Hector, Bel and Freddie.
THE welcome clatter of typewriters is back in town tonight with the return of The Hour.
Set in 1957, the second BBC2 series is a step up from the acclaimed first season with the confidence to be even bigger and bolder in its storytelling and settings.
Presenter Hector Madden (Dominic West) is dining out – and more – on his national celebrity while producer Bel Rowley (Romola Garai) does all the work back at the BBC.
The deliciously dry Lix (Anna Chancellor) remains on the foreign beat and knows a lot more than she cares to tell, still clutching a glass of Scotch at all times of the day.
And just what is her link to the intriguing and ever so slightly OCD new Head of News Randall Brown, played by Peter Capaldi?
There’s a dramatic re-appearance for Freddie, played by new Bond star Ben Whishaw, who was fired in the first series.
And an unexpected new direction has been cooked up for Hector’s frustrated wife Marnie (Oona Chaplin).
While this six-part tale of London’s criminal underworld set against the backdrop of the Cold War and the space race also sees the arrival of Hannah Tointon as Soho club hostess Kiki.
Plus Tom Burke as producer Bill Kendall.
Back in the first few days of October I was among those lucky enough to be invited along to a preview screening of tonight’s first episode.
Followed by a showreel of highlights from the rest of the series and then a Q&A session involving award-winning writer Abi Morgan, producer Ruth Kenley-Letts, Dominic West and Hannah Tointon.
Part one of my transcript of that Q&A is below with the rest to follow as soon as my own non-clattering keyboard can manage.
But first, here’s one of my news stories from the event:
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Dominic West as Hector.
The Hour star Dominic West turned into a heavyweight TV presenter when filming the new series of the period drama.
Dominic plays BBC anchorman and hearthrob Hector Madden in the BBC2 series set in 1957.
“We had incredibly good caterers on the set and I put on about two stone,” he revealed.
“I remember having two lunches and everyone looking at me. My suits were made to measure with elastic seams.”
Writer Abi Morgan wrote the weight gain into the script.
“There were lines about how fat Hector was and how he should lose weight,” laughed Dominic.
The second BBC 2 series sees Hector being offered a job with a rival current affairs show on ITV.
And also facing the fallout from the Soho criminal underworld involved in sex, crime and intimidation.
Hannah Tointon – younger sister of Kara – joins the cast as clubland’s Kiki with The Thick of It’s Peter Capaldi as new Head of News Randall Brown.
Former Hollyoaks star Hannah says: “Kiki just uses her sexuality to get what she wants. She thinks she’s untouchable.”
Now back to his fighting weight, Dominic played detective Jimmy McNulty in The Wire and won a BAFTA for his portrayal of serial killer Fred West in ITV1’s Appropriate Adult.
The Hour 2 also sees the return of Ben Whishaw – who plays Q in Skyfall – as BBC journalist Freddie Lyon.
The new series begins tonight (Wednesday Nov 14) on BBC2 at 9pm.
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Peter Capaldi as Randall.
The BBC’s Head of Drama Ben Stephenson introduced the screening:
“It’s the first series to come back on BBC2 in about a hundred years. So it was a brilliant moment for us on BBC2 to see that. We’re incredibly proud of the show. We loved series one. But, as ever, series one just gives you a springboard into series two and to build on all the things that we thought were so wonderful. Starting, of course, with Abi’s fabulous writing and the characters that she created. And I think what she’s done this year is really build it around those wonderful actors and those wonderful characters in a scintillating workplace against a fascinating backdrop. But this year it is all about the lives and loves of this group of characters – joined by some new stars, including the absolutely brilliant Peter Capaldi. I’m constantly amazed that we’ve got one of the country’s premier writers writing a series for us on BBC2. May it continue for many years. She’s written beautiful, sensitive, startling scripts filled with many layers. They are worth watching time and time again.”
Anna Chancellor as Lix.
The post-screening Q&A:
Q: (From me, as it happens): Abi – obviously we saw the themes in that first episode and the series showreel that will run throughout the series. Can you expand on why you chose those themes and how they develop. And what you were able to explore in this series that, perhaps, you couldn’t do in the first series?
