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3 hours ago
8
I always forget how good Emma Thompson is. That is partly because she tends to work in film rather than television and I last made it to the cinema in the mid-90s. It is also partly because she is always so … how can I put this? … so Emma Thompson in all her interviews and award speeches that I can’t envisage her putting herself away enough for Proper Acting.
But of course she can – and does as the private investigator Zoë Boehm, a woman of flint and diamond, in the new eight-part thriller Down Cemetery Road, Morwenna Banks’ adaptation of Mick Herron’s debut novel of the same name. Herron has since become known for Slow Horses, the series about the busted spies in Slough House pushing paper under the world-wearied eye of Jackson Lamb, ever hoping to get back in the game. Gary Oldman, who plays Lamb, has become a sort of niche national treasure for his portrayal of the beleaguered antihero whom we like to think lives in all of us. I hope the same happens with Thompson/Boehm, because both are magnificent. Boehm is a role model for ladies everywhere, but especially those hampered by a lack of innate cynicism or by a people-pleasing nature (or early training). Look at Boehm and learn. Observe the barren wasteland in which she stands, the field of fucks she has left to give. “I don’t drink prosecco and I don’t bond emotionally,” she tells a new client and one of the show’s many delights is that this remains almost entirely true.
The new client is the art restorer Sarah Tucker, played by the glorious Ruth Wilson. Sarah is another woman who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, with the notable exception of her investment banker husband, Mark (Tom Riley). The couple are in the middle of a nightmarish dinner party with a potential new client for Mark, a rich prick called Gerard Inchon (Tom Goodman-Hill, having a whale of a time with a character given some of the best lines in a drama stuffed with great ones). They are joined by Sarah’s friend “Wigwam” (Sinead Matthews), a hippy with four kids (“Are you starting a cult?” inquires Gerard), and her newish partner Rufus (Ken Nwosu), when a neighbour’s house explodes, killing two adults and injuring a child.
Sarah goes to visit the child, Dinah, in hospital. The strange hostility of the staff, who refuse to let her see the little girl and whom she later sees being bundled into a car and spirited away, leads to an obsession – there is a suggestion of mental heath struggles in Sarah’s past – with finding her. The quest brings Sarah into contact with the private investigator team of Zoë and her hapless and hopelessly devoted husband, Joe (Adam Godley). Joe begins to look into it.
Could Dinah’s disappearance have anything to do with the storyline unfolding elsewhere? Namely, at the Ministry of Defence, where nervy handler Hamza Malik (Adeel Akhtar) is being hauled over the coals by his boss, C (Darren Boyd, cast against type to brilliant effect, in a terrifying part that requires all his comedy chops, given that he has almost as many great lines as Gerard). It was not a gas leak that took out the house but a bomb planted by a borderline rogue agent referred to by C variously as “Wreck-It Ralph” and “the Twisted Firestarter”. He must be brought back under control and the consequences of his mistakes covered up, along with the mistake he seems to have been trying to cover up for others. We all look at the shaking Malik. No one’s hopes are high.
Down Cemetery Road is great stuff. There is not a wasted moment, not a wasted word. Everything is there for a reason (especially Fehinti Balogun as Amos, the bridge between Malik and his mad or bad and certainly dangerous to know agent, and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as the man caught on Mark’s phone camera hanging around the blast site). The plot thickens at pace and the twists are worth waiting for. It smooths out the book’s few technical problems and infelicities nicely – bringing Zoë to the fore much earlier, for example – and retains all the dry humour and acuity for which fans of Slow Horses will surely have been hoping. And – a side issue, I know, but for those of us who can barely look at Jackson Lamb because of the fine layer of filth that shrouds him, an important one – Zoë looks as if she has fully mastered basic hygiene and laundry. Who could ask for more?
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Down Cemetery Road is on Apple TV
