Has there ever been a character on television that you feel you can smell through the screen in the way you can with Jackson Lamb, Gary Oldman’s fantastically flatulent, gloriously gluttonous, hard-drinking, lank-haired, chain-smoking spy genius in Slow Horses (Apple TV+)?
Well, one candidate might be Roddy Ho, tech nerd at Slough House, Lamb’s collection of secret service “losers, misfits and boozers”, as Mick Jagger’s drawlingly compelling theme tune calls the slow horses. However, the scent emanating from Roddy’s £200 designer label shirt would probably be a virulently pungent aftershave. Eau de Vulgar, perhaps.
Christopher Chung’s Ho is centre stage in series five, with the antenna of the horses pinging at the fact that he has acquired an extremely good-looking girlfriend. Ho does not tend to have girlfriends, or if a miracle happens, they dump him pretty quickly, after which he embarks on a lengthy and fruitless stalking campaign (this is information gleaned from official MI5 records, by the way). So yes, the hot woman seen dancing with him in a nightclub is certainly fishy.
In his last outing in charge, lead writer Will Smith has made a few changes to London Rules, the Mick Herron book on which this is based, but the essentials are happily in place. The new batch of conspirators attacking London were, we suspect, meant to start with the road traffic death of Ho — but his life is saved by the quick-wittedness of the ever-brilliant Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards), who Roddy then blames for breaking his headphones while pushing him away from a moving van.