Abi Morgan: “I always think with The Hour, I’m chasing history. And so I knew I didn’t want to be away from the group for too long but I had to come back. And basically there wasn’t a big Suez Crisis, there wasn’t The Bay of Pigs yet. And so in many ways it was good for me because I had to look at the eclectic themes that were going on at that time. What I loved about ’57 is that Macmillan has said, ‘Spend, spend, spend,’ and we were dealing with huge threats about immigration and concerns about immigration and we were very seduced by the rise of Hollywood and glamour and that was affecting us culturally in Britain. But also you could start to see the starts of this big gangland – families, infrastructures and a lot of those were also related to huge migrant families at that time. So there were a lot of themes that instantly appealed to me and I think what I got very excited about was the notion of two time bombs ticking. The literal time bomb of the nuclear arms race and certainly the space race but also the domestic time bomb. And what I loved about what I found in series two – series one is very much about post-war austerity, it’s about a kind of generation of men recovering. And I think series two is really about us preparing ourselves for the Sixites and a time where London was sort of feeling a sense of glamour but the counterpoint to that was a sort of dark, seedy underworld. And so it’s a kind of macro and micro in one series, really.”
Romola Garai as Bel.
Q: Was it in some ways easier to write the second series because you had your characters under your belt and you could get on with it?
Abi Morgan: “Well I kind of hoped that I’d shaken off the Mad Men thing because I think inherently The Hour is…what possesses me is the notion of quest and slight thriller elements and I’m a huge fan of news, I love newspapers, I love The Newsroom, for example, and I love the idea of journalists being these noble creatures because I like good journalists, basically. So I was very possessed by those characters and I felt I really knew them. I think the brilliance of Dominic and Ben and Romola and Peter Capaldi and Anna Chancellor – as a writer you’re very enthused and you’re very driven by who you write for. They’re brilliant barometers of the work. But they also re-adopt those characters and own them. And so in many ways I felt very confident about listening to what they felt about the characters but also in many ways I didn’t have to work as hard, because I think they own them anyway. So I just responded to the brilliance of what they threw up in series one and I just tried to write the counterpoint of some of the things they did in series one. In the first series Dominic (Hector) is completely charming and invincible and strong and in many ways unbreakable. And I think series two is very much about this man being taken into a spiral and a catalyst of change. And so I was really inspired by Dominic and where he can go as an actor. So, yeah, it was easier series two in a way.”
Q: Dominic – you seem very comfortable in this role as Hector. Did you look at presenters of that time? Or did you look at the presenters of now? And did you get something from them or is it just somebody you have just made up in your own mind from a series of presenters you’ve watched?
Dominic West: “I felt I knew the period because I felt my dad – he wasn’t like Hector but he was a man of the Fifites, really, and dressed like that. And so I felt my affection towards the character and the period was, I suppose, because of my dad. But I did look at a lot of the presenters then and particularly the paternal or the avuncular Richard Dimblebys and, ‘Now then viewers, we’re all going to listen very carefuly to an expert, an academic. He’s going to teach you exactly what’s what.’ (laughter) I long for those days to return. Inevitably I did find you can’t get Paxman out of your head. And I suppose the more confrontational style of interviewing that I suppose only came about really with Robin Day after this period. So I think there’s may have been a bit of anachronism in the way one approaches the interviews that we did, anyway. But I have a great deal of affection for the BBC at that time. We had a character in series one who was an Egyptian man and I think he was involved in the Arab Section of the World Service. He worked in the BBC in the Fifites and he was telling us all about the guys who ran it then and he had a lot of affection for it as well.”
Q: Is there any historical evidence that in the Fifites ITV tried to poach BBC journalists?
Abi Morgan: “It could have happened. What was interesting, they weren’t doing viewing figures then, They weren’t so set on viewing figures. I think Britain was very influenced by the American style – the Ed Murrow, the Walter Cronkites and that slightly informal form of broadcasting. And certainly ITV copied that mould very early on. So there was very much a sense that the BBC was given a run for its money. And I played on that. But what we didn’t have then is how many people were tuning in every night because no-one had that black box in that small section of middle England that black boxes are in. But I liked the idea that it was a period where BBC wasn’t controlling – so there was more competition and it just felt like a rich vein. I liked that idea of a healthy sense of competition.”
Hannah Tointon as Kiki.
Q: Hannah – did you perhaps look at Diana Dors from the past?
Hannah Tointon: “I think Kiki’s idol is Marilyn Monroe…I think she aspires to be that. I looked at all her films and tried to get her wiggle, actually.”
