In the old days, before cable, Americans had to rely on PBS for high-end British programming, but all that changed in 1998, with the establishment of BBC America, which opened a window on the full landscape of British TV. That’s how the story should go, anyway, but it doesn’t. The fact is that other cable channels have grabbed the good stuff, while until very recently BBC America remained a half-arsed enterprise. The half that it had was gained mainly from giving an American home, eight years ago, to Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s “The Office” and to the fantasy series “Doctor Who.” BBC America (whose offerings include shows not just from the BBC but from commercial sources like Channel 4 and ITV) is only now appearing to be interested in creating an identity worth having, though on any given day the schedule still looks like an afterthought: numbing blocks of Gordon Ramsay shows, “Top Gear,” “Doctor Who” episodes, and a bunch of old American sci-fi shows. Hand me the remote, will you, pet? Thanks, love. Cheers.
Yet there are and always have been a good number of programs worth watching on BBC America, both comedies (the every-which-way politically incorrect “Little Britain” was a favorite of mine) and dramas, such as “Luther,” starring “The Wire” ’s Idris Elba as a brilliant, troubled police detective. But not before this summer has the channel given us a show that has the lustre of “The Hour,” a six-episode drama (it’s already been renewed in the U.K.) that’s almost absurdly gratifying, as if it were a space containing chocolate, gold, a book you’ve always wanted to read, your favorite music, and the love of your life, who desires you unceasingly. With its casting, its look, its unfolding mysteries, its attention to important historical events, its sexiness, “The Hour” hits every pleasure center.
“The Hour” was created and written by the playwright and screenwriter Abi Morgan, who is not as well known in the United States as she is in Britain. That may change soon: Morgan wrote the film “The Iron Lady,” about the rise and rule of Margaret Thatcher, starring Meryl Streep, which will be released in December. “The Hour” has been compared to “Mad Men,” because it appears to be attempting to capture so much in its dramatic net—to give hard definition to a national style at particular moments in time, and also as those moments are giving way to the next. Morgan was born in 1968, Matthew Weiner, the creator of “Mad Men,” in 1965; they missed the eras their series are about by just enough to fuel their evident curiosity about those dead days. Both shows draw you in visually—you come for the set design and the smoking, and stay for the relationships, the intrigue, and the history lesson.
“The Hour” is set in London in 1956, during the Suez crisis, and combines the worlds of news and entertainment, and politics and espionage, all while the empire is undergoing its last pricking before finally deflating. The series begins as a group of ambitious young BBC employees are putting together a new kind of show: a weekly news magazine that’s timely, and responsive to world events, but is also a packaged thing, a product that has to win over critics and the public—and the government. Right from the start, the integrity of everyone involved is at stake—a point of interest made even more pointed and more interesting by what we’ve learned in the past few months about the shady practices of some journalists at the British tabloid News of the World and the government officials, officers of the law, and thugs in its orbit. (As it happens, the production company behind “The Hour,” called Kudos, is owned, as was the now defunct News of the World, by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.) At the same time, “The Hour” is an office drama, examining decisions that have to be made on a daily basis: coverage of the Hungarian uprising and its crushing by Soviet tanks has to be shortchanged in light of the events in Suez. And, as in “Mad Men,” the new freedoms, as well as the old restrictions, that women faced personally and professionally in the workplace are very much in the forefront, with the added ugly wrinkle that class distinctions still play a part in everyone’s destiny.
The first shot in the series is a closeup of an intense young man, Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw), talking right at us. “Newsreels are dead. We’ve bored the public for too long,” he says, with a sense of urgency. He’s practicing his pitch to the head of the news department, to try to get on the new show. His itchiness is well founded: the evening news is showing footage of débutantes at Royal Ascot. Continuing on his tear, he says to Bel Rowley (Romola Garai), a co-worker, that news should be more than “the nightly dose of reassurance that everything’s all right with the world.” “Agreed,” she says, calmly. Bel and Freddie are best friends, though they are not equals. Freddie calls her Moneypenny, the name of the sexy executive secretary in the James Bond books, but it turns out that Bel is superior to him—she is named producer of the new program (the news director, Clarence Fendley, played by Anton Lesser, believes that Bel, because she’s a woman, will be easy to control), and Freddie doesn’t get the on-camera job he’s angling for. That goes to the handsome, presentable Hector Madden (Dominic West, also of “The Wire”), who’s long on pedigree and short on credentials. (The triangle is familiar, if you’ve seen the 1987 movie “Broadcast News,” with Holly Hunter as a producer caught between the smart reporter Albert Brooks and the thick but smooth anchor William Hurt.) Intercut with scenes at the office are events whose import isn’t clear at first: we see Freddie covering an upper-class girl’s engagement party, and an unidentified man leaving his office, looking hounded. The man is shortly murdered, and the engaged girl, Ruth (Vanessa Kirby), commits suicide. Freddie becomes obsessed with finding out what really happened to the man and to Ruth, who had been involved with each other: Ruth was a childhood friend of his—her aristocratic parents took the working-class Freddie into their country house during the war, because Freddie’s mother had worked as a secretary for Ruth’s father—and she had come to him for help before her death and he didn’t answer the call.
Freddie is fearless in pursuit of the truth, and that puts him in danger. Outside the office, he’s being followed by he knows not whom, and inside the office he and his colleagues are constantly running into trouble with their superiors, who, in turn, are constantly being pressured to make “The Hour” less watchdoggish, as if national security depended on it. At the time, the BBC operated under a “Fourteen Day Rule,” forbidding it to air opinions on controversial parliamentary matters for two weeks. Originally put in place to keep government ministers from using the Beeb as their personal mouthpiece, it came to be a straitjacket. Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s press liaison, Angus McCain (Julian Rhind-Tutt), is always complaining to Clarence, and Clarence is always complaining to his staff. It gets old, but you do believe that it took courage to defy the government during the Suez crisis, to show antiwar demonstrations on TV, and to present evidence that the government was lying to its citizens about its actions in Egypt.
Some viewers in the U.K.—people who were there at the time—have attacked the show for getting so many details wrong: phones, clothes, accents, colloquialisms. Americans won’t have a problem with all that. Most of us aren’t burdened by firsthand familiarity with fifties Britain, and some of us aren’t burdened by the idea that a fictional show is a documentary. It’s as a piece of nostalgia-tinged theatre that we are likely to fall for the series, and who can blame us? “The Hour” combines the sensibilities of two people who did so much to shape our idea of what Cold War Britain was like: Alfred Hitchcock and Ian Fleming, through his avatar James Bond. The series does everything it can to reinforce those associations. The actors look like their Hitchcockian equivalents, the opening credits recall Saul Bass’s lively geometrics, and the soundtrack is as Manciniesque as it gets, snazzily underscoring moments of romance, danger, dread, loneliness. Where “Mad Men” is cool, “The Hour” is warm, and in love with its actors, who are often shot in tight closeups. And it’s hugely gratifying to watch a drama that doesn’t sideline a woman when capital-H history is happening. Bel is part of history, because she’s deciding how history is being depicted. It’s heady stuff, and it’s sexy in all the right ways. ♦