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MeIf the spy wars of the future are to be fought on the Internet, TV fans will have to show this, as much as they may not want to. Cyber-attacks, cross-border malware and digital disinformation are invisible on social media: whatever you do, you’ll always have a nerd typing away and muttering “Shit!” when gobbledegook passes through the monitor and red lights flash in the distance.
In 2022, Channel 4’s misguided drama The Undeclared War attempted to tackle the problem by throwing in some heavy-handed filmmaking. Peter Kosminsky, the respected director behind Wolf Hall and The Government Inspector, apparently investigated the latter part of the story, showing the details of the suspected Russian campaign to disrupt the digital operations of Britain every day – and, from that, the democratic process of elections – in a way that people who do not really sleep said it was reliable enough.
The problem was the play itself, which in Kosminsky’s hands was slow, slow and bleak, as if the cyberwarfare theme was too important to be distracted by cheap tricks like the rise of myth. The scene after the scene was clear of the techies looking at each other nonchalantly in the silent rooms of GCHQ. The goals that Kosminsky and his writers added were not changing: the young dreamer who studied computer science Saara (Hannah Khalique-Brown) will embarrass the best hackers in Britain just a few minutes after arriving at the place where the students were placed, seeing an important point in the Russian code that everyone else ignored. With Glum’s college friend Vadim (German Segal) in St Petersburg, working for Russian criminals while secretly he was more loyal to Saara than to Vladimir Putin, starting or avoiding the third world war depended on two people who had a dream at the beginning.
A surprise was also given for a second season four years later, Unofficial War returns without Kosminsky as a director and without the frisson of the near-if-if future: the original was set two years in the future, in 2024, but the new run carries the timeline directly, so we are now two years ago.
A big change has been made, however, and new director Paul McGuigan is eager to let us know: the kinetic opening scene is shot in one shot, right up to the commercial break. It follows the new head of GCHQ, Danny Patrick (Simon Pegg), as he walks the corridors and into the conference rooms, raising his voice to people and reacting immediately to the bad news he’s been given on paper by shaking hands. It’s fun!
Danny’s new role as the undisputed leader – Saara is still there, skipping around Britain and Russia by sending a direct message to Vadim on social media, but she is no longer the main driver of the story – is confirmed as we follow her out of the office and into her hitherto unknown home life. His wife, Barbara (Siân Brooke), looks like a rock, ready with hugs and teasing when a crippled Danny returns home from work and stumbles into bed in a well-dressed, minutes before he has to leave for school. We then find out that Barbara is leading the China team at GCHQ! What with his best friend being Charlie (Danny Sapani), the head of GCHQ security and the man in charge of taking out Danny’s group who is a fraud to feed intel to the enemy, Danny is faced with a troubling intersection of personal and professional.
This has more zip than previous episodes by contrasting Saara’s work for GCHQ with her life as a young British Muslim, which was another climactic element that never went down. But The Undeclared War is still looking for something that will pay the cold wars of the digital age into nothingness. In the old days, your elite would be sneaking into homes to steal files, wreak havoc on their enemies, and live a sleazy life in strange cities. Now he’s pushing buttons in a bedroom outside Cheltenham.
The show’s politics, meanwhile, haven’t changed. The new writer Colin Teevan repeats the events between the rational Danny, his boss David (Alex Jennings) and the angry minister of the cabinet Richard Marston (convincing villain Ed Stoppard), who always wants to take revenge on Russia in a way that Danny thinks will not be delayed. “A similar attack would be…” says Danny – and at this point Undeclared War patients can join the rest of the line, because it feels like Pegg said it 100 times in the first season – “it’s getting bigger and bigger!” Danny is desperate to stop it, but the show could use a little lift: The stakes in Undeclared War are still very low.
