Pomona Rewind

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 ...

If you were to ask people to name a Diane Keaton role, two probably come to mind. The first would undoubtedly be the eponymous character in Woody Allen's romcom 'Annie Hall' - a role that won her a Best Actress Oscar, a BAFTA and a Golden Globe. The second would be Kay, Michael Corleone's WASP wife who becomes increasingly repulsed by his ruthlessness in Francis Coppola's 'The Godfather' trilogy. There were many other acclaimed dramatic roles in movies like Warren Beatty's 'Reds,' Alan Parker's 'Shoot The Moon' and Jerry Zaks' 'Marvin's Room'. But she also enjoyed huge success in comedies over her career like Charles Shyer's 'Baby Boom,' his 'The Father of the Bride' movies, Hugh Wilson's 'First Wives Club' and Nancy Meyers' 'Something's Gotta Give' and her collaborations with Allen on seven other feature length movies. The predominant image of Keaton, though, is as the s...

   Actor, writer, producer, director, activist - sometimes it seemed like there was nothing Robert Redford couldn't do. As a screen actor, he was unquestionaly charismatic and, like his good friend Paul Newman, beneath the good looks was an actor of considerable intelligence and skill.  Redford was also an Oscar winning director, often bringing hefty dramatic stories to the big screen. But his greatest contribution to cinema was the helping hand he gave to other talent. As one of the brains behind the Sundance Institute and its film festivals, he provided a launch pad for directors like Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, David O Russell, Kevin Smith, Damian Chazelle and Jordan Peele. But he was also an ardent campaigner for environmental and LGBT causes. Born in Santa Monica in 1936, Redford's family had English, Scotch Irish and Irish ancestry. His father Charles was an accountant and was married before he met his mother Martha.  He also had a step brother, Willi...