PRESS

TX: BBC1, Thursdays, 9pm, 06/09/2018 – 11/10/2018 (six episodes)
w: Mike Bartlett, d: Tom Vaughan, p: Paul Gilbert, m: Natalie Holt
(Lookout Point Ltd. & BBC Studios & Deep Indigo Productions & PBS Masterpiece – for BBC One)

A steady grower of a series, Press was pleasantly verbose and took its time in exploring the particular milieu of journalists on two papers: the Sun-style tabloid The Post and the broadsheet The Herald – Guardian-esque, as strongly implied in episode 1: ‘The Herald started in 1936 as the Yorkshire Herald’. Writer Mike Bartlett was unafraid to expose the particular venal nastiness that has been increasingly prominent in our tabloid media discourse since Rupert Murdoch took over The Sun in 1969. David Suchet does a good job as George Emmerson, The Post’s owner and CEO of Worldwide News, suggesting the transnational power behind the scenes, exerting control over even his very self-possessed editor Duncan Allen (Ben Chaplin). Chaplin is the stand-out performer, wringing an uncertain note of pathos in his portrayal of Allen’s private life, as well as his monstrous marshalling of his newsroom. Wisely, Bartlett complicates his amoral ruthlessness by creating other characters who seem to possess even less of old Gordon Brown’s compass.

It has its flaws. The This Life-style private life entanglements of the work colleagues across both papers are far from riveting. Paapa Essiedu does his best with the amoral reporter Ed Washburn. Ellie Kendrick is lumbered with the stereotypical hapless liberal Leona Manning-Lynd, a journalist air-headed enough to leave her notes and phone around when out for a drink with rival reporter Ed, when she goes to the toilet. Brendan Cowell – Steve Pemberton would’ve been better! – and Priyanga Burford have a relationship that I couldn’t care less about. Things are much more interesting when revolving around the idealistic northern tough nut Holly Evans (Charlotte Riley) and Duncan Allen, who encapsulates the broiling, manipulative cynicism of 2018 Britain’s true elite: the right-wing press. Riley, so adept at deadpan comedy in Swimming With Men (2018), is as good here playing grim tenacity.

Compared with the warm, northern provincial newsroom of Arthur Hopcraft’s Play for Today ‘The Reporters’ (BBC1, 1972) or the bustling Junior Gazette in Steven Moffat’s Press Gang (Central, 1989-93), Press suggests it’s a bleak time for “Fleet Street”, besieged by social media and dwindling circulations – as well as being physically dispersed beyond its Fleet Street locale for over thirty years. In the last episode, in a bid to persuade him to do the right thing, Evans reminds Allen of his old editor and mentor, who Allen then reveals was very much part of the fabled drink-sodden culture of old Fleet Street.

The contemporary newsroom is presented as either mildly dysfunctional and reactive (The Herald) or ruled on fear and proactive (The Post). Allen’s attitudes are shown in his patronising of his Geordie assistant Lucy Redford (“She’s not the sharpest”), who in a notable scene in episode 5 breaks cover and reveals sardonically to Holly: “There was a reporter here who started leaking stories to other papers. When Duncan found out, he put the reporter’s mam on the front page. Labelled her “benefit scum”. (Quietly) He thinks I’m stupid. That’s what I want him to think.” It’s a shame that Lucy (Laura Jane Matthewson) doesn’t get any further truth-telling opportunities, but maybe that is the point: such voices are closed down. With such newspapers, you only really hear one voice – Emmerson, mediated by Allen, who discourages any distinctive voices among his staff.

Bartlett negotiated such ground successfully in his TV play – formerly on stage and radio – King Charles III (TX: 14/05/2017), which portrayed a fair few commoners’ outlooks alongside the dominant royals, even if it did have tendency to portray a baying mob rather than a passionate crowd.

The best episodes were 5 and 6, with the intertwining plots around terrorism – as symbolised by MI5’s shadowy “Resonance” surveillance project – and the suicide of school bully Danny Lyons, 17, who it is implied was hounded to kill himself by the paper’s disproportionate coverage of him as a ‘MONSTER’. The drama becomes less predictable; the scenes in the newsroom become ever more charged, after earlier episodes resembled a rather pedestrian equivalent of The Hour (BBC2, 2011-12).

Mercifully, Press never seems to see itself as a film, but a leisurely, unfolding television text – and the final episode bluntly dramatises the increasingly hysterical tenor of our baying press since 2017. It is a gripping, ethically engaged intervention against the terrorscapism of Bodyguard, rubbing our faces in the frightening world Paul Dacre and the Mail’s political editor James Slack have helped to mould.

There’s a nobility in standing against this tide; remember which paper broke the story of the Windrush scandal and consider this: would the likes of Duncan Allen have gone anywhere near it?