If you needed something else to worry about because Covid, Monkeypox and the rising cost of your supermarket shop wasn’t enough – then there’s good news.
A cyber attack is imminent.
Peter Kosminsky’s latest series The Undeclared War, which started on C4 on Thursday, is set in an all-too-plausible 2024. A near future where more bad stuff happens, such as the entire country being brought to its knees by a terrorist hacker.
I’ll just add this to my long list of anxieties, above “buy gifts for school teachers” and below “death of the planet”.
The six-part thriller is set deep inside Government Communications Headquarters, where many, many tech nerds secretly analyse code to block cyber attacks.
Super-bright graduate Saara Parvin (Hannah Khalique-Brown) begins her work experience at GCHQ, on the same day that a routine stress test suddenly takes down half of the UK’s infrastructure.
It’s not clear what’s happening but boss Danny (Simon Pegg being unnaturally serious) looks extremely frazzled.
Online banking is down, online shopping is down, no Zoom, no Teams but, strangely, social media is unaffected and it just so happens to be in the run-up to an election. Cyber attack.
It’s Russia, right? No one seems sure. The Prime Minister Andrew Makinde (Adrian Lester), who has recently ousted Boris Johnson from leadership, is mostly worried about his unpopularity. Which is mostly because he’s deeply unpleasant.
Now the analysts have to crack the code, fast. And Kosminsky has a clever trick so that we don’t spend six hours watching analysts stare at screens.
Slick sequences go all Mission Impossible as we visualise what Saara is thinking.
Suddenly she’s climbing an imaginary ladder, bouncing an imaginary ball against an imaginary brick wall, opening imaginary locks, a tool belt ready around her waist. It’s clever and engaging, because code otherwise would be boring.
Much to the annoyance of all the middle-aged white men in the room, Saara, young, female and Muslim, is the one to spot the virus within the virus.
She even gets a round of applause at a COBRA meeting (in the real world, someone else would take the credit), before bigwigs realise she’s just made everyone look incompetent. There is more work to be done to avoid complete disaster.
Side plots, including Saara’s father’s suicide and a frisson of a lesbian love interest, lend some emotion to this otherwise robotic workplace.
And the underlying tension of a catastrophe that could actually happen makes this addictive and totally bingeable. And who needs sleep anyway?
