Author’s brush in Berlin led to BBC drama on ‘Nazi’ Britain
Academics discover the dark secrets of cake-baking and vegetable contests
THE AUTHOR of the book that inspired BBC One’s new Sunday night drama, which imagines a Britain under Nazi occupation, has told how he was inspired by taking a wrong turn outside Berlin in 1962.
Len Deighton’s accidental encounter with a Russian soldier 20 miles outside the city, while on a driving trip from what was then Czechoslovakia, led to him being escorted via a military checkpoint to communist-ruled East Berlin. His experiences there informed his bestselling novel SS-GB, which has been adapted for a television series that begins tomorrow. Writing in today’s Telegraph, Deighton recalled arriving in East Berlin, where he took a room at the Hotel Adlon. “I didn’t get much uninterrupted sleep,” he said. “I hadn’t even closed my eyes before the barking and yapping of dozens of fierce dogs started on both sides of the newly built Berlin Wall.
“Looking out of my window, I could see the floodlit compound, the huts and barbed wire that backed on to the Adlon and to the boundary of the Soviet Sector.” His time in the city “opened up a new world of research” and taught him “harsh truths” about life under a totalitarian government. Although life ran like clockwork under the regime, he was constantly spied upon and sometimes detained. “Soviet-occupied Germany is not a sure guide to an England under German rule, of course, but my stay in the DDR convinced me that there were similarities between the brutality of the Nazis and that of Moscow-dominated regimes.”
The director of SS-GB, Philipp Kadelbach, is German. He has described the drama as “enthralling and thoughtprovoking”. The screenwriters are Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, who have written five Bond films, including Casino Royale and Skyfall. Sam Riley plays a Scotland Yard detective who becomes involved in the resistance movement.
GIANT vegetable competitions are a hotbed of rivalry, rule-breaking and outright cheating, according to security experts who have investigated the murky world of village fetes.
In one of the most heinous acts, a competitor in the longest runner bean contest was disqualified after it was discovered that the entry was, in fact, two runner beans stuck together.
Cake-baking and flower arranging attract similar levels of skulduggery, according to Dr Annie Maddison Warren and Rachel Daniels of Cranfield University’s defence and security department. Dr Maddison Warren’s previous work includes reviewing information systems for RAF Strike Command. Her paper on village fetes is not quite as serious – it was prepared for the Academic Archers conference, in which experts from various disciplines investigate themes raised on the BBC Radio 4 soap.
“There is always some sort of dodgy behaviour at the Flower and Produce Show in The Archers – suspected cheating, sometimes actual cheating. What would motivate you to cheat? It intrigued us,” she said.
The two colleagues embarked on a journey around the country, interviewing village fete committees and competitors and made some dark discoveries.
“Some people admitted to using shop-bought cake mix, although apparently you can tell when you taste it,” said Maddison Warren.
Another common cheat concerns children receiving “inappropriate levels of help from parents”, while on one occasion a child’s model of the Queen made from vegetables had its head knocked off just before judging in a possible act of sabotage.
Competitors take things very seriously, Ms Daniels said. “We had one man who maintained that he wasn’t a bit competitive. Then he took from his wallet a business card, and underneath his name it said: ‘Grower of large vegetables’.” Ms Daniels added there was a positive aspect to the competitions. “People really love these things as social events, and they bring a community together,” she said. The conference in Lincoln, now in its second year, also heard talks on birdwatching and masculinity in Ambridge, the efficacy of the village’s flood defences and the provision for lactation in women’s prisons, the latter inspired by Helen Titchener’s arrest for the attempted murder of husband,
Rob.