Slow Horses; England ’Til I Die

“As with previous seasons, the big joke is that Lamb and his crew at Slough House – effectively a banishment room for underperforming spies – are secret agents who should be living lives of international mystery. Instead, they are condemned to a bureaucratic purgatory straight out of Samuel Beckett. Of course, a single joke cannot sustain a long-running streaming series. Not even when Apple is paying the bills. Where Slow Horses goes above and beyond is combining that withering view of government institutions with fantastically convoluted plotting. That remains the case in series six. The action begins with an excruciating death and a moment of reckoning for Cartwright as he deals with a bereavement. This season also sees the return of Olivia Cooke as MI6 agent Sid Baker – who was shot and apparently killed all the way back in episode two.”
Ed Power, Telegraph

“Hapless agent River Cartwright (Jack Lowden) was organising the funeral for his grandfather, played by Jonathan Pryce. But is the veteran spook really in the spirit world now? As River’s malodorous boss Jackson Lamb pointed out: ‘We’ve all faked our own death at one time or another.’ Slow Horses has always gloried in its grubbiness, and Gary Oldman, as Lamb, is wallowing in the character’s grotty, unshaven, sweat-stained rancidness. One scene, where he tries to consume a dish of sloppy pasta and ends up with most of it on his chin and his shirt, is genuinely revolting.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail

“The killers keep coming and the slow horses, mainly River, chaotically run away – which often requires the murderers to suddenly become incompetent in order for the story not to end prematurely. With the vicious banter not quite as piercing as it used to be and the parallels to real political issues also not as piquant – besides some stuff about Russia – it becomes more noticeable when tropes like trained killers who can’t shoot straight creep in. Having cast actors of the calibre of [MyAnna] Buring and [Kyle] Soller to play the new foes, the show inexplicably never gets round to getting to know them. Also struggling to make an impact is Harry Lloyd, who looks as if he could be superb as a malevolent media mogul who is blackmailing MI5 boss Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas), but never gets a proper chance to show us. Slow Horses is still slick and confident enough, and it helps itself by casting Lenny Rush, an actor who immediately improves anything he’s in, as a civilian caught in this year’s crossfire. But it might have run its course.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian

“Slow Horses is one of the simplest pleasures in modern TV. It has the soap operatic quality of Spooks, just with Oscar-worthy lead actors and Apple’s deep-pocketed budgets. The show is beautifully shot, the action sequences well choreographed, and the tension executed with aplomb. It might not be much interested in reinvention or evolution, but this is prestige entertainment at its absolute sturdiest.”
Nick Hilton, Independent

““Is this the Ukraine-friendliest town in the UK?” a headline in The Guardian asked in 2022. The affluent, leafy town in question was Crowborough in East Sussex, and the article noted that it was exceptionally welcoming to Ukrainian refugees. Four years on, Crowborough and its residents are the subject of a documentary, but the mood is rather different. England ’Til I Die (Channel 4) is the unsettling, depressing story of how a government decision to use a nearby former military training camp to house up to 600 male asylum seekers has ruptured community cohesion and caused locals to be at loggerheads. One resident says it was once a “beautiful, sleepy little town” where you felt safe. “That peace has gone.””
Carol Midgley, The Times

“If it wasn’t so horrific, parts of England ’Til I Die could almost feel like something written by Chris Morris. One woman launches into an extended rant about burqas, halal meat and dogs, while three men from the asylum centre whom Tomsett and a group of other men follow down the road turn out to be Iranian Christians on their way to church. [Liam] Tomsett and his Crowborough Says No collaborator Gary believe that their actions are “a fuck-you to the government”. But it seems the people they’re truly hurting are their own neighbours; as one anonymous contributor says, it’s a “really horrible feeling” knowing that people in the town are protesting against others that look like her. Unsettling aerial camera work only emphasises the sense that Crowborough is becoming something of a strange and unknowable place, just not in the way that Tomsett claims.”
Hannah J Davies, The Guardian

“Migrant camps being forced on to quiet communities without consultation is a good subject for a documentary. The pull of the far-Right, fuelled by social media, is too. This film teases enough of both to be a fascinating watch, but it can’t manage to separate the two.”
Anita Singh, Telegraph

“In effect, what we have, then, is a documentary illuminating a problem that pretty much everybody already knows exists. If England ’Til I Die is being sold as a study of a man’s descent into radicalism, then the end result is ultimately something far more banal. It is a portrait of malevolent idiocy, of empty, petty anger. It is a programme bereft of optimism, one that really does make you feel like this country is broken. That it is, of course. The question is where do we go from here?”
Louis Chilton, Independent