The title sequence of floral and snake patterns is enticingly beautiful. When will the Tories face up to Britain’s benefits scandal? Whoever designed the exquisite cover deserves most of the profits because that’s what sold it, not the contents. This is exactly the kind of novel people tell themselves they enjoyed rather than having actually enjoyed it.

I can tell that just by having glanced over a few pages. Jamie Bell’s serial killer makes Hannibal Lecter look like Mary Poppinsīook groups and critics would have adored Perry’s leaden, overwritten and over-researched snooze-fest. A decent production budget and starry cast led by Tom Hiddleston and Claire Danes are squandered on a dreary, convoluted, portentous drama with all the appeal of a fog blanket over a giant rotting fish which someone briefly mistook for a dead dragon. The first was The Essex Serpent, an adaptation of Sarah Perry’s bestselling novel about a sea monster – or is it? – that terrorises the populace of the Essex marshes in the 1880s. Certainly, the two new dramas I watched this week left me cold. The man is a genius.īut those hoping that Apple TV+ is going to supplant the increasingly rubbish, excruciatingly modish and content-lite Netflix as the new go-to subscription channel may be in for a disappointment. I’d say his understanding of the intelligence services is at least as jadedly insightful as John le Carré’s and I was quite wrong about his treatment of the ‘far-right’ threat. Oh, and I’d like to apologise to Mick Herron, author of the original novel series, which I now intend to devour. Having now watched it to the end, I would say that Slow Horses (Apple TV+) is by far the best TV drama I’ve seen in at least the last year: superbly acted and directed, ingeniously plotted, refreshingly free of annoyance.

The essex serpent novel review