Like last year’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office, The Hack (ITV, every Wednesday, 9pm), which Virgin Media One will also be showing soon, dramatises an appalling scandal: the illegal phone hacking carried out by the News of the World.
Journalists at the now-defunct tabloid, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International corporation, hacked into the voicemails of politicians, celebrities, royals and ordinary members of the public, including – most repellently – murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler before anyone knew her fate, and the victims of the July 7, 2005, London bombings.
But this is where the similarities between the two series end. The Hack, a seven-parter written by the brilliant and prolific Jack Thorne, co-writer of Adolescence, is far more creatively adventurous. Unfortunately, it’s in ways that mostly work against it.
David Tennant, careworn in a scuffed leather jacket, his hair dyed cigarette ash grey, leads a large cast as Nick Davies, The Guardian journalist whose tenacious investigation blew the scandal wide open in 2009.
It led to the rolling of a few editorial and management heads and the eventual closure of the rotten-to-the-core News of the World – although it was more or less reborn soon after as the Sunday edition of another rancid Murdoch organ, The Sun.
We meet Davies in 2008, when he’s plugging his book on BBC Radio 4’s Today and not doing a particularly good job of defending his assertion that the integrity of journalism has been overwhelmed by commercialism.
Too many reporters, he claims, have become “passive processors of unchecked second-hand material” – they don’t actually report anymore, they just regurgitate press releases.
He’s met with scepticism by the presenter and contempt by NOTW managing editor Stuart Kuttner, played by Pip Torrens, a master at smug characters dripping with condescension.
When Davies reminds everyone that NOTW royal correspondent Clive Goodman and a private investigator called Glenn Mulcaire had received prison sentences for hacking into the royal family’s voicemails, Kuttner bats this away. “It happened once,” he says, though we now know the hacking was widespread and carried on for years.
Exhausted and disillusioned, Davies tells The Guardian’s editor Alan Rusbridger (Mr Bates himself, Toby Jones) he wants to be assigned to something else, perhaps a gig in Brussels, but Rusbridger wants to keep him where he is.
Davies’ enthusiasm is renewed, however, when a deep-cover source (Adrian Lester) tells him his book only “scratched the surface” of what’s going on at the News of the World.
Anyone expecting The Hack to be a straightforward story of dogged, honest, old-school journalism in the manner of All the President’s Men or Spotlight is in for a surprise, and maybe a fair bit of disappointment with it.
Thorne and director Lewis Arnold resort to all sorts of stylistic tricks and gimmicks. Davies frequently breaks the fourth wall, Fleabag-style, to deliver asides that range from wry to annoyingly smartarse.
There’s a deeply silly and pointless gag about anonymous sources featuring split-second cameos by celebrities
Characters representing real sources who helped him with tip-offs and information are given jokey fake names like “Detective Inspector Buzz Aldrin”.
Adverts on the Tube come to life around him, as do pictures on his wall.
There’s a deeply silly and pointless gag about anonymous sources featuring split-second cameos by celebrities, including Harry Hill, Jonathan Ross and Gabby Logan.
All this nonsense does is take us out of an important and compelling story that should not be forgotten. There’s also a trite and distracting subplot about Davies’ son being bullied at school that seems to belong to a different series.
In contrast, episode 2, which is as far as I’ve got, shifts lanes to follow, in straightforward fashion, Met officer DCS Dave Cook (Robert Carlyle) as he reinvestigates the 1987 murder of private eye Daniel Morgan, a case with links to the hacking story and the issue of police corruption.
The Hack is bulging with top British acting talent, including Steve Pemberton (as Murdoch), Dougray Scott, Katherine Kelly, Phil Davis, Eve Myles and Sean Pertwee.
Wherever it goes next, let’s hope it scales back the needless and distracting quirks.
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