The Night Manager

The Night Manager is finally back after ten years with three major drawbacks: no Elizabeth Debicki for the sex scenes; no Tom Hollander for the comedy scenes; and no Hugh Laurie for the evil-kingpin-in-his-toothsome-mountaintop-lair scenes, I nearly claimed. But only because at the very beginning of the new season the Laurie character’s grizzled body is identified by Olivia Colman (in her most irritating performance ever, as a dowdy but capable MI6 officer with a gratingly suburban accent). And I didn’t want to spoil the coming plot twist in case any of you were foolish enough to have fallen for this blatant case of Chekhov’s misidentified corpse.

All the previewers have been drooling lasciviously over The Day of the Jackal reboot and, having seen the first three episodes, I quite understand why. This is coffee-table spy-drama porn perfectly calculated to satisfy all manner of lurid and exotic tastes. There’s sniper-rifle-assembly porn; foreign-property porn (the Jackal’s gorgeous mountain retreat near Cadiz with a to-die-for infinity pool); fashion-nostalgia porn (especially the brown suede jacket worn with a red neckerchief in homage to the original, starring Edward Fox); far-right German politician’s head exploding in a pink mist as the heavy calibre sniper round reaches the end of its remarkable, unprecedented two-and-a-half-mile trajectory porn.