Cometh The Hour, cometh the woman

The Hour (BBC2 Tuesdays), now in its second week, is an exciting proposition – elegantly assembled, neatly plotted, and with fine performances from Ben Whishaw, Romola Garai and Dominic West. The masterstroke was the decision to set the drama in 1956.

The initial appeal of the US series Mad Men was that it took place in the months of 1960 before Kennedy came to power, during what one of John Updike’s characters called “the twilight of the old morality”. Writer Abi Morgan has lit on a similar mini-epoch – a year which, though replete with incident, is neither too grandly significant nor too narrowly associated with a single event. We aren’t bored with 1956 the way we may be with, say, 1945 or 1968. It has yet to be plucked of all its feathers.

The period has parallels with our own. There was an Eton-and-Oxford man in No 10 (Anthony Eden), a budget deficit, a credit squeeze, trouble brewing in Egypt – and television was moving into a new era. Part industry drama, part conspiracy thriller, The Hour concerns a group of ambitious and forward-looking BBC reporters who create a serious news programme to replace the old format of newsreels. (In September 1955, Panorama was rebooted as the BBC’s current-affairs flagship, with Richard Dimbleby presenting.) The new show, itself called The Hour, coincides with the run-up to the Suez crisis, which marked the beginning of the end of the British empire. But Morgan also gives a central role to developments at home. Just as working-class boys are finally being given the chance to get ahead, there’s new competition from women too – boy-wonder Freddie (Whishaw) ends up with the “pity post” of home affairs correspondent while his best friend Bel (Garai) is given the peachy role of producer, and the BBC’s choice of presenter is establishment insider Hector Madden (West). Earlier in 1956, the health minister Robin Turton announced that smoking does no harm; Morgan’s characters puff away constantly.

Hindsight allows Morgan to make Freddie a seer – he predicts Kennedy’s vice-presidential nomination and the Suez headline “Grabber Nasser”. This is a crude device, but otherwise the period element is handled well. The newsroom setting makes topical developments, often shoved in at random in historical drama, a legitimate discussion point, and Morgan draws the viewer’s attention to social changes by dramatising their effects convincingly.

It is indicative of The Hour’s restraint that we weren’t told about the 1954 Television Act, which enabled the foundation of ITV, or about the introduction of regional television stations. It reflected less well on Regional TV: Life through a Local Lens (BBC4 Monday) that it didn’t mention these things. Instead, we were given archive footage and anecdotes about interviewing shopkeepers.

The actor Benedict Cumberbatch made a decent fist of The Rattigan Enigma (BBC4 Thursday), a documentary about the playwright Terence Rattigan, who was born 100 years ago. (The BBC’s DVD wing, 2entertain, has released a welcome boxset of televised Rattigan.) Cumberbatch cantered through Rattigan’s life (schooldays at Harrow, homosexual relationships, success with The Browning Version and The Winslow Boy) giving special attention to the night when things fell apart. 1956 would be an exciting year for Rattigan – Marilyn Monroe was in town to film The Princess and the Showgirl, an adaptation of his play The Sleeping Prince. But it also brought the premiere, in May, of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger at the Royal Court; the same week, Gollancz published Colin Wilson’s manifesto The Outsider. The Angry Young Men had arrived; the well-made play was over.

Changes in social mood affected art as well as theatre. James Fox also made reference to 1956 in the final episode of the informative and authoritative British Masters (BBC4 Mondays), a survey of post-war painting. The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition that year was a source of controversy, but Fox chose a different show to demonstrate the clash of tradition and rebellion – the Independent Group’s This Is Tomorrow show, which opened at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1956. Fox gave extended attention to the exhibition’s most famous work, Richard Hamilton’s early Pop Art collage “Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?”. A passionate advocate of the British painting tradition, Fox descended into polemic when he touched on conceptual art, dismissing it as “impenetrable” and “vapid”. Cumberbatch, by contrast, did a thorough and cool-headed job of discussing Rattigan’s post-56 decline.

It wasn’t just in the portrait of competing sensibilities and generational succession that Cumberbatch proved a better historian than Fox – he was also better on pre-1967 homosexuality. Fox referred to the homosexuality of Bacon and Hockney, but bizarrely neglected the topic altogether when considering the most troubled and least-known of his subjects, Keith Vaughan, who killed himself in large part out of sexual misery – not, as Fox appeared to suggest, out of despair at “his increasingly marginal place in the art world”. Fox was telling a story about changing tastes in art, but not everything fell in line with that story; Cumberbatch did better by taking a wider view and refusing to go easy on the facts; and The Hour proved that historical detail, rather than being an enemy of drama, can be one of its most valuable resources.

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