Reich time, wrong place
WHEN SS-GB (Sunday, BBC1) first appeared as a novel, we were barely a generation away from the end of the Second World War. Kids in playgrounds still played “Spitfires versus Messerschmitts”, parents and grandparents could pass on vivid memories of the bombs and the battles.
It says something that a TV adaptation of Len Deighton’s book in 2017 should manage to press all the same buttons, with the same effect. The opening scene featured a Spitfire swooping high over a London skyline. Instead of this cutting to spiffing types at the MoD, it cut to some high-ranking Nazis within spitting distance of Buckingham Palace, preparing to give the iconic warplane to the Russians as a gesture of friendship.
After the 2016 we’ve just had, none of that historical fantasy looked that fantastical. Much of what followed was self-consciously dialling up another era, and another era’s picture shows, with fedorasporting spooks smoking quietly on street corners, goon squads meting out beatings at random and beastly slogans pasted onto every wall. Even with the addition of the jackbooted Prussian superior and the “good Nazi” who preferred tweed suits, none of it seemed particularly artificial. Sam Riley played the gravel-voiced DSI Archer, trying to be a straight-up, old school copper as Scotland Yard filled up with SS men and the strains of Lili Marleen.
His number one enemy wasn’t Standartenführer Huth (Lars Eidinger), the clipped Teutonic boss flown in from Berlin, but the resistance movement, infiltrating his squad room and trying by means foul and fouler to force his hand.
Last night’s episode was a fanfare for a show with promise. A script by James Bond screenwriters, an atmosphere of murk and shadows only partly down to the London fog. A classic wartime thriller but by no means stuck in one time.
TOM WAITS: TALES FROM A CRACKED JUKEBOX (Sunday, BBC4) was a programme that left you with an unexpected glow. Partly, this came from the American singer’s many friends, collaborators and admirers who, as you’d expect, spoke highly of him. More than that it came from a sense that we haven’t heard the last of him.
To many people, Mr Waits, with his angelic-convict face and his ever-present cigarette, is forever stuck at a piano in some bar, telling the same stories, of dignified bums and noble streetwalkers. Last night served as a reminder that, like the best actors, poets, painters and novelists (Waits’ performances encompass all of those professions and more), he has kept on evolving. After meeting his wife, Kathleen Brennan, he moved away from chronicling the lives of barflies as he moved away from the bottle.
Version Two of Tom Waits was more like a cracked circus ringmaster, by way of the Berlin cabaret and an orchestra made of scrap metal. Friends in last night’s tribute linked it to him moving to New York with his wife and family, a city so compact and cosmopolitan that you can’t help but feel plunged into a carnival, even when you’ve just popped out for a loaf of bread.
The real point is that his genius didn’t stay stuck in the sleaze of downtown L.A. any more than his body did. No one knows what Waits 3.0 will be like but we know there will be one, which, given the loss of so many fine talents last year, seems like reason enough to cheer.