From a Whisper to a Screen:The Undeclared War.

"The point is to get people used to the idea that everything is a lie. That there is no truth. Once they accept that .... the biggest liar wins" - Angie McMurray

Peter Kosminsky's recent The Undeclared War (Channel 4) could hardly be more topical. It's set in the UK, in 2024, during a run up to a general election. The ruling Tory party are hugely unpopular and are getting a lot of shit, quite correctly, for being corrupt and incompetent. Prime Minister Andrew Makinde (Adrian Lester), the first PM of colour in the UK, has replaced Boris Johnson, in something that was widely seen as a bloodless coup, fifteen months earlier and the country is in deep recession and its hospital corridors are full of sick and distressed patients.

Protests surround Whitehall and the far right are on the rise. On top of all this the country suddenly falls victim to a series of increasingly dangerous cyber attacks. At GCHQ in Cheltenham, a team of analysts is tasked with trying to prevent these attacks and, possibly - if some in government get their way, launching revenge attacks on those believed responsible. Vladimir Putin's Russia and the FSB.

Danny (Simon Pegg) heads up a team at GCHQ where he is joined in his work by Phil (Joss Porter), Max (Tom McKay), and a young American lady called Kathy (Maisie Richardson-Sellers). Reporting into Danny's boss David (Alex Jennings), the team are joined by a young student on work experience. Saara (Hannah Khalique-Brown) is, quite clearly, the owner of a brilliant mind but will her older, and mostly male, colleagues take her seriously? A teenager on work experience?

Saara's also got a fair bit of personal stuff going on. Her dad, Ahmed (Nitin Ganatra), is very unwell and her relationship with her mum, Yasmin (Bharti Patel), is so bad she's not even told her, or either of her siblings, about her new job. She's also in a relationship with a former tutor of hers. James (Edward Holcroft). 

Sleeping with one of his students is not the only thing John does that he perhaps should not. He takes a group of students with him to a climate change protest in Bristol and is rewarded by having his head kicked in by a load of fascist thugs.

In Whitehall, PM Makinde has, to use what now feels like antiquated parlance, a hawk on one shoulder in the form of Richard Marston (Ed Stoppard) and a dove, at least in comparison, on the other in the form of Foreign Secretary Elizabeth Kahn (Hattie Morahan). Marston's unpleasant, and pugnacious, personality seems a good fit for the current Tory administration but it also has to be said that Makinde, though often malicious and self-serving in intent, is articulate whereas Teresa May, Boris Johnson, and Liz Truss could barely string a coherent sentence together between the three of them. 

Makinde also cites the US, Germany, and France as allies which, as we've recently discovered, is better than Truss has managed so far. Away from the world of COBRA meetings, Saara has befriended the eccentric John Yeabsley (a deliciously hammy Mark Rylance). Yeabsley's an old hand at GCHQ and something of a grammar pedant. Modern developments appear to have left him behind but, over games of chess and triangular sandwiches, he becomes something of a second father figure to Saara and shares his memories, his experience, his homespun wisdom, and even his salt'n'vinegar Discos (great crisp choice) with her.

Saara can also call on the grudging help of the young maths genius Gabriel (Alfie Friedman) and a former Russian classmate of hers, Vadim (German Segal). Nearly a whole episode is given over to Vadim's return to St Petersburg where he's tasked by Glasvet (a sort of high level Russian trolling organisation) with creating online disinformation destabilising the UK. But who does he really work for?

The episode set in Russia is not the most gripping but is highly instructive and provides much exposition. Of course the war in Ukraine is mentioned but of more importance to The Undeclared War is the introduction of Marina (Tinatin Dalakishvili), a journalist who Vadim is clearly in love with. 

Marina is sent to London from Russia to work for Russia Global News. An organisation, as her boss Angie (Kerry Godliman) wryly notes, who have earned the nickname 'Putin's poodles'. Angie McMurray is an interesting, and quietly terrifying, character. She believes that both Britain and Russia are so broken they need to be torn apart, violently if need be, so that they can be rebuilt.

There is a lot in the way of Aleksandr Dugin's dubious philosophy in Angie's worldview and, like Dugin, she is more than happy to incite people to riot to achieve her aims. In a disUnited Kingdom, at a time when we already seem to have created the perfect storm and things look like they can't get any worse they, of course, do get worse (sound familiar?) and The Undeclared War starts off telling this story a bit slowly but once it gets going it becomes a pretty addictive watch.

There's lots of tense background music (c/o Debbie Wiseman), lots of doors, lots of brick walls, and lots of empty rooms and there are absolutely loads of shots of scrolling data on computer screens. To try and avoid too much repetition of this, the makers of The Undeclared War have chosen to depict some codebreaking scenes metaphorically and this means we end up, rather confusingly at first, watching Saara Parvin looking through phone books with a magnifying glass, abseiling, breaking into gyms, and bouncing a ball against a wall for bloody ages.

It's hard to care too much when a bank of computers crash and people chatting about BT Openreach and online banking is not particularly thrilling either. Some of the dialogue, "most of our tools have been rendered nugatory", is a bit clunky and some of the post-pandemic touches (no handshaking at GCHQ and more masks in 2024 than in 2022?) seem a bit overdone. 

A Kandinsky on the wall at the offices of the FSB seems like a rather obvious signifier that the action has switched to Russia and when Saara and Kathy's friendship looks as if it may move over to something less platonic that seems an unnecessary distraction to the main story. An avenue perhaps the makes of The Undeclared War might have better not gone down.

Those caveats aside, and admittedly there's quite a few, I really enjoyed The Undeclared War. A couple of good supporting performances from Gavi Singh Chera as Saara's brother Saj and Oliver Powell as a black hat hacker called Jolly Roger who GCHQ make use of and some interesting thoughts on deepfakes, Wikileaks, and Edward Snowden set the scene for a thriller that got more tense as it went on.

Not for everyone in it. Some, in the style of Don't Look Up, seemed oblivious to the obvious danger the country was in but others, especially Saara and Vadim, realise how much trouble is coming down the line and just how dystopian the future is beginning to look. Eventually, you find yourself caring about them and even this frustrating country. In the end, in what could have so easily been a dry and didactic drama, Peter Kosminsky managed to pull off human emotion. Something Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng are proving themselves incapable of.