THE MORNING LIST
The end of the year is approaching, and the series to see are piling up under the tree. It’s time to say goodbye to Atlantato find the broken arms of Slow Horses or to meet the inhabitants of a house in Manchester.
“Atlanta”: a final at the top
As irregular in its programming (a season 3 four years following the second, then two seasons in one year) as it is free in its form, Atlanta will have alternately impassioned and disconcerted its public. After five years of intermittent presence on screens, the UFO created by Donald Glover (alias Childish Gambino) bows out with a final salvo of ten episodes that are perfectly insumable, but of which it is no exaggeration to write that none failed.
After an ultra-experimental third season, torn between a main arc following the European tour of Paper Boi and above-ground episodes in the form of short films, the series finds a form of normality with the returns of Earn, Van, Darius and Paper Boi in Atlanta. And revives the dark comedy with the eminently political subtext of its first seasons. With its imperfect characters, its art of shifting and mixing genres – comedy regularly competes with horror – and its indecipherable, even cryptic morality, Atlanta stands out as one of the most stimulating creations of the last ten years. Audrey Fournier
Series (season 4) created by Donald Glover. With Donald Glover, Brian Tyree Henry, Lakeith Stanfield, Zazie Beetz (United States, 2022, 10 x 30 min). Two episodes on OCS City on Fridays at 9 p.m. starting December 2. On demand on OCS Go.
“Slow Horses”: God the Cold War was pretty
Last spring, we got acquainted with the band of reprobates of Slough House, the building where the MI5 parks the secret agents who cannot be fired or promoted. Winter is approaching, and here they are once more, always led by the repulsive but brilliant Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman, who has a field day when a noodle soup gives him the opportunity to demonstrate his total lack of know- live). This time it is a question of liquidating an ugly sequel to the Cold War, a story of which only the former Jackson Lamb, Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas) and David Cartwright (Jonathan Pryce) grasp the exact scope.
This season unfolds in the space dug between generations. River Cartwright (Jack Lowden), the dynamic and desperately clumsy son of David, comes up once morest the secrets kept by KGB veterans and their British counterparts alike, while Diana Taverner, to whom Kristin Scott Thomas lends her endless reserves of superb and Ironically, a responsible minister very representative of the staff that we see parading at a steady pace in Whitehall must be stuck with. A little political satire, a lot of John Le Carré double acting and a few spectacular sequences, all carried by a dazzling cast, is enough to make Slow Horses a series you can count on at the end of the day. Thomas Sotinel
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Talking of the excellent TV series SAS Rogue Heroes (and even Ungentlemanly Warfare), by now most of us have read Ben Macintyre’s SAS Rogue Heroes and Giles Milton’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. However, there existed a less renowned but SAS related clique of maverick and patriotic British reprobates in British Intelligence called Pemberton’s People who worked for Colonel Alan Brooke Pemberton CVO MBE.
During the Malayan Emergency (really a war) British Intelligence and covert units such as the Special Air Service worked closely together under the eagle eyes of Field Marshal Sir Gerald Walter Robert Templer and his ADC Alan Pemberton who in 1952 in Malaya oversaw the establishment of 22 SAS Regiment. Since then its home has been in Hereford, England. Malaya proved to be an exquisite training ground for all involved in the dark arts of modern warfare.
Even the notorious spy Philby tried to get in on the act to support the communist backed insurgents and later some of Pemberton’s People starred in the real Clockwork Orange Plot as to be depicted in Samuel Martin’s The Ghost of Harold Wilson.
If you are interested in this and more besides do check it out at TheBurlingtonFiles website and see the News Article dated 31 October 2022 … Pemberton’s People, Ungentlemanly Officers & Rogue Heroes.