The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Britain ruled by Nazis. What would Bond do?
Throughout our conversation, Purvis and Wade both refer to Eon Productions, a.k.a. Bond Mission Control, as “they”, despite their long-running alliance with the company. The union began in the late Nineties after their script for Plunkett and Macleane, a Cool Britannia-surfing highwayman caper with Jonny Lee Miller and Robert Carlyle, caught the eye of producer Barbara Broccoli, Eon’s very own M.
It’s true that an eerie hush has fallen over the production company’s Piccadilly headquarters since the release of Spectre in October 2015. A director is still being sought for Bond 25, while Daniel Craig’s contract to return remains unsigned, and reportedly not for a want of zeroes on it. But here’s an upside. For the first time in more than a decade, these two writers – friends since they bunked together at the University of Kent in 1980, and whose Bond career has taken them from their late 30s to mid-50s – have had time to try something different.
Next month heralds the arrival of their first completed postSpectre project, and first work for television full stop: an adaptation of Len Deighton’s 1976 novel SSGB, which will screen as a five-part mini-series on the BBC. Deighton remains best known as a writer of post-war British spy fiction – take him and Fleming, throw in Graham Greene and John le Carré, and you’ve more or less got the pantheon – so the move may not initially sound like much of a bound into the unknown.
But for Britain itself, that’s just what SSGB is. The series takes place in an alternate 1941 in which the United Kingdom lost the Battle of Britain and finds itself under Nazi occupation. The Blitz never took place – there was no need – though Buckingham Palace is a giant sarcophagus, crumbling and deserted. The Houses of Parliament are intact, but bedecked with swastika banners. And the British people – for the most part, getting by as best they can under an uneasy coalition of Adolf Hitler’s SS and Storm Troopers – have to decide to what extent they’ll collaborate in order to carry on. From behind this shadowy curtain creeps Detective Inspector Douglas Arthur, a Scotland Yard detective played by Sam Riley, whose latest murder case – an apparent shooting, though the body exhibits strange scalds and blisters – attracts the attention of the SS.
As Wade observes, Arthur is less James Bond than Sam Spade, the shabbily suave P.I. of The Maltese Falcon, immortalised on film by Humphrey Bogart. ( There’s a femme fatale, too: Kate Bosworth’s enigmatic American journalist Barbara Barga.) But the opportunity to write Britain herself from a different angle – as a nation crushed and cowed by the Second World War, rather than one which emerged from it as the kind of world power 007 would be proud to defend – was part of the source material’s murky allure.
“It seemed very relevant in that it makes you think about our relationship with Europe,” says Wade. “Because our political views were largely forged by not having been beaten.”
“That question of what we’d do if the Nazis were outside our front door is one we’ve never had to answer,” continues Purvis. “But it defines all other European politics – almost everyone else has had to deal with occupation of some sort. Some people collaborate, others don’t, and at the end the survivors have to pick up the pieces.”
These are exciting times for anyone who’s ever wondered what the West would look like with fascists in charge. In addition to the BBC’s SS-GB, Amazon have recently released the second season of The Man in the High Castle, a science-fiction drama set in an Axis-occupied United States during the Sixties, and based on a novel by Philip K Dick.
Purvis and Wade believe both series strike a topical chord, though admire Deighton’s confidence in setting his story in 1941, glancingly close to the point at which his alternate history forks off from the real. “History is still live, not a fait accompli,” says Wade. “It could still go either way,” adds Purvis.
Both writers had been admirers of Deighton for years, in both his guises of spy fiction maestro
The writing duo behind 007’s biggest blockbusters reveal why they’re taking on a Len Deighton classic for the BBC