The Undeclared War (Channel 4)
Rating: Four stars out of five
That’s one mystery solved. Britain has been shedding Prime Ministers faster than the Queen Vic changes hands, but now at least we’ve got a clue where they all go.
Landlords in EastEnders either retire to Portugal, like Grant Mitchell (Ross Kemp) and his dear old mum Peggy (Dame Babs Windsor).
Or they meet a watery death, though their bodies can’t be found, like Dirty Den (Leslie Grantham) and Mick Carter (Danny Dyer).
And missing PMs? They fly to Camp David, the US President’s official retreat in the hills of Maryland, where they remain ‘incommunicado’. No one can reach them, even in the event of a Third World War breaking out.
Adrian Lester, the Shakespearean actor who played the PM four years ago in the first series of The Undeclared War, met this fate as the spy thriller returns.
We glimpsed him in the recap, but after that he vanished — phone off, and a Do Not Disturb sign on the door.
This left the UK’s fate in the hands of power-mad Foreign Secretary Richard Marston (played by Ed Stoppard, son of playwright Tom).
He loomed over the operations room at GCHQ, the government’s cyber-listening post, frothing at the mouth as radar screens appeared to show a squadron of Russian bombers heading for London.
Hannah Khalique-Brown, Simon Pegg and Sian Brooke star in Channel 4’s spy drama The Undeclared War
Sian Brooke plays the role of a former spy and the wife of Simon Pegg’s character
Marston announced he was ordering ‘an immediate retaliatory attack on the military base in Kaliningrad’.
He reminded me of manic DJ Kenny Everett, waving his foam-rubber hands on stage at the 1983 Tory party conference and squeaking, ‘Let’s bomb Russia!’
The Undeclared War is as nonsensical as Kenny, though shorter on laughs.
The opening ten minutes were filmed in a single shot, in the style of the Netflix drama Adolescence, with the camera whirling around characters while, unseen, the production crew scurried to keep out of the way.
This style of drama is a lot harder to do successfully than it looks. Not only do the cast have to memorise pages of dialogue and perform every line flawlessly without any chance of retakes, but all the background extras must be choreographed with the precision of a Strictly dance spectacular.
Director Paul McGuigan made it easier by keeping most of the cast static in their offices, under the pulsating strip lighting.
Our hero Danny shuttled between them, striding so purposefully that he must have clocked up his daily 10,000 steps within the first few scenes.
Simon Pegg plays Danny, GCHQ’s Head of Operations, a man so dedicated to his office job that he sleeps in his shirt and suit trousers.
If you’re the type of viewer who can’t imagine any job title more thrilling than that of a line manager in the Civil Service’s security branch, The Undeclared War will keep you on the edge of your seat.
If not, you might want to go through a tax return to help pass the time.
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