Press play for top drama
SHOULD I be previewing PRESS (BBC1, 9pm) with my journalist’s hat on (a rather natty fedora, since you ask)? It’s tempting, naturally. That way I can tell you if I think writer Mike Bartlett’s new six-part drama, about two national newspapers and the people who work for them, is a realistic portrayal of that world.
But would you honestly give two hoots?
When you’re watching Casualty, do you really care if it accurately reflects real life in an A&E department?
When you’re watching Our Girl, are you that bothered whether or not our modern-day Army is really like that?
When you’re watching The Walking Dead, are you thinking the producers have a moral obligation to ensure that real-life flesh-eating zombies are being fairly represented?
Taking a wild guess, I’d say probably not. So if you don’t mind, I’m not going to worry too much about Press’s authenticity, or lack of it.
Ben Chaplin’s character, Duncan Allen, the editor of a thriving popular tabloid called The Post, does come across at first as a bit of a cliché. To a slightly lesser extent, so does Charlotte Riley’s Holly Evans (right), news editor of The Herald, an earnest broadsheet (although no longer in broadsheet format but let’s not get bogged down in technicalities), based a mere stone’s throw away.
There’s a clichéd quality, too, to the programme’s portrayal of everyday life in their respective newsrooms.
Yet by the time we’re halfway through this first episode (key storylines: a hit-and-run involving a police car, a young footballer’s suicide, an MP shamed by compromising pictures from her past), I find myself forgetting all that, forgiving the silly inaccuracies and daft misrepresentations and just enjoying a pretty solid, engaging human drama. Because accurately reflecting what people’s jobs are like isn’t what any of these shows is really about.
Thank goodness, as the day-today reality of most occupations would actually make crushingly dull television.
No, they’re simply about fictional characters who either fascinate/ intrigue/entertain us, or fail to, and Bartlett’s rather good at creating those. The fascinating ones, I mean.
It was Bartlett, let’s not forget, who gave us the brilliant Doctor Foster, starring Suranne Jones. Millions loved that show, and it won stacks of awards but I don’t suppose many of us watched it and thought, wow, that’s just what my own GP is like. Or at least I hope not. If it’s indisputable truth you’re after, the one-off documentary SPYING ON MY FAMILY (C4, 9pm) certainly deals in that. A family of six from Essex, the Kirks, have signed up for a week-long social experiment (“social experiment” being Tellyspeak, of course, for “somewhat debasing exercise to which we’re attaching some spurious scientific value…”) whereby they’ll monitor every detail of each other’s lives, around the clock. That’s every text, every social media post etc, with cameras set up all over the place to capture all the rest.