SS-GB needs a dose of German eff iciency

IT IS time for a Campaign for Real Drama. Len Deighton’s clever book, SS-GB, would make a terrific TV series. Alas, the modern BBC isn’t capable of doing that.

It isn’t just because it favours mumbling over talking. I could hardly hear what the actors were saying because my own teeth were grinding in rage and disapproval. But I listened to the whole thing again through some top-notch headphones, and gathered I hadn’t missed much.

It is just so slapdash. Deighton’s carefully researched and brilliantly imagined idea, a despairing London under German occupation after a shocking defeat, actually made me miserable when I first read it because it was so believable.

But this lot can’t even get their own fictional details right. The central character, Douglas Archer, is called Inspector by a reporter, Chief Superintendent by himself and Superintendent by his German boss and a German journalist. His rank continues to veer wildly up and down.

The SS chief who has supposedly handpicked him later calls him Inspector. In less than two minutes he has promoted him to Superintendent, but within 30 seconds he has demoted him back to Inspector. I thought these Nazis, with their Sturmbannfuhrers and Obergruppenfuhrers, were supposed to be sticklers for rank. I haven’t room to list all the incredible and unlikely moments. But the sheer terror of a country in which you could be shot for fiddling your fuel coupons, or deported to do slave labour at a moment’s notice, is simply not evoked. Sinister music, which often blots out the dialogue, is no substitute for real drama. Instead there is an extraordinarily stupid and incredible scene in which a supposedly passionate resistance member wraps her naked body in a Nazi flag and stands on a London hotel balcony in mid-November. There is also an exposed willy (how avant-garde!) and the tedious use of cigarettes (I counted 13 lit in an hour, despite tight rationing by the Nazis) to show we are in the past. What a missed opportunity.