Has TV finally got journalists right?
The latest from Mike Bartlett, ‘Press’ sets out to succeed where so many other drama series have failed. Anita Singh takes an early look
Ihad many low points during my days as a rookie reporter, and the memories of them still bring me out in a cold sweat. There was the time I slept in a car outside Hugh Grant’s house in order to get a comment on his split from Liz Hurley, but was so bleary-eyed when he came home that I couldn’t think of a single thing to ask and just stared at him in excruciating silence – a moment recorded for posterity by television cameras.
I once spent 10 hours huddled in a phone box on a freezing January day waiting for Mandy Smith to emerge from the flat opposite, only to discover I’d got the wrong address, it not having occurred to me that a divorce settlement from a Rolling Stone would buy more than a dingy one-bed over a greasy spoon.
But my most mortifying moment was the time I faithfully transcribed Kate Winslet’s considered thoughts on a scene she had filmed with Leonardo Dicaprio, only to see it turned into a front-page story the next day under the headline: “Kate’s Titanic Boob Panic”.
All this came flooding back to me while watching Paapa Essiedu play a fresh-faced journalist in Press, a new BBC One drama set in the world of newspapers. It follows the fortunes of staff at two fictional Fleet Street titles, The Herald and The Post. The writer, Mike Bartlett, and the cast, which includes Ben Chaplin and Charlotte Riley, spent time in real-life newsrooms as part of their research. And it shows. It is that rarest of things: a programme about journalists that isn’t complete bunkum.
There are still a fair few howlers. Like all reporters in TV dramas, this lot can’t attend a press conference without yelling over each other, ensuring that no one can hear a word. One wildly off-key subplot sees a journalist single-handedly uncover a major national scandal, forcing highlevel resignations, all in the space of 24 hours. And, despite the shiny offices, there is a curiously retro feel to the proceedings, with all the focus on print and websites and smartphone apps something of an after-thought.
Bartlett is the man who gave us the gloriously OTT Doctor Foster,
so this is not the place for gritty realism. But there is much that he gets right. I particularly liked the photographer who behaves as if he is on his seventh tour of Iraq, even if he’s most probably just come from snapping Carol Vorderman at a Variety Club luncheon.
The grizzled journalistic veteran who can bring down corporate giants but can’t work something as newfangled as a water cooler also rang a few bells, as did the brighteyed Oxford graduate reduced to a self-loathing husk after selling his soul for a picture byline (a line at the top of an article that names the writer and includes their photograph).
And then there’s the monstrous tabloid editor, Duncan Allen, brilliantly played by Chaplin as a bullying charmer who fires an underling for sitting in the wrong chair, then forces him to turn up to work dressed as a polar bear. Sounds unlikely? Tell that to the real-life reporters who were variously fired for reading the “wrong” newspaper and having too large a knot in their tie, and to the unlucky soul on a Sunday title who was anointed “Harry Potter correspondent” and made to dress as the boy wizard despite being 29 at the time. Bartlett describes Allen as “an amalgam of people I met and stories I was told”.
The camaraderie, the black humour, the late-night drinking in bad pubs, the frazzled nerves as deadline approaches and the thrill of landing the exclusive – the last time we saw a British newsroom so authentically portrayed was in Drop the Dead Donkey, the deliciously funny Nineties series set in the offices of a TV station.
Doctors may wince at the clangers on Casualty and Holby City, but no profession is as misrepresented on screen as journalism.
State of Play did a halfway decent job – in the US remake, the inside of Russell Crowe’s car accurately resembled a dustbin – and the more hardbitten of my journalist colleagues are full of praise for the reporters in The Wire. But I’ve lost count of the dramas showing seedy hacks shouting through letterboxes, boorish photographers taking pictures through living room windows and staff generally having no regard for either the Contempt of Court Act or basic human decency.
Then there’s the incompetence: reporters in Broadchurch sitting through a trial without taking a single note; Rory Gilmore, the protagonist of US series Gilmore Girls, managing to fall asleep mid-interview.
And of course, reality really takes a hike when Hollywood gets involved. If you have seen Kate Winslet play a Telegraph journalist in The Holiday,i am sorry to have to inform you that we do not employ a wedding writer with a salary big enough to afford a thatched cottage in a separate county.
The heroine of Press is Holly Evans (Charlotte Riley), deputy news editor on the Left-leaning Herald. Like Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw, she taps out a story on a laptop in her bedroom. Unlike Bradshaw, she doesn’t live in an apartment straight out of Architectural Digest. Evans, focused and serious and fiercely bright, dresses like someone whose main priority in the morning is to get to work, not to find the perfect capri pants to go with those Manolos.
Bradshaw was the most exasperating female journalist on television until Amy Adams rocked up this year as local paper reporter Camille Preaker in Sky’s Sharp Objects, permanently sloshed on vodka miniatures and having sex with the detective on the murder case she’s supposed to be covering, all while given unlimited time by a kindly editor to mooch around her hometown in search of a story. Frankly, Julia Sawalha gave a more authentic portrayal of an editor in Press Gang, and she was playing a 16-year-old at the time.
Press is far better at conveying the kind of deadlines imposed by news editors on a daily paper. When Post reporter Ed Washburn (Essiedu), on his first day in the job, is tasked with extracting an interview from the parents of a dead footballer, the text he receives from his boss says: “You have one hour. Do not f--- this up.”
Bartlett has said he set out to explore “whether journalists were passionate truth-tellers working hard, or cynical hacks… Of course, the truth is there’s both, and everything in between.”
Journalists as regular human beings? Well, hold the front page.
Press starts on BBC One today at 9pm
I’ve lost count of the dramas showing seedy hacks shouting through letterboxes