Q: What was the hardest thing to put over in the second series?
Abi Morgan: It sounds like a cliche, but you raise your game and you surround yourself with good people. And so I think when you get the calibre of actor like Dominic and Hannah and Ben and Romola and Peter, you raise your game all the time to try and do things that tonally still feel real and yet I also feel that The Hour does have that ‘other’. It is meant to be entertainment. It is meant to be this slightly heightened world and yet I think the good stories are those stories where you feel very transported – at the same time you’re constantly trying to resonate back to the 21st century. That’s what’s interesting. In series one, Ben Whishaw’s characters says, ‘History repeats itself. The first is tragedy, second is farce.’ And I think there is a truth in that. That history keeps turning itself round and round. So a lot of the the things that resonated when I was looking back – certainly series one was about a Middle Eastern leader who gets above himself and wants to take over the world and I wrote that at the time of the Iraq invasion. What I loved about series two is that it is about the undercurrent of the Right, which I think is still very prevalent in 21st century Britain, certainly in Europe. And it is about capitalism out of war, which is still very relevant. So I think the challenge for me is to try and write something that transports you and you enjoy the glamour and the escapism of the Fifties but still feel it’s relevant and contemporary. And also just raise your game so that the actors will say your words without catching you in the corridor and saying, ‘I don’t believe in this.’ And so that’s what I do on a personal level.”
Ruth Kenley-Letts: “One of the exciting things for us making it was that Abi was writing in the building that we were shooting in and our studio. So she was writing later episodes as were shooting earlier episodes. Often Abi would just quietly go and watch some of the scenes that the actors were shooting and come back kind of inspired almost, thinking, ‘I know what I can do.’ And a whole new storyline would suddenly emerge.”
Ben Whishaw as Freddie.
Q: Surely isn’t the difference now we have this Peter Capaldi figure in? That’s surely the big difference? There’s a whole new sense of jeopardy in the newsroom?
Abi Morgan: “Yeah. Anton Lesser playing Clarence was a really hard ask. So they were big boots to fill. And the first day that Peter was on set, I met Ruth in the corridor and she went, ‘Come and have a look, come and have a look…’ I came very late to The Thick Of It and I’m really glad because I think I would have been incredibly intimidated had I seen how brilliant his performance was in that. I have to say it’s the greatest joy of being a writer. Most writers are frustrated egomaniacs who really want to act and just don’t have the talent or the charm to do it. And most writers want to give their words to brilliant people. I genuinely mean that. Most of writing is incredibly isolated. Most of you probably write on your own late at night having to file stories. So I always feel kindred spirits when I sit with other journalists. Most of the time I’m working at four, five in the morning and thinking, ‘Why bother going to bed? I might as well just have breakfast and get my kids up.’ And when I’m writing very late the thing that keeps me going is wanting to impress the actors that I work with. What I realise is actors are very intimidated by writers and I don’t think that what actors realise is that writers are incredibly intimidated by actors. And most of the time they’re desperately waiting for those moments when they say something good. Or they like something.”
Q: Did you know you were writing for Peter when you wrote the script?
Abi Morgan: “Yeah. Because I wanted Peter. I wrote that part specifically for Peter. Because I go to Gail’s in Crouch End and it’s a very small, middle class Guardian reader world and Peter goes there too. And Ruth lives in Crouch End…(laughter)
Q: Dominic – did life imitate art…did you get any fan mail after the first series that indicated that you’d become a matinee idol in the way that your character is?
Dominic West: “No, not in that way. But in terms of inspiring Abi’s writing, we had incredibly good caterers on the show and because it was very long hours and because filming can get…you look forward to lunch. I was talking to Romola about it and she’s pregnant so she’s alright now but I put on about two stone. And at the end of it Abi was writing lines like…first of all she put in – because I was always late – she always put in, ‘Hector was always late.’ And so lots of great speeches about being late and how rude that is and unprofessional is is. (laughter) Then it as how fat he was and how he’s got to lose weight. So it’s true, we do inspire our writers. I remember having two lunches and everybody looking at me. And I’m just looking down and thinking, ‘Crikey…they were made to measure those suits with elastic seams. Amazing caterers. Also it was freezing cold.”
Abi Morgan: “He’s a really intelligent actor. We were talking about more than the catering.”
Part two of the Q&A transcript will follow as soon as my keyboard allows.
