A hard core cyber war
IMAGINE if almost the entire internet suddenly ceased to function, right across the UK. Wouldn’t that be absolutely brilliant? Sorry, I mean “terrible”. Wouldn’t that be absolutely terrible? I really must get this keyboard fixed.
That’s the scenario we’re presented with tonight (the internet meltdown, I mean, not my laptop playing up) in Channel 4’s new thriller THE UNDECLARED WAR (9pm).
Set just a couple of years into the future, it finds the nation brought to its knees by... well, take a wild guess.
No, not by RMT boss Mick Lynch but, almost as bad, by the Russians, who have decided to subject us to a crippling cyber attack.At least, it’s assumed they’re the ones behind it.
They do have form for this kind of thing.
And actually the effects are both swift and horrendous because these days it’s all that online interconnectedness that holds everything together.
For example: “Air travel is still up,” reports one of the characters at GCHQ, where this drama unfolds, “but most of the flights have stopped because they use the internet to control aircraft on the ground.”
Last time I checked it was a family from Cambridge who did that, with the help of Kevin Bacon and his pals from EE Broadband, but the point remains the same either way: the country has been plunged into a right old mess.And the Government, led by Adrian Lester’s Andrew Makinde (apparently, he’s ousted Boris in some sort of coup), might choose to retaliate.
If it does, well, blimey, where will it all end, eh?
Central to the story isn’t the prime minister, however, but Saara Parvin (Hannah Khalique-Brown), a work experience student who’s thrown into this nightmare scenario on her very first day.
Although treated condescendingly when she arrives, Saara looks destined to be a key player in whatever happens next. That’s because she’s a genius when it comes to computer coding (ie. scrolling down a screen crammed with squillions of digits and dots and dashes and, crucially, NOT saying: “Sorry, I haven’t a blinking clue what any of this means.”)
Dramas with computers at their core can be tricky to pull off (that relentless clickety-clack of characters tapping away doesn’t exactly make for an engaging soundtrack) but writer Peter Kosminsky has shown great inventiveness in addressing that issue. I’ll leave you to find out how.
Oh, and don’t try to make any sense of the opening scene.
You won’t.
It’s designed purely to illustrate the peculiar manner in which Saara’s brain works, on an entirely different level from yours, mine and maybe even Mick Lynch’s.