Hack-hating BBC luvvies take potshots at the wrong targets
FORGET anything you’ve read about the national newspaper drama Press (BBC1) being brilliantly researched and authentic. It isn’t.
Every office scene, crammed with painfully duff notes, felt to me like listening to someone pick out a familiar melody on an out-of-tune piano. Even writer Mike Bartlett’s splashes of press-room jargon, with phrases like ‘off-stone’ and ‘death knock’, are not quite right — in the way that non- native speakers always retain a giveaway accent.
TV drama is never really accurate, of course. Real-life coppers roll their eyes at Line Of Duty, and pathologists openly weep over Silent Witness. No doubt if an 18thcentury Cornish tin miner could watch Poldark, he’d be muttering: ‘Tain’t right, tain’t fit, tain’t proper.’
This muddled portrayal of how a newspaper works isn’t the problem. Nor is the dreadful plotting: we have to suspend our disbelief with considerable force to accept Holly (Charlotte Riley) is a journalist.
Supposedly a deputy news editor, she fails to recognise a story with the explosive power of a 20 megaton hydrogen bomb. Her best friend has been killed by a hit-and-run police car, and Holly doesn’t mention it to her colleagues because she doesn’t want their pity.
If Holly doesn’t think that story
TIME SLIP OF THE WEEK: When Doctor Who (BBC1) returns next month with Jodie Whittaker in the title role, it will shift from its traditional Saturday slot to Sunday evenings. The Tardis is designed to jump about in time and space . . . not in schedules.
needs reporting, she’s missed her vocation — she should have been a nun in a silent convent.
Still, lots of dramas survive atrocious storylines. Bodyguard is as nutty as a conker dipped in peanut butter, but still draws ten million viewers on a Sunday night.
The real travesty of Press is the naked bias and hypocrisy of the BBC. Remember that, when the Beeb decided to highlight their own failings in a show, they painted themselves as lovably bumbling brainboxes on W1A.
The whole existence of the Corporation is based on its impartiality, yet it uses this star-laden, six- part serial for a sustained attack on what it portrays as commonplace newspaper practice: manipulating grief, blackmailing politicians, covering up secrets.
One scene showed bullying tabloid editor Duncan ( Ben Chaplin) trying to browbeat a bereaved mother in a Parliamentary Press Commission meeting. Bartlett couldn’t have made the man any more hateful if he’d stamped on a kitten.
Such gleeful stereotyping of newspapers is not merely dishonest, it’s dangerous. It increases the risk of censorship because, by painting all journalists as villains, the BBC encourages the public to think of reporters as the enemy.
In an age when politicians, celebrities and tax- dodging oligarchs have never been more keen to muzzle the press, the BBC has picked the wrong side to support.
Realism was not in question on Ross Kemp And The Armed Police (ITV), as the former EastEnders actor joined firearms units on raids in Birmingham. The efficiency of the squads that surrounded suburban houses and arrested gun-toting drug dealers was coldly impressive but far from reassuring, as every operation revealed the ubiquity of illegal weapons on British streets.
The combination of Kemp’s fame and his investigative methods, honed in war zones, enabled him to set up two remarkable interviews — one with a gun smuggler who cheerfully noted how underfunded the police have become, and one with three masked gang members intoxicated with gun violence.
‘It’s easy to turn a little child into a killer,’ boasted one youth, before admitting that his lifestyle terrified his own mother.
This made depressing television. But no one could doubt its authenticity or the depth of its research.