Abstract
For a relatively small trade – 110,000 practitioners in the UK at the last count – journalism gets more than its fair share of glamour and excitement. Those toiling as reporters in sleepy towns, where the local football team drawing 0-0 with Crewe Alexandra might be the highlight of the week, will disagree. But look at the films devoted to the sharp end of the news media. Romance is only a step away from the the dramatised reporting of life’s events, big or small and inevitably “based on a true story”.
Major movies in which intrepid reporters expose scandal or corruption draw enthusiastic audiences. A raft of awards is awarded annually to journalists by other journalists. Books celebrating their work, fact and fiction, crowd the shelves in stores and libraries. Only television lags behind in celebrating the fourth estate or other news media outlets. Successful television series in which fearless journalism sets the word to rights are rare.
Aaron Sorkin, main script provider for The West Wing, has flirted with media in that show and other, less lucrative projects such as the two-series comedic Sports Night; Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which despite some cracking dialogue lasted only one series, and The Newsroom, an idealistic view of journalism that lasted for three series before viewers tired of all that saccharine. Sorkin collected a best screenplay Academy Award for The Social Network, based on the history of Facebook, but The Newsroom remains his best shot at a media-themed TV hit.
The writer said of the show that it was “meant to be an idealistic, romantic, swashbuckling, sometimes comedic but very optimistic, upward-looking look at a group of people who are often looked at cynically”. While Sorkin appeared to be cornering US television’s media market, his biggest challenger, The Morning Show, was establishing itself as a major contender, spotlighting the characters and power politics of a fictional morning news programme and offering big hitters Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carrell in the cast.
Filming having been completed, the third series of the uncrowned queen of the genre is ready to roll into homes in the US. There is little to challenge it elsewhere in the world, most notably not in the UK, where hard-nosed American crime dramas such as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad lose out to those of a genteel nature, such as Midsomer Murders and Death in Paradise.
It is these that command high audience ratings survival. Occasionally, they will introduce media sub-plots that feature characters no more believable than the main storyline. Of those that bequeath the fondest memories, the majority are comedies and such serial dramas as the UK’s original House of Cards, in which a ruthless politician – a Tory, since you ask – lies, cheats and murders on his path to high office, disposing of a young reporter mistress on his nefarious way.
There are no media-based ongoing programmes currently available on UK television, but they flourish elsewhere: in Australia, The Newsreader, the six-episode on and off-screen drama of an 80s newsroom, was a big hit and fared well when picked up by the BBC. A second, equally short, series is scheduled for later this year in Oz. And in Scandinavia, the multi-series Borgen, which has featured the news industries here and there, is about to be challenged by more Nordic noir: Graverne (Gravedigger), a “journalistic crime drama” due later in the year.
Until then, journalists with an appetite for something similar can only harbour fond memories of such quirky offerings as Drop the Dead Donkey and Hot Metal. The first of these, set in a fictional TV company with contemporary news events knitted into its scripts to suggest realism, helped enormously the careers of, among others, Haydn Gwynne and Stephen Tompkinson. It won a BAFTA comedy award in 1984 and racked up six series before its demise, having established itself as a favourite with an audience that, one suspects, included a large percentage of journalists.
Earlier and less sophisticated, Hot Metal chronicled the fortunes of The Daily Crucible, a struggling national paper turned into a sensational red-top tabloid not unlike at least one of those dominant in the 80s – guess which! – by media magnate Terrence “Twiggy” Rathbone. Robert Hardy played Rathbone (and a handful of other roles) in a style suggesting the swagger of real-life proprietors. Rupert Murdoch and, for a while, Robert Maxwell were never far from the thoughts of writers – witness the unseen Sir Royston Merchant in Drop the Dead Donkey.
Other attempts to pitch medialand into the sitting rooms of the nation included Lytton’s Diary, with Peter Bowles as a newspaper gossip columnist – two series in the 80s – and, the latest, Ted Lasso, where a journalist is allowed to roam freely throughout the football club managed by American Lasso, played by Jason Sudeikis. As if!
Perhaps a definitive work propelling news media into the nation’s consciousness will eventually arrive, although there are those who fondly recall the BBC’s Harry, which survived two series in the early to mid-90s. This could, of course, be because of the graphic promotional description of Harry himself as played by the late Michael Elphick, portraying a hard-living news agency boss based in Darlington.
It reads: “Harry Salter was once a Fleet Street high-flier: he got the stories, he got the expense account and he got drunk. But now he is living on his wits running a news agency in Darlington.” Newspaper journalism to a T. Except Darlington, that is.
