SS-GB is a crime drama set in a world where the Nazis won the Battle of Britain – and it’s a warning from history, say stars
Sam Riley and James Cosmo on the BBC’s adaptation of Len Deighton’s alternative history that imagines a Nazi occupation Britain – and how they hear echoes of that time in current events
There’s something quite unnerving about watching SS-GB. A new five-part BBC series, adapted from Len Deighton’s 1978 novel, it posits the idea that the Nazis successfully invaded Great Britain during the second world war. London has fallen and giant swastikas are draped across the city. As an alternative history, one that doesn’t bear thinking about for anyone in Britain, it’s gruesomely fascinating.
“If the invasion of Britain had actually happened, it would be very different from what we imagined, what we would’ve liked to think would happen,” says lead cast member and Scottish veteran actor James Cosmo.
“People crave security, mostly, for the families. Personally, I don’t think we would’ve been fighting on the beaches and the hills. Just like France, just like all the other countries, there had to be a pragmatic approach to it.”
In other words, compromise and collusion would be the order of the day. The series is framed as a film noir, with Cosmo and Sam Riley starring as Scotland Yard detectives investigating a murder in 1941. Riley’s character, Detective Superintendent Douglas Archer, is a widowed father left morally compromised – and a target for the Resistance – after Heinrich Himmler himself sends SS colonel Huth (Lars Eidinger) to oversee the investigation.
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Riley admits – as a parent – the dilemma of being a father in this situation was what intrigued him. “Having a child myself heightened my questions about this,” he says. “Whether one would keep your head down and hope it would all go away, or would you do something about it? And the fact that he struggles with this question appeals to me, because it felt like a more realistic conundrum.”