Thankfully, the show also has a particular trump card to play: the casting of the great Gary Oldman in the lead role of the grumpy, flatulent and generally socially regrettable spymaster Jackson Lamb, who sums up the men and women nominally in his charge as “M-I-fucking useless.” But here, thanks to the (presumably) huge budget that Apple has provided, we see Lowden’s Cartwright in full 007 mode at the airport, with a superbly tense and expansive action scene that sets out the series’ raison d’être: this is no time for laughter. In the book, it’s an opening set piece that wrongfoots the reader in elegant and witty style, setting up the reversals and twists that will ensue later. And this is nowhere clearer than in the casting of the excellent Jack Lowden as the James Bond-esque River Cartwright, who has earned his own rustication for the spectacular bungling of a training exercise. Herron’s central conceit is that the designated no-hopers and failures who have committed various sins are actually competent (and occasionally) brilliant agents who can excel where their superiors in their Regent’s Park headquarters cannot. It’s a bit like seeing the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air reinvented as a gritty urban drama. Instead, we have a big-budget spy thriller, polished and scripted to within an inch of its life. Gone are the laugh-out-loud one-liners and endearingly witty pieces of throwaway badinage.

Instead, it takes Herron’s uproariously comic premise - that a group of misfit British spies, cast out of MI5 for misdemeanors exaggerated and accurate alike, have been reduced to grubbing about in a grim office on the periphery of the City of London - and plays it almost entirely straight. It may come as a surprise to anyone who has read Mick Herron’s peerless Slough House novels, but Slow Horses, Apple TV’s high-profile adaptation of the first book in the series, is not funny.

Slow Horses by Mick Herron