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SLOW HORSES, S3 We know the drill by now. Each season of 'Slow Horses' begins with a big, pulsating set piece. But this time around it's not occurring in Blighty but in Istanbul where Sope Dirisu's head of security at the UK Embassy Sean Donovan is spying on Katherine Waterston's MI5 agent Alison Dunn. She is suspected of trying to leak information that could be highly damaging to British intelligence. The only problem is Sean and Alison are also lovers and when she discovers he is spying on her a cat and mouse game around Istanbul ensues as he tries to intercept a stolen document she is going to pass on to a mystery man. Losing him during the chase at dusk, Sean eventually catches up with where she is at an empty football stadium, only to discover Alison has been thrown off the building. A year later, Sean resurfaces in London at an AA meeting that Saskia Reeves' Slough House office administrator Catherine Standish attends regularly. Posing as an alcoholic name...

SLOW HORSES, S2 Having avoided shouldering the blame for a false flag operation that went badly wrong in the show's inaugural season, Apple TV's 'Slow Horses' are back for more adventures. However this time it isn't the far right the gang of MI5 screw ups in Slough House have to worry about. Season Two finds Gary Oldman's Jackson Lamb and his gang of MI5 rejects encountering dodgy Russians after the suspicious death of a former disgraced comrade, Phil Davis' Richard Bough. The victim dies while following a man who is acting suspiciously outside his shop. In fact, the incident is of sufficient concern to Lamb that he combs video footage of Bough's last movements and even searches the bus he made his final journey in. There Lamb finds Bough's mobile with a message 'Cicada' on it, prompting him to get Jack Lowden's River Cartwright and the rest of the team to dig deeper. Independent of Lamb's operation, two of the team Dustin Demri-Burns...

SLOW HORSES, S1 If you were a BBC, ITV or Channel 4 drama commissioner, you're probably cursing your luck. Long before Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ and Apple TV+ came on the scene, you would had the pick of the crop when commissioning television scripts. Great writers like Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter, Alan Bleasdale, Lynda La Plante, Jimmy McGovern, Sally Wainwright, Paul Abbott and Alan Plater all made their name on terrestrial television and delivered stunning work. Huge audiences tuned in for adaptations of Robert Graves' 'I Claudius,' Anthony Trollope's 'The Barchester Chronicles' or John Le Carre's 'Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy'. However the shift in the British television landscape brought about by streaming has changed all that. Nowhere is that better illustrated than with a show like 'Slow Horses' winding up on Apple TV+. An adaptation of Mick Herron's 'Slough House' novels, Will Smith's spy series has all the ha...

BLUE LIGHTS, S3 With a  BAFTA in the bag  and an international following, you can see why ' Blue Lights ' returned to our screens this September with one hell of a swagger. Now in its third series, audiences have built up a real affection for the show's characters and they are really invested in their ups and downs. They've just about forgiven the show's creators  Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson  for getting rid of its most popular character in the first series,  Richard Dormer's Gerry Cliff . That series focused on the murky world of  Belfast drug dealers  operating under a  dissident Irish republican  flag of convenience, while cutting deals with  military intelligence puppet masters  who permitted a flow of drugs into upper middle and working class communities. Series Two  concentrated on a turf war on a loyalist housing estate that was also linked to the drugs trade. Patterson and Lawn's third series takes it a step further,...

  ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER From ' Hard Eight ' to ' Punch Drunk Love ,' ' There Will Be Blood ' to ' Licorice Pizza ,' Paul Thomas Anderson has built one of the most impressive CVs in American cinema over the last 29 years. Anderson's movies are so distinctive in style and so rich psychologically, you can see why actors from Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Julianne Moore to Daniel Day Lewis, Emily Watson and Joaquin Phoenix have all been drawn to him. His latest movie 'One Battle After Another' sees him finally collaborate with Leonardo DiCaprio. But it also reunites him with Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro. 'One Battle After Another' is a refreshingly original tale of Californian left wing rebels battling right wing extremists in the US establishment. Inevitably, given the extreme polarisation of contemporary US politics, it's a movie that will very much be interpreted as a film of its time. But it is also a bravura demonst...

  A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE During the Cold War there was no shortage of movies and TV dramas dealing with the prospect of a nuclear apocalypse. From Stanley Kramer's ' On the Beach ' in 1959 with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardiner and Fred Astaire to Sidney Lumet's 1964 thriller ' Fail Safe ' with Henry Fonda, Walter Matthau and Dan O'Herlihy to Nicholas Meyer's 1983 miniseries ' The Day After ' with Jason Robards, JoBeth Williams and Steve Guttenburg, filmmakers and screenwriters explored the horror of nuclear warfare from the perspective of military personnel or ordinary citizens. ' Threads ' in 1984 with Reece Dinsdale and Karen Meagher on BBC2 was a particularly graphic and sobering account of how a regional English city like Sheffield would fare. Others took a slightly different approach, with the director Stanley Kubrick deploying satire in 1964 to still drive home the horror in ' Doctor Strangelove (Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Lov...

  TASK Four years after giving us the superb ' Mare of Easttown ,' screenwriter Brad Inglesby has delivered another HBO miniseries with fully fleshed out characters struggling to do the right thing. Set once again in Pennsylvania, 'Task' features Mark Ruffalo as a former Catholic priest turned FBI agent who is recalled to field duty after spending his time at recruitment fairs in colleges. Tom Brandis, however, is nursing his own demons. He's a widower with a drink problem who is estranged from his adopted son, Andrew Russell's Ethan who is serving time in jail as he waits to be tried for murder. In spite of his messy family life, Tom is asked by his no nonsense FBI boss, Martha Plimpton's Kathleen McGinty to head up a hunt for a missing young boy, Ben Doherty's Sam who has disappeared after his drug dealing parents are gunned down in a stash house. The shooting, however, has been a botched robbery, with Tom Pelphrey's garbage collector Robbie Prende...