The Undeclared War
Channel 4 | ★★★✩✩

Writing TV reviews for the JC, you’re generally hoping for shows that feature Jews. But when it comes to the work of writer/director Peter Kosminsky, whose The Promise had me shouting with incredulity and frustration at the TV screen, I’m relieved to report his new Channel 4 series has nothing to do with us. Unless the ending of The Undeclared War somehow reveals that the real baddie all along was Israel. Mark Rylance’s in it so I wouldn’t be surprised.

After watching the first few episodes what I do know is that this is a cyber-mystery, about the cyber-warriors who’re our frontline of cyber-defence and their cyber-efforts to discover who’s cyber-hacking the cyber-dependent UK. Which is to say I know little at all.

Much of the pleasure of this series comes from having your eyes opened to this very real world that keeps the digital world turning.

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Hannah Khalique-Brown

Whenever Hollywood depicts government spies using computers — think the Bourne movies — it throws in as much camera movement as possible, swishing and panning across monitors and keyboards as snatches of information whizz past.
This is exciting! Except of course in reality it’s mostly not.

It’s a slog, with the usual grind of office politics and mediocre cafeteria food, and the added bonus of numbly staring at thousands of lines of intricate code.

So instead of resorting to flashy camerawork, Kosminsky deploys a few key elements to engage the audience in his apparently well-researched exploration of this environment.

The first is relative newcomer Hannah Khalique-Brown’s promising portrayal of Saara Parvin. Saara is our avatar, a hacker who has recently won a year’s work experience at GCHQ. Her excitement at being allowed access behind the veil carries us along, her discoveries becoming ours. That she almost immediately spots something her more experienced peers missed, hidden in a probably Russian virus that’s shutting down the UK’s infrastructure, invests us in her further success, even as family and personal life intervene.

Overcoming the digital boredom barrier is the very clever trick of illustrating the hacking as real-world interactions, as Saara makes her way through the 1’s and 0’s in the form of her finding secret entrances in corridors and conjuring up tools to create shortcuts.

Topping the enterprise off is a slow-burning thriller narrative of wanting to discover who the villains are and what their purpose is. Simultaneously releasing all six episodes on All 4 was a good move to this end, as you want to peep ever further through the looking glass.

Less successful is some insanely shoddy acting. Bigger players like ever-frowning Simon Pegg and Adrian Lester get the job done, Rylance is shuffly excellent, but whoever cast the step-on roles must’ve been having an off-day. And, contradicting myself, the direction is just a bit too understated. Whilst that helped ground Kosminsky’s superlative Wolf Hall, in a space of concrete bunkers and open-plan offices it deadens everything.

Deliberate maybe, but a bit boring. Not enough to stop me watching, and unlike the Russian bots that ironically seem to have targeted online reviews for this show, I’ll reserve judgement until seeing how and if the entire puzzle fits together. I wouldn’t want to be accused of bias.