.png)
4 hours ago
2
There’s in media res and then there’s the opening of The Iris Affair. The new caper-drama opens with a man being beaten half to death while a woman (Niamh Algar) looks on unmoved and refusing to hand over a MacGuffin to the man ordering the beating (Tom Hollander, channelling Michael Caine). They are watched by a rather more concerned teenager, Joy (Meréana Tomlinson), who becomes infinitely more concerned when Hollander-Caine’s character realises that jamming a gun into her neck might be a better way to elicit a response from MacGuffin lady. Then he realises he can’t quite bring himself to shoot the child. But he can order his heavy to do so. The hired gun swings around and we cut to Sardinia, Italy, the day before. And that, my friends, is how a prologue should be done. Properly tense, properly disorientating and long enough that you become properly engaged and almost forget that you know nothing about these people. Just don’t kill the kid!
The next few episodes of this eight-part series keep the pedal to the metal but steers with perfect control around timelines (another begins in Florence two years before Sardinia), locations, revelations, multiple twists, double crosses, wigs, costume changes, false identities and set pieces, as a tale as entertaining as it is absurd takes thrillingly preposterous shape.
Algar, you see, is Iris Nixon (when she’s not going by one of those false identities, which includes Joy’s tutor, Miss Brooke), a supergenius and inveterate puzzle solver. She is approached in the wake of one of her greatest successes by an eccentric entrepreneur, Cameron Beck (Hollander), who “loves helping brilliant people do brilliant things”. He takes her into the bowels of his secret lair in Slovenia (“It’s really quite snazzy upstairs”) and shows her “a topological quantum device” that is using 2m qubits of processing power and “non-organic polymers” to create neural pathways and “think thoughts that have yet to be thought”. The machine is “the Before and After” and its name is Charlie Big Potatoes. “Well,” reasons Cameron. “It’s not small potatoes, is it?”
You are either very, very in by this point or very, very out. I’m all in, because to write this sort of stuff takes guts, and to plot and pace it well, too, is a rare talent – and one I like to stretch out in front of and enjoy. Onward!
All Iris has to do is break the code with which Charlie Big Potatoes’ inventor, Jensen Lind (Kristofer Hivju), has hidden the activation sequence that will bring CBP to life. It is somewhere in his closely written, annotated and equationed diary, and Jensen cannot help because he went bonkers some time ago, took an axe to his creation, and now sits mute and unmoving in a wheelchair. “Genius is madness on a good day,” says Cameron, looking at his erstwhile employee fondly. “Jensen ran out of good days.”
Back in the present, it is clear that something in the intervening two years has rather kiboshed the promising partnership between Cameron and his new genius. He is now funding an international hunt to find her, via an online army of interested parties who congregate at the Two Seconds to Midnight website run by Alfie Bird (Sacha Dhawan), to keep track of the prize fund and pick up hints and tips. Frontrunners include some corrupt members of the Italian police’s Special Case Unit (I think the naming budget all went on Charlie Big Potatoes), who track down Iris’s lover (an Italian police officer she has already semi-framed and is blackmailing), then her address, but not – quite – Iris herself. The cat and mouse game that ensues brings back happy memories of Killing Eve, before that caper disappeared up its own fundament. Good times.
The Iris Affair is a rollicking yarn from Neil Cross, the creator of Luther, stylishly and propulsively directed by Terry McDonough and Sarah O’Gorman. Cross’s script is drily witty while avoiding any hint of the cynicism that would spell death for the endeavour. You’ve got to go at this stuff with your whole heart or it doesn’t work at all. And in Niamh Algar, who specialises in women who have had just about enough of everyone’s nonsense – yes, yours, yours and especially yours, goddammit – they have the perfect actor in the role of Iris, who is herself mostly computer and only at her core still willing or capable of allowing human emotions to enter her calculations. I’m hoping it can sustain this wild a ride over its entire eight episodes, but I’m halfway and so far so good. Hurrah for Charlie Big Potatoes and all who search for the sequence to activate his non-organic polymer neural pathways! What fun we shall have!
