theguardian - 2 days ago

Tom Hollander and Niamh Algar star in this fun, propulsive tale of a genius code-cracker, an oddball entrepreneur … and an evil supercomputer known as Charlie Big Potatoes trapped in a secret lair. Brace yourself for a wild rideThere’s in media res and then there’s the opening of The Iris Affair. The new caper-drama opens with a man being beaten half to death while a woman (Niamh Algar) looks on unmoved and refusing to hand over a MacGuffin to the man ordering the beating (Tom Hollander, channelling Michael Caine). They are watched by a rather more concerned teenager, Joy (Meréana Tomlinson), who becomes infinitely more concerned when Hollander-Caine’s character realises that jamming a gun into her neck might be a better way to elicit a response from MacGuffin lady. Then he realises he can’t quite bring himself to shoot the child. But he can order his heavy to do so. The hired gun swings around and we cut to Sardinia, Italy, the day before. And that, my friends, is how a prologue should be done. Properly tense, properly disorientating and long enough that you become properly engaged and almost forget that you know nothing about these people. Just don’t kill the kid!The next few episodes of this eight-part series keep the pedal to the metal but steers with perfect control around timelines (another begins in Florence two years before Sardinia), locations, revelations, multiple twists, double crosses, wigs, costume changes, false identities and set pieces, as a tale as entertaining as it is absurd takes thrillingly preposterous shape. Continue reading...

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