London Spy Making Ponderous Into An Art Form.

The BBC has done it again with their new spy thriller ( add your own inverted commas ) London Spy. They confuse slow and ponderous with quality. If it hardly moves and nothing happens then it must be fantastically good and worthy. The story, such as it is ,concerns Danny ( Ben Whishaw ) who becomes involved with the mysterious Alex and when Alex is found dead in very odd circumstances, Danny decides to find out the truth. That might sound pacy and contain a  lot of twists and turns. But no if this show had a cast of snails it would move faster. The first episode was killingly ponderous, but the second made it look like a frantic episode of 24. Danny goes to visit Alex's parents. It was laughably slow, so slow I thought my Sky box had frozen. London Spy also wastes a first rate cast, we have Jim Broadbent, Charlotte Rampling and Clarke Peters noodling around the edges. But the biggest plot twist of all is that London Spy is written and created by Tom Rob Smith.Mr Smith's novels like Child 44, The Last Speech and The Farm move along at a great pace with lots of event and plot twists. I don't know if Tom Rob Smith submitted a pacy thriller and was told to give it the BBC treatment. Slow, slow, slow. Whatever all concerned seem to have misunderstood Nordic Noir. Shows like The Killing and The Bridge are slow burners, but also have twists, intrigue and gripping story. The anti London Spy.
Over