SS-GB: a timely treatise on dealing with dictatorship

Another week spent gaping in horror at the news, watching hatred win again? Never mind. Stick the telly on and escape into a plush new period drama about … oh. It’s about Nazis running Britain. Sorry.

SS-GB (Sunday 19 February, 9pm, BBC1) is based on Len Deighton’s 1978 alternate-history novel and set in 1941, a year after Germany invaded and our government fell. Buckingham Palace is flying Third Reich flags, Trafalgar Square is strewn with spiky roadblocks, and the titular British arm of the SS keep bursting into London pubs, screaming “PAPERRRZ!” and slapping folk about, just as someone’s trying to start a chorus of Knees Up Mother Brown.

Shooting was under way a year ago, so SS-GB isn’t a hasty response to world events. TV drama bosses are perhaps more politically prescient than we’d credited, given that Hulu in the States is about to adapt Margaret Atwood’s totalitarian thriller The Handmaid’s Tale, and Amazon is already two seasons into its version of Philip K Dick’s The Man In The High Castle. SS-GB could be more eerily well-timed, instructive fiction … or, if the tone is not quite right, horribly timed fluff.

They’ve got a dashing hero here in the lithe form of police detective Douglas Archer (Sam Riley), a cocky, feet-on-desk sort who’s constantly smoking, smirking and adjusting his hat to achieve maximum film-noir rakishness. Archer is also a colossal shagger, introducing himself to us by riskily sneaking his secretary into a posh, Nazi-commandeered hotel (the “Fritz Ritz”) for some hotly verboten wurst-smuggling on swastika-patterned sheets. Minutes later, he’s surveying the crime scene that sets off the narrative – an antiques dealer has been shot, but his gaff’s full of weird contraband, and the postmortem hints at something other than bullets – when he spots an expensively clad, platinum-curled woman (Kate Bosworth) loitering outside. He follows her to a tea room. Bosh! Before you can say “top-level debriefing”, he’s ascertained that she’s an American journo who knows too much, and she’s leaning across the table with a cigarette in her mouth and a look that says “light me up”. By episode two, it’s missionary position accomplished.

Replete with genre wish-fulfilment as SS-GB is, though, the underlying atmos is one of paralysing darkness, convincingly realised; you believe that the populace is in constant fear of making one false move. Archer’s swagger is mere bravado. The war has already made him a widower who spends spare evenings soaking in black-market whisky. Now, just as the British resistance movement is gaining momentum, the military significance of this murder removes the last vestiges of cushiness from his job. Episode one’s key scene sees him insist to his young son that the rumours at school are false: of course Dad doesn’t work for the Germans! He works … in the same building. The police are “non-political”. Society needs them to keep calm and carry on. Everything’s fine.

So the question SS-GB asks is not an abstract “What if?” but rather an acutely topical “What would you do?” Staying neutral is not an option when authoritarianism takes hold: it relies on public servants just doing their jobs. That’s a test that, for example, US immigration officials are failing right now. Our man Archer is in danger of ending up on the wrong side of history, alternate or otherwise. There’ll be real weight behind it if he does decide to put his trousers on and punch a fascist in the face.