for episode 3 to drop. 
  3. Because I know there are at least five more books in the Mick Herron series. Oh yes, and Mick Jagger wrote and performs the theme. 

1 comment:

MI6 said...

I wish librarians luck as in many ways they are the unsung heroes of democracy when they get things right. By way of example, my librarian, her disguise for being a secret agent, classified The Ipcress File by Len Deighton as a cookbook and then catalogued Mick Herron’s Slow Horses under Farmyard Animals until her handler saw what she had done. He told her she must take things slowly and not trot or canter let alone gallop around the library.

He recommended she read the fact based spy thriller, Beyond Enkription in TheBurlingtonFiles series by Bill Fairclough (real life MI6 codename JJ) aka Edward Burlington as part of her CIA induction program, and now she can recognise a spy when she sees one. Since then she is being made to study Charles Dickens having left a poignant note for her handler before trying to resign from the CIA. It read "If I knew as little of life as that, I'd eat my hat and swallow the buckle whole". Poor girl ... she's even being sued for copyright infringement by Dickens’ ancestors.