I DISCOVERED The Americans (Thursday, ITV Encore) by accident. In a world of Netflix, Amazon and boxsets there is a dizzying, terrifying, giddy range of choice about what to watch. Friends will urge you to try Sons Of Anarchy, whilst another is raving about House of Cards, and you sit in the middle, with your head in your hands, knowing there will simply never be enough time to watch them all. Some shows will need to just slip on by because life still has to be lived, the dishes need to be done and the dog wants out.

The Americans is another blockbuster series which its fans swear by and critics love but it’s half-way through its fourth series now and if you haven’t jumped in by this point, then how can you manage it at such a late stage? There’s so much catching up to do, and so much competing for your attention. All I can do is urge you to try. Make room for The Americans.

I thought I had no space for them at all, until I heard it likened to Channel 4’s recent Cold War drama, Deutschland ’83. I’m fantastically and horribly obsessed with the Cold War and its nuclear threat and was reluctant, after Deutschland ’83 ended, to go back to repetitive dramas about cops, police, police and cops. Where were the ambitious dramas tackling the cracking, horrifying, maddening topic of the end of the world?

Try The Americans, someone suggested. And so, with trepidation, I began watching it. Could it match the garish and vivid tensions of Channel 4’s 1980s West Germany? I was sceptical.

The Americans is set in early 1980s Washington and Virginia and it looks slick and so very “American”. There is no 1980s roughness or gaudiness to it. It has no frayed edges. It could be the set of any anonymous 1990s American drama: glossy lips, big cars, long hair, luxurious houses and lots of sex scenes. I flinched from it: The Americans was just so…American. It didn’t have the bleak nuclear chill of its Channel 4 rival.

The show is about a Russian couple who’ve been trained since their youth to live as Americans. Smuggled into the country, they took the names Elizabeth and Phillip, married, had children and started running a nice little travel agency – but they’re working as Russian spies under the deep cover of being a perfect, all-American couple.

And if you come to the show, as I did, looking for intrigue, tension, smuggled documents and assassinations you might be a tad disappointed because so much of the drama is set in Philip and Elizabeth’s kitchen or bedroom. Where’s all the spying, the car chases and nukes, you might cry? But you slowly appreciate that the drama is as much about their marriage as it is about espionage.

Philip and Elizabeth were paired by the KGB and sent to live in an alien country they’ve been taught to hate, and then compelled to create a cosy, married life together. To make this story plausible to their neighbours, and for us at home, they had to fall in love and be able to live as a proper husband and wife and so the drama must accommodate their domestic tensions and trivialities as well as wider political developments. So we can forgive them their petty arguments at the breakfast table, or their hassles in raising a bratty, precocious teenage daughter, because their story as a married couple is running in tandem with their story as dangerous Russian “illegals”.

But this week’s episode turned away from Phillip and Elizabeth’s domestic worries and unashamedly gave us nuclear war: the topic people like me are tuning in for week after week. You can’t have a Cold war drama without tackling that issue, the ultimate horror.

In 1984, the BBC broadcast Threads (Please watch it if you haven’t seen it!) That film showed a mercilessly realistic view of Britain after a nuclear war. The previous year, America had shown their own version, a film called The Day After. It’s seems like silly baby talk after watching Threads. Besides which, Steve Guttenberg stars. You’ll be left cold by it after seeing the utter bleakness of Threads, but it still disturbed a lot of Americans, with millions sitting down to watch it, and parents being issued guidance on how to comfort and reassure their children throughout the film.

Thursday’s episode of The Americans broadcast clips from the film, showing the white flash of the bomb, blackened corpses snagged in trees, and Kansas City reduced to radioactive dust. Throughout these extended clips we saw Philip and Elizabeth watching in white-faced silence. And across the street, and across the country, millions of other households were doing the same. The insane, but real, prospect of a nuclear holocaust had reduced everyone to the same level. Adults, children, Russians, Americans, spies, housewives and FBI agents were all suddenly one: we’re all just flesh and worry and fear. The Bomb makes us all the same.

If domestic scenes in the kitchen keep reminding us that the “illegals” are people too, then the Bomb did that to a more extreme degree. We’re all human but it might take horror, or the end of humanity, to make us realise it.

Now that’s a spectacular topic for a series I’d dismissed as being rather too smooth and “American”.


From the unthinkable prospect of nuclear war, we went to the warm silliness of Man Down (Wednesday, C4) and were quite glad of the change. This is the sitcom’s third series and whilst it’s painfully clear we’re missing Rik Mayall from the cast (Mayall having played Dan’s crazy father who was fond of pouncing on him whether poor Dan (Greg Davies, inset) was driving, sleeping, or sitting on the toilet) but the rest of the cast do their best to sparkle and fizz, and they usually always succeed. We miss Rik desperately, but they’re putting on a jolly good show without him.

If the confused and misguided Dan lacks a father figure in his life, two new older men appeared in the show this week, though both were so prickly, mad and aggressive that Dan might have longed for the shenanigans of his dear old dad.

His mother, “Old Woman", is being squired around town by a new beau. Played by Tony Robinson, he’s a severe, no-nonsense Yorkshireman called Daedulus (”everyone calls me Daddy”) who takes a crashing, hideous, instant dislike to Dan. With Daedulus’s Northern froideur colliding with Dan’s frantic japes, I predict the two men are going to clash, brilliantly and horribly, over the coming series.

And if a forbidding Yorkshire stepfather isn’t scary enough, Steven Berkoff made an appearance as a homicidal Serbian janny in Dan’s school, trundling down the corridors with his cart and brushes, leering and staring. Poor Dan would be forgiven for whimpering.