Sam Riley plays Douglas Archer, a Scotland Yard detective caught between Berlin’s SS overlords and a resistance cell while investigating a murder that drags him toward atomic secrets. The five-part BBC One serial, shot in Chatham’s candle-lit dockyards, paints 1941 London as a city of swastikas on the Strand and pints pulled in bombed-out pubs where neighbour now spies on neighbour.
The plot keeps its foot on the gas: every clue Archer unearths tightens the screws of a German civil war brewing between Wehrmacht and SS. Kate Bosworth’s American journalist Barbara Barga and Lars Eidinger’s ice-cold SS Standartenführer Dr Huth circle Archer like rival chess players, using him to secure a King’s Cross attic where Britain’s last hope of an A-bomb sits in a lead box.
Purvis and Wade’s script trims Deighton’s labyrinth of double-crosses to the bone, staging a finale in the royal crypt beneath Westminster where monarchists and fascists swap bullets over a live microphone to Berlin. Composer Dan Jones’ dirge-like strings echo through empty Underground tunnels, turning tube trains into rolling coffins long before the credits roll.
Production Details
BBC One / 1 Season / 5 Episodes / 2017
Created by: Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, Len Deighton
Writer(s): Robert Wade, Neal Purvis
Producer(s): Patrick Schweitzer
Cinematography: Stuart Bentley
Music: Dan Jones
Main Cast
Sam Riley as Douglas Archer
Kate Bosworth as Barbara Barga
Rainer Bock as Fritz Kellermann
Aneurin Barnard as PC Jimmy Dunn
Christina Cole as Mrs Sheenan
Maeve Dermody as Sylvia
Lars Eidinger as Dr Oskar Huth
James Cosmo as Harry Woods
Jason Flemyng as Mayhew
Andrew Bicknell as Professor Springer
Jonathan Cass as German Officer
Julian Rhind-Tutt as Bernard Staines
