Slow Horses

Daisy May Cooper and Lenny Rush in first-look images for series two of Am I Being Unreasonable?

Selin Hizli and Daisy May Cooper stand outdoors at night, looking surprised and slightly horrified at something off-camera

Chelsea Peretti (Brooklyn Nine-Nine), Tom Davis (Wonka), Denise Black (Queer as Folk), Jamali Maddix (Never Mind the Buzzcocks) and rapper Kojey Radical will all be making appearances. They’ll be joined by Charlie Cooper, in his first onscreen reunion with This Country co-star Daisy May Cooper.

TV dramas score sound and vision with music soundtracks

Saskia Reeves lifts up a chess piece, halfway through a game

Listen with even half an ear and it’s obvious that TV music soundtracks have upped their game in recent times. This year alone, Hans Zimmer’s score for The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Federico Jusid’s work on A Gentle­man in Moscow jostle other worthy contenders to show how music can significantly elevate a series.

Slow Horses trailer and release date revealed by Apple TV

Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb holds a 99 ice cream with strawberry sauce and a flake as he walks down a British street

The drama stars Gary Oldman (Oppenheimer) as misanthropic has-been Jackson Lamb. Despite his brains, his lot in life is to head up the ‘Slow Horses’, a not-so-affectionate nickname for the MI5 department where promising careers go to die.

The series three trailer sees Lamb saunter into a church with his usual bad attitude and worse dress sense. He is informed by Ingrid Tearney (Sophie Okonedo) that the Slow Horses are expected to go up against a MI5 team gone rogue. To make matters worse, Lamb’s brother-in-arms Catherine Standish (Saskia Reeves) has been kidnapped.

Apple to its core: the slow and steady rise of Apple TV+

Two statistics released in recent months have made people sit up and pay attention to the burgeoning progress made by the streaming service Apple TV+. In May, the Jason Sudeikis-fronted football comedy drama, Ted Lasso, became the first Apple show to feature in Barb’s SVoD average UK monthly audience top 20.

It came in at number 18, with around 963,000 viewers – well below the most-watched (Netflix’s Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, seen by around 3 million) but a milestone nonetheless.

Will Smith on Slow Horses, working with Gary Oldman and controlling the swear count

Slow Horses writer Will Smith

Having started his career in stand-up comedy before moving into screenwriting, his television career levelled up when he started working with legendary Scottish satirist Armando Iannucci in the mid-noughties. This collaboration led to a spot in the writers' room on Iannucci's seminal political comedy The Thick of It, where Smith also ended up on screen as Phil, the geeky and pompous special adviser.