With reluctance – but enticed by its surprisingly starry cast and the fact that it had landed, ironically enough, on Netflix – I recently tuned in to The Hour, the BBC’s 2011 political drama series. It’s about a BBC TV news programme being launched in 1956, against the backdrop of the Suez Crisis. And, goodness me, isn’t it good? Better than good, in fact – it’s a high-carat television diamond, and not some lab-grown job either, but the real, romantic, sparkling deal hewn out of the earth and hawked via Antwerp before ending up in the Imperial State Crown.
From the get-go – those classy, Hitchcockesque credits – you know you’re in for a treat, and it doesn’t disappoint: the dialogue brims with zingers and has the velocity of an assault rifle, like the West Wing in its pomp, while the plot zooms along, twisting this way and that, oozing corruption, sex and ambition.
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