THE HOUR is a dull drama about how the BBC wish they'd been
Plot: Two BBC journalists start a radical new news show but are caught up in a murder-conspiracy.Right now British TV is trying to play catch-up with the US and this is a blatant attempt to rip off the period glamour of "Mad Men". Sadly, whilst the 1950s in Britain is interesting from a news perspective - Suez, Hungary and television - it's also a dull, shabby, exhausted and distinctly not glamorous period. Which doesn't stop the BBC from making it into one, no matter how incongruous. What really lets it down though is the writing, which is so trendy, metropolitan, and left-wing that it bears no real relation to the period whatsoever. Example: "Mad Men" dealt with changes in racial attitudes with subtlety, with black-face and black servants slowly giving way to Civil Rights; "The Hour" simply has the main character walk through streets packed with (only) black people whilst calypso music plays loudly and he quotes Martin Luther King (in 1956!). The story follows two journalists, one an insufferably chippy 'working class' smart-arse who makes you want to beat his head in with an Alan Sillitoe novel, the other a woman in a man's world who actually spends most of the series in a tepid love triangle and modelling (inappropriate for the period) clothes. The other characters are a thinly sketched parody of a conservative boor and a ferocious, alcoholic female war correspondent (the only one whose character rang true). As a period piece it fails because the leads (anachronistically) hold exactly the same 'correct' political beliefs as the 21st century BBC. As a drama it fails because it mostly consists of the leads telling each other how wonderful they are. In addition, because straight drama is apparently too dull, there's a poorly shoehorned in murder-conspiracy that is poorly plotted and somewhat inevitably implicates "the authorities". Altogether, glossy rubbish.
score /10
YohjiArmstrong 21 July 2011
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2462358/14530
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