Like everyone with an Apple TV+ account, the most pleasurable six hours of my Christmas break were spent in the esteemed company of Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb, the dog-eared, moth-eaten protagonist of Slow Horses. His propulsive drinking and smoking habits reminded me of less cautious, happier days. That grubby overcoat satiated an urgent December need to divorce myself from the reductive filters of positivity, tinsel and gloss. The scheduling of the show’s fabulously preposterous climax over the festivities couldn’t have felt any more prudent, turning Lamb into the ghost of Christmas never.
I first saw Oldman playing Sid Vicious in Alex Cox’s Sid and Nancy as an errant 15-year-old with a burgeoning curiosity to look underneath the grubby bonnet of life. He captivated me entirely, his opening run establishing Oldman with perfect film star precision without destabilising any of his natural working-class charm. Next, he introduced me to the mesmerising world of Joe Orton in Prick Up Your Ears, the first and possibly only gay man on screen I ever truly loved.
Those early roles now feel like a dress rehearsal for his professional curtain call. Oldman has said that Jackson Lamb will be the last role he plays, the Sleaford Mods of MI5 thrillers, preternaturally in tune with a snippy, agitated, expletive-addled retort to our collective urge for niceness. Beware anyone brandishing the suspect hashtag “be kind”. They only ever seem to mean #bemorelikeme.
Oldman is one of the few actors I will watch a film on account of. His mid-Nineties directing and writing debut, Nil By Mouth, was so perfect in its fastidious depth of understanding how human beings work, he didn’t bother doing either again for a decade. He was a corner of London I actively wanted to investigate, despite being brought up in a Manchester that informed me repeatedly not to trust anyone down here, because nobody said thank you to bus drivers, a Northern truism I’ve since found to be almost entirely fictional (nobody queues though; that one stands).
Slow Horses is a blistering, witty London spy thriller set among the rejects, like John le Carré ordering a family bucket at KFC or James Bond going for a snifter at Wetherspoons
For those not familiar with Oldman’s latest screen incarnation, Slow Horses is a blistering, witty London spy thriller set among the rejects, like John le Carré ordering a family bucket at KFC or James Bond going for a snifter at Wetherspoons. Jackson Lamb presides over a feral bunch of agents, numbering the preposterously handsome, if forever brow-beaten redhead River Cartwright, and an almost complete deck of functioning addicts circumnavigating booze, coke and gambling. Lamb’s Slow Horses rarely get to have sex. It’s just not that kind of bureau.
Set in a raft of pleasingly familiar locations, highlighting the success deficit between east and west London, the show has made a geographic icon of one anonymous sliver of Goswell Road, just north of the Museum of London, where the Barbican abruptly stops being so studiously tidy and a vintage launderette reminds you of one of London’s romantic heritage aesthetics. City planning is afoot to turn nearby into a London equivalent of New York’s High Line, with the same architect helming the project, so enjoy its bleak neighbourliness while you can. Lamb certainly seems to. What I love most about the city’s recognisably unfiltered new local hero is his full embrace of failure. We live in a city that is built on the patina of success. One of the things that most shocked me about London when I first arrived in my mid-twenties was how quick people were to shout about their own brilliant achievements.
This year we will see a general election in which two men will battle over the falsehood that their gang alone have the solutions to a succession of grave problems. Jackson Lamb wouldn’t have a second of it. He’d get on with the problems at hand, usefully insult someone, stroke his greasy chin and crack on. It feels like enough.
While we all caught a viral dose of darts mania this week, I was reminded once again of this new patron saint of failure, not least because Luke “The Nuke” Littler has a kebab named after him at his favourite St Helens takeaway. That’s very Jackson Lamb behaviour. So is coming second, in anything. That’s the thing about failure. Once you greet it as a useful fundamental and life’s most familiar ingredient, then the very occasional taste of success will be all the sweeter.
New Year resolutions are nonsense. But if we must embrace them, then being a bit more Jackson Lamb is at least a novel place to start.
