The BBC turned down the chance to make Slow Horses, the phenomenally successful spy series starring Gary Oldman, Apple TV Plus Europe boss Jay Hunt has revealed.
And it's not the first massive hit the BBC has passed on as they also apparently turned down All Creatures Great and Small (more on that later!).
With hindsight, it's easy to say passing on Slow Horses was a huge mistake, but turning Mick Herron's excellent thrillers into a TV series was, as Hunt says, a big risk.
"I think you have to take risks," said Hunt at the BFI London Film Festival (quotes via Variety). "It's interesting. Slow Horses is a very good example where it was passed on by the BBC. I think one of the reasons that people struggle with shows like that is they've got a hybrid tone. So people go, is that show a comedy? Is that a show a drama? And so in a weird way, that represents a risk.
"I think finding those things, being confident we could hone them to the quality of execution that we've seen, and again working with exceptional teams, exceptional writers, exceptional directors, I think it's a slate which showcases the very best of British creativity, which is everything that I hoped for in this job."
I can, though, easily see why the BBC didn't adapt Slow Horses. After all its lead character, slob spook Jackson Lamb is offensive and unsympathetic in the books and could have easily been a disaster on TV if someone as skilled as Gary Oldman hadn't ended up playing him.
More of a mystery is why on earth did the BBC apparently turn down the chance to remake All Creatures Great and Small?! The All Creatures reboot, shown on MASTPIECE in the US and Channel 5 in the UK, has been a massive ratings winner. One of its stars, Samuel West (Siegfried Farnon), ironically also features in Slow Horses as politician Peter Judd.
Unlike Slow Horses, All Creatures always looked like an obvious hit. Even more obvious because the BBC had previously adapted it with Christopher Timothy playing James Herriot and it had been, well, a huge hit!
The show's producer, Colin Callender, claimed to The Daily Telegraph that the BBC feared it wouldn't appeal to younger viewers and they'd only commit to making a pilot. So he took All Creatures to Channel 5.
"They [the BBC] had concerns about whether it would speak to a younger audience and whether or not the show could emerge from the shadow of the first series."
Well, that's one risk the BBC certainly should have taken as it's still going strong with All Creatures Great and Small season 5 currently being shown on Channel 5. As for Slow Horses, the latest series may have ended but Apple TV Plus has confirmed that Slow Horses season 5 and season 6 are both on the way.
