Be careful what you want, it’s the permanent message of the first episode of the new Channel 4 drama, The Undeclared War.
Be careful what you wish for if you’re Saara Parvin (Hannah Khalique-Brown, doing a good job in her first major role in television), a superbright graduate who begins her work experience alongside even the brightest computer analysts in the world. GCHQ on the same day (in 2024) the country is affected by a cyberattack from an as yet unidentified source. “55% of Internet performance is down,” says boss Danny (Simon Pegg, in a sort of undrawn version of his Mission Impossible role). It appears to have targeted non-essential online services and is considered: “Reasonably targeted for maximum disruption and minimum risk to lives.” Saara, however, is brighter than all and finds a second virus hidden inside the first that would have taken care of the other 45% and put the country on its knees. She can sit at a Cobra meeting, which seems unlikely, but not more likely that our own prime minister won’t attend most of his during a pandemic, but he doesn’t get to the hospital to see his father before. who dies after a pandemic. apparent suicide attempt.
And you should be careful what you want if, like me, you expected The Undeclared War to offer the perfect dose of real-world quality and escapism as it crashes and burns around us. A cyberattack? How fun! He doesn’t even come close to making the list of anxieties I work on these days. In fact, if that 55% included streaming daily headlines from around the world, I would appreciate it. “Take the temporary respite from the burden of horrible knowledge!” I would cry.
Unfortunately, The Undeclared War has taken the other route and is clearly designed to introduce us all to a new field of concern. Created by multi-award winning Peter Kosminsky (who directed the brilliant Wolf Hall) after three years of research on modern intelligence and cybersecurity, the six-part series takes this research very seriously and is taken very seriously.
Too serious … Adrian Lester in the undeclared war. Photography: Channel 4
It moves at an icy pace and GCHQ staff has the air of reluctant office workers on data entry shifts, boringly tapping their keyboards until it’s time for a legal break, rather than the people frantically trying to stop an enemy assault that could kill. thousands and throw the nation back to the Middle Ages, or at least the 1990s. While I’m sure this is much more realistic than the bullet sweat heroes that Hollywood offers us (though there would really be audible moans of code-breaking professionals when the boss tells them they need to review malware code?), doesn’t. It doesn’t bring much dramatic tension.
Kosminsky’s involvement presumably explains the emergence of heavyweights such as Adrian Lester (Prime Minister Andrew Makinde, who apparently ousted Boris 15 months ago), Alex Jennings (head of GCHQ, David Neal) and, still for later episodes, Mark Rylance (John). Yeabsley, a former GCHQ asset returned to help them cope with the attack). For now, and there was only one episode available for review, they don’t have much to do. The concentration on the discovery of the second virus by the young Saara banishes them to the sidelines in the same way that adults were peripheral to an Enid Blyton adventure. He also recalls the mild mockery of its facilities by children’s librarian Eileen Colwell: “But what hope does a band of desperate men have against four children?” The script is also Blytonesque. People say “We’re here!” much, or “We’re offline!” or “It’s 70% reverse engineering,” without much intermediation.
For now, The Undeclared War seems to have aimed high and lost. But with five episodes to finish, Kosminsky at the helm and a distinguished cast who, you’d think, read it all before they signed up, hopefully the drama and vision will build up. Maybe from time to time we will leave the static configuration of GCHQ and discover how life goes for people without 55% of the Internet? If not, it will feel like a rich premise wasted and we will be waiting for a remake that leans into its potential as a good contribution to the brilliant technology genre, which we could do at this difficult time.