If the espionage battles of the future are going to be fought online, TV thrillers will have to reflect that fact, much as they might not want to. Cyber-attacks, cross-border malware and digital misinformation just aren’t especially televisual: whatever you do, you always end up with a speed-typing nerd muttering “Shit!” as gobbledegook scrolls across a monitor and red lights flash in the distance.
In 2022, Channel 4’s missable drama The Undeclared War tried to crack the problem by throwing heavyweight film-making pedigree at it. Peter Kosminsky, the esteemed director behind Wolf Hall and The Government Inspector, had evidently researched the back end out of the subject, presenting the details of an imagined campaign of Russian interference in Britain’s daily digital functionality – and, from there, the democratic process of an election – in a way that real-life sleepless nerds said was credible enough.
The problem was the drama itself, which in Kosminsky’s hands was slow, quiet and dingy, as if the topic of cyberwarfare were too important to be sullied with cheap tricks like storytelling momentum. Scene after scene featured tech whizzes staring listlessly at each other in the oddly silent environs of GCHQ. The contrivance that Kosminsky and his writers did add was not an improvement: a young adult fantasy that saw computer science undergraduate Saara (Hannah Khalique-Brown) embarrass Britain’s best pro hackers within minutes of arriving on a student work placement, by spotting a crucial detail in Russian code that everyone else had overlooked. With her glum college buddy Vadim (German Segal) in St Petersburg, working on Russian cyber-attacks while secretly being more loyal to Saara than to Vladimir Putin, the commencement or avoidance of a third world war depended on two dreamers just out of their teens.
Surprisingly recommissioned for a second season four years later, The Undeclared War returns without Kosminsky as director and without the frisson of a near-future what-if: the original was set two years in the future, in 2024, but the new run carries the timeline straight on, so we’re now two years in the past.
Big changes have been made, however, and new director Paul McGuigan is keen to let us know: the kinetic opening scene is shot in one take, all the way up to the first ad break. It follows the newly animated head of GCHQ operations, Danny Patrick (Simon Pegg), as he strides down corridors and bursts into conference rooms, raising his voice at people and dealing instantly with nuggets of bad news handed to him on scraps of paper by quivering underlings. It’s a thriller!
Danny’s new status as the unquestioned lead character – Saara is still there, implausibly bypassing British and Russian surveillance by direct-messaging Vadim in a gaming server’s chatroom, but she is no longer the story’s main driver – is confirmed when we follow him out of the office and into his hitherto unexplored home life. His wife, Barbara (Siân Brooke), seems like a rock, ready with a cuddle and some witty mockery when a frazzled Danny once again returns from work and stumbles into bed fully clothed, only minutes before it’s time to get up for the school run. Then we discover Barbara heads up the China team at GCHQ! What with that and his best mate being Charlie (Danny Sapani), GCHQ’s head of security and the man in charge of deducing which of Danny’s team is a traitor feeding intel to the enemy, Danny faces a stressful intersection of the personal and the professional.
This has more zip than the previous effort in contrasting Saara’s GCHQ work with her life as a young British Muslim, which was another element of season one that never got off the ground. But The Undeclared War is still scrabbling around for something that will compensate for the digital age’s cold wars being essentially action-free. In the old days your top people would be sneaking into buildings to steal files, garrotting their enemies and living elaborate double lives in chic foreign cities. Now they’re pressing buttons in a bunker on the outskirts of Cheltenham.
The politics of the show, meanwhile, have not evolved. New writer Colin Teevan simply repeats the one-dimensional dynamic between idealistic Danny, his more pragmatic boss David (Alex Jennings) and infuriatingly gung-ho cabinet minister Richard Marston (a satisfyingly villainous Ed Stoppard), who always wants to performatively retaliate against Russia in a way that Danny thinks would be reckless. “A symmetric attack would be …” says Danny – and at this point hardcore Undeclared War sufferers can join in with the rest of the line, because it felt like Pegg said it 100 times in season one – “highly escalatory!” Danny is desperate to stop it, but the show could use a bit of escalation: The Undeclared War’s threat level is still much too low.
• The Undeclared War is on Channel 4 now
