The big lesson from this cyber war? Change your password!
The Undeclared War Thursday, Channel 4 Aids: The Unheard Tapes M onday, BBC2
The biggest deal of the week was The Undeclared War, written and directed by Peter Kosminsky, who makes state-of-the-nation, event television, like David Hare. It’s a near-future drama, about cyber warfare, that somehow never feels grippingly urgent, and will send you to Wikipedia on umpteen occasions – what’s ‘NSA?’; what’s a ‘sandbox?’ – but it does make you think about this kind of attack. You may even wish to change your password if, say, it’s ‘Deb123’.
Kosminsky has set this in 2024, with Boris Johnson deposed and a new Conservative Prime Minister (played by Adrian Lester) in place. He is unpopular, loudly heckled wherever he goes and is mostly concerned about the polls as a general election is imminent.
That burbles in the background while the main action takes place in the government’s communications intelligence agency, GCHQ, run by Danny (Simon Pegg), who is kindly and calm but squeezes the hell out of his stress ball. Today, there’s a new recruit, Saara (Hannah Khalique-Brown; utterly compelling; best thing in this by a country mile). She’s a computer science student on work experience. That’ll mean she’ll do coffee runs while largely being ignored, you think, but no, on her first day in the malware department a major cyber-attack is launched against Britain.
She’s plunged in at the deep end and is clearly a genius, spotting something in the code the others have missed, thereby averting a second catastrophe. Well done, Saara! But would she really be taken to an emergency Cobra meeting as a result? It didn’t seem likely but there you are.
Elsewhere, there are strokes of brilliance. To avoid scene after scene of worried GCHQ employees tapping away at keyboards – or saying ‘It’s a dropper, right? Have you pulled it down without tripping the payload?’ – Saara’s mind is literally extrapolated. We see her with a tool belt, lifting manholes, opening rooms along a corridor, going through phone books.
We get it immediately and it’s such a clever way of showing how her mind is working. But it’s still not dramatically exciting. We’re told that 55 per cent of the internet has been brought down. There’s no online banking or shopping and it’s affecting trains and planes and Zoom meetings and Teams but we never see the chaos in the outside world. Meanwhile, who is doing this? The Russians. Should we retaliate? The PM thinks so. This is certainly timely. Cyber-attacks are, apparently, a likely response to Western sanctions against Russia. But, as Danny warns, do we want to get into a tit for tat escalation? This is a big ask. I’ve watched ahead (there are six episodes) and it becomes ever more complicated, involving Russian bots, fake news, ‘black hats’, the Kremlin’s interference in elections, all set against Saara’s fractious home life.
Overall, it seems more concerned with the mechanics than drama, and is slow, and slower yet, given how many times you have to pause to look something up. It is watchable but not addictive, is the bottom line. Still, you may wish to change your password, particularly if your other one is ‘Ross456.’
If you watched Aids: The Unheard Tapes, it surely broke your heart into a thousand pieces. This three-parter is based on audio interviews recorded by gay men in the 1980s and 90s that had been archived at the British Library, and which were lip-synced by actors here. That’s a bit naff, I initially thought. But it’s so seamlessly done, it’s as if you are seeing the real people who lived through the horror. Or didn’t. Many died a few years later.
The first episode documented the arrival of HIV and Aids at a time when you could still get sacked for being gay or arrested for holding hands in the street.
The only place you could feel welcome were the gay clubs, like Heaven in London, where Terrence Higgins – the Terrence Higgins Trust was set up in his name – worked as a barman. He was the first to die of Aids in this country. Says his partner, Rupert: ‘Terry went from fat to losing weight, collapsed in Heaven, was taken to hospital where he had a rare type of pneumonia and fungus in his mouth and I wasn’t allowed in.’
Rupert, just 19, paid for his funeral from his student grant but they wouldn’t tell him what he died of. ‘They said it was because I wasn’t family but it was because I was a gay man.’ He later had to read about it in a medical journal.
Or there was David, who tested positive, which was a death sentence then: ‘I wrote little notes to all my close friends. It was distressing. They were like suicide notes.’ The government did nothing because, as one noted, ‘it affected the gay community’, and we saw not just the fear, but also the stigma, perpetuated by Mary Whitehouse and her ilk, or Derek Jameson (‘It’s been inflicted on mankind by an outraged God.’). This wasn’t the biggest deal of the week but it was the most unexpected and haunting.
Deborah Ross