Careless mumbling costs lives

SS-GB BBC One, Sunday

Inside No. 9 BBC Two, Tuesday

Incredible Medicine: Dr Weston’s Casebook BBC Two, Wednesday

his week, much fuss has been made about the mumbling in a big-budget adaptation of Len Deighton’s counterfactual novel which imagines Britain under Nazi occupation. But, in truth, the worst thing about the drama is its timing.

It follows two TV wartime fictions – Stephen Poliakoff’s Close to the Enemy and the ITV hotel drama The Halcyon, which raises an uncomfortable thought: are we in danger of fetishising the Blitz? What’s more, SS-GB has emerged just as Amazon’s no-expensespared The Man in the High Castle begins a second series. This adaptation of Philip K Dick’s novel is so realistic in its rendering of an America ruled by the Nazis that it makes your skin crawl.

Sensibly, SS-GB didn’t try to match that series’ depiction of the utter grossness of a Grosse Deutsche Reich, and after one show-stopping CGI tableau of a bombed-out Buckingham Palace draped in red, white and black, it concentrated on the story. Writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (who have collaborated on five Bond films) brought the audience into this strange world through the eyes of a single character, Douglas Archer, a detective from the Metropolitan Police forced to work alongside the Gestapo.

Archer, as played by Sam Riley, was so inscrutable that you could never be sure whose side he was on. The suspicion was that as Britain unravelled before him, he wasn’t sure either. Was he a collaborator or a pragmatist? That we still have no idea suggests that SS-GB will be a knotty, superior thriller.

And so to the mumbling. The debate over the show’s audibility seems a little unfair given that a London run by the Gestapo would, inevitably, have been a place where people moved in shadows and spoke in murmurs. In any case, it’s a false debate – if you want realism in drama you have to accept that, in real life, people don’t speak like they’re teaching in primary school. Indeed, I would argue that part of what made Riley’s performance so good was his diction, which was pitched perfectly

Tas the words of a man who could never be sure who he could trust. No, you absolutely could not hear every word. But you didn’t need to, and every mumble was a reminder that careless talk costs lives.

Whether or not you enjoy Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith’s depends on whether you like playing games. The premise for the series itself is a wheeze, with each half-hour episode telling an entirely different story connected only by a blackly comic slant and the number nine. Part of the fun is to see whether the writers can pull off the same trick week after week: set up the board, get to the endgame and close it out in as few moves as possible. Tales of the Unexpected, some Agatha Christie and, more recently, Black Mirror and Sherlock have ploughed a similar furrow.

The first episode in a third run was

With all this wartime fiction on TV, are we in danger of fetishising the Blitz?

set entirely in a near-empty restaurant (no. 9) in which four men argued over the bill. They were all insisting on paying, and the row became increasingly acrimonious and farcical. One of them (played by Shearsmith) ended up announcing that he had a brain tumour and had three months to live – that’s why he wanted to pay for the meal. Silence. Then his friend (Pemberton) phoned his wife and found out he was lying.

You were waiting for the big twist. It duly came, and I have to say that I