The Iris Affair is far-fetched Bond-lite

There was much speculation following the most recent James Bond film, No Time to Die, in which Lashana Lynch played the first female agent to be given the 007 designation, that we might soon see a female Bond.

That was four years ago, and while we carry on waiting, there is now a female character with Bond-like attributes – Iris Nixon, the titular heroine of Sky’s new eight-part action adventure The Iris Affair. She is not a spy but a maths prodigy and codebreaker extraordinaire, and while Iris doesn’t have a licence to kill, that doesn’t stop her from bumping off her enemies. Or indeed from using men in much the same way as Bond uses women.

Niamh Algar gets a good workout in the title role, constantly on the run from enemies eager to win the €4m bounty that has been placed on her head. The reason for this generous reward is gradually revealed over the course of the opening episode, after Iris has thrashed 17,000 competitors in a mysterious trans-European treasure hunt that ends in a Florence piazza.

It turns out that the treasure hunt is in fact an elaborate job interview, and waiting for Iris in Florence is Cameron Beck, a venture capitalist who likes “helping brilliant people doing brilliant things”. Played by Tom Hollander, Cameron whisks Iris off to his Dr No-style lair in Slovenia, where he’s been building a “topological quantum device”. This seems to be an immensely powerful computer that’s growing its own brain and is capable of creative thought, and which has been dubbed “Charlie Big Potatoes”. “Because he’s not small potatoes,” explains Cameron helpfully. “He’s world-changing… he’s the wheel.”

The trouble is that its creator, Jensen, has seemingly gone mad and attempted to destroy a machine he has come to perceive as dangerously god-like. Cameron needs someone brilliant like Iris to decipher the now-comatose Jensen’s codebook and restart the machine. Iris says thanks but no thanks, steals the codebook, and the chase is on.

Hollander plays Cameron in the charmingly sardonic baddie mode that he first essayed in The Night Manager and then resurrected in the second season of The White Lotus. He’s well-matched here by Algar, who has a grounded relatability and whose character is endlessly resourceful, with numerous safe houses providing a handy change of clothes. She also poses as a tutor to the daughter of a rich couple, for reasons that are not yet entirely clear. But while the time-hopping storylines take some getting used to, the outline of the jigsaw is fairly clear by the end of the opening episode.

The show is set mainly on Sardinia, and the sun-soaked vistas are as gorgeous as the storyline is fantastical – a mash-up of Bond, Killing Eve and Alex Garland’s dystopian techno-thrillers Devs and Ex Machina. That makes it sound better than it actually is, but The Iris Affair has enough propulsion to keep you watching.

The title song, “Here Comes That Day”, a brassy Shirley Bassey-style blast from post-punk rocker Siouxsie, is pure Bond; in fact, it was described by one reviewer upon its release in 2007 as “the best James Bond theme that never was”. The Iris Affair’s creator, writer Neil Cross, also gave us Luther – a similarly far-fetched thriller that led to Idris Elba being named as a future Bond. Perhaps The Iris Affair is Cross’s way of showing 007’s new paymasters at Amazon that they should have chosen him to script the next Bond movie, and not Peaky Blinders’ Steven Knight.

It’s doubtful whether Algar, a talented and versatile actor whose best performance to date was in Shane Meadows’s 2019 drama The Virtues, would however want to be saddled with any link to a potential female Bond. Mind you, she wouldn’t be the first Irish actor in the role.

‘The Iris Affair’ is available to watch on Sky Atlantic and Now