Slow Horses

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.

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.

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.