Shuttling between the sleepy town of Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1980 and the Malay Peninsula in the early 1940s, The Railway Man (2013) recounts the secret history of one Eric Lomax, a signals officer in the 5th Field Regiment of the Royal Artillery. Lomax was dispatched, following his commissioning in December 1940, to the main island of Singapore; he was there for its bombardment by Axis forces in December 1941; and he was there to supervise the regiment's clean-up operation when Fort Canning fell into Japanese hands on 15 February 1942. One early flashback in his biopic reveals Lomax ensconced in the ‘Battlebox’ among his fellow telegraphists and wireless operators, straining once more to parse a stream of distress signals, before dismantling his equipment and squirreling away a glass receiving tube. ‘It might come in handy,’ he tells his commanding officer. The kit Lomax manages to salvage, we soon learn, proves instrumental in establishing a connection with the Allied world when the company is taken captive. Lomax and his fellow servicemen are transported to a PoW camp in Thailand, where they furtively set about constructing a makeshift radio in between their engineering duties on the new Thailand–Burma Railway. In a film brimming with long looks and tortuous reunions, an odd moment of relief comes when Lomax and his friend Finlay finally get their act together and find a way to power their equipment. Crouched in the back of an army jeep, the men dampen the static crackle just long enough to make out a distant strain, first a smattering of dance music, and then a familiar, sturdy voice: ‘This is the BBC Home and Forces Programme …’

A good deal has been written about eavesdropping in recent years, so much so that one might detect a tantalising kind of irony in its becoming a topic of open and sustained debate. Covert, precarious, breathtakingly evanescent – the very matter of tapping into remote performances of voice resists trim critical description, and this has come home strongly to those who claim that the long imaginative history of eavesdropping reached its highest pitch in the heat of the Second World War.