The Hour (BBC 2)

A journalist slips some cash into the policeman's hand and minutes later is rifling through a dead man's pockets. Not the latest example of Fleet Street's rot but a detail from BBC2's new newsroom drama The Hour, set in 1956 as television journalism came of age.
"It's a really interesting time for the show to be broadcasting, although obviously I wasn't aware of the situation at the time," admits Abi Morgan, writer of The Hour. "We also have phone-tapping going on in our drama – although it's very different from the kind we're hearing about now."
With the Suez crisis as a backdrop, the stylish drama weaves thriller and newsroom drama together. It follows three news journalists – played by Dominic West, Romola Garai and Ben Whishaw – as they launch a groundbreaking new programme, The Hour, which aims to shrug off the constraints on television journalism at the time.
"In the late 50s, journalists felt very inhibited and penned in by the establishment, so the notion of The Hour was that it was a show where journalists could stand up and have an opinion," Morgan said.
But while journalism at the time had "a level of nobility" the writer's research also suggested that journalists paying off policeman did happen. "But it is fiction," she stressed. "The idea is that it's a great ride. I'm a storyteller, so my job is to tell a dramatic fiction."
Filmed through a fug of cigarette smoke, and focused on a media world stuffed with sharp-suited men and ambitious women, comparisons with the acclaimed US advertising drama Mad Men, set in same era, are inevitable.
But while spirits at lunchtime, sexism and stylish design are all very much in evidence, Morgan said there were also differences. "To be mentioned in the same sentence as Mad Men is an honour, but I think it has a different pace and energy to The Hour," she said. "I didn't think, 'I'd like to do a series like Mad Men,' I just thought it was an interesting place in history and I wanted to do a show that was set in a newsroom. Mad Men is an incredible, but different, show."
The Hour does, however, have its own Peggy Olson-style pioneering female in the shape of producer Bel Rowley, played by Garai, who also starred in the BBC2 adaptation of The Crimson Petal and the White earlier this year.
Rowley takes her reference points from Grace Wyndham Goldie, who became head of BBC news and current affairs, introduced innovative television formats and was instrumental in the careers of broadcasters such as Robin Day and David Frost. "I was very interested in the women of that time. My mother is of that generation and there were these incredibly brilliant, intelligent women who, because of the time, had to battle to get noticed," she said.
Morgan has had practice when it comes to determined women – she has also written the script for the forthcoming Phyllida Lloyd biopic The Iron Lady, which stars Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher. While she would not be drawn on her politics, Morgan said she had enjoyed writing about the former prime minister. "It was fantastic to write her. She's an incredible, iconic woman and it was exciting to be able to examine someone like that and try to find the dramatic art for that," she said.
"I was aware of her growing up and it's interesting for me to go back in time and get a stronger sense maybe of the pressures, of the demands on a woman running the country and the verve of the woman to do what's she's done."
The Hour is part of a tranche of shows to have benefited from increased funding for BBC2 drama, an additional £10m a year for three years. They include the Hugo Blick thriller The Shadow Line, a classy adaptation of Michael Faber's The Crimson Petal and the White and The Night Watch, broadcast this week, which starred Anna Maxwell Martin and Claire Foy.
The Hour, which begins on Tuesday, will be broadcast as six one-hour episodes. Morgan, whose acclaimed work includes Sex Traffic and Royal Wedding, is keen to secure a second series. "What would be really exciting would be to come back into another big news story," she said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InILSU-ZV9M