The Hour
kathyh gave me the two seasons of The Hour for Christmas, and I just finished watching them. Which I enjoyed very much. Not at all the wannabe Mad Men its detractors claimed, more what would have happened if you'd comissioned Terrence Rattigan to write His Girl Friday/The Front Page for British tv, if one has to make comparisons. There was something very Rattigan-ish in each and every scene Lix and Randall Brown shared (which: yay! Anna Chancellor and Peter Capaldi were awesome) in s2, and also about Clarence in s1 (with a dose of Le Carré there, for obvious plot reasons). As for the younger folk at the heart of things: Ben Wishaw seems to be able to morph in body size and age, or maybe it just depends on which co star they give him; that the last time I'd seen him was on stage with Judi Dench in Peter and Alice, where he looked somewhat tall, because Judi Dench, and he came across as of avarage height in The Hollow Crown as Richard II, whereas next to Dominic West (or for that matter Daniel Craig), he suddenly looks like a 15 years old teenager in body build. (In the s1 scene where Hector lends Freddie his dinner jacket, shirt and trousers, I thought "but he will DROWN in those things!") Anyway, he was suitably intense as Freddie, whereas Dominic West as Hector did his Dominic West thing of playing conflicted charming bastards. (I'm starting to see that getting introduced to him, consciously at least, via his role as an infamous serial killer with learning problems was not normal.) As for Romola Garai as Bel the producer, I was a bit frustrated because having seen her in Atonment and The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant, I know she has a great range, and Bel, script wise, is more reacting to events than intializing them, but I liked her a lot anyway.
Re: historical accuracy, I have no idea. I mean, I recognized some of the actual events - the Suez Canal, the Wolfenden Report, the Soho bust-up, for example - but I'm not an expert on any of them, so I don't know how much liberties the show took. Within the show's 'verse, I believed it, my only real suspension of disbelief problem was that at the end of s1, Bel is fired as producer as the result of events, and at the start of s2, she's producing again and only a blink-and-you-miss-it line of dialogue from Angus McCain informs us why she wasn't fired after all. This to me screamed of Doylist "oh, we don't want to waste an episode explaining on how Bel got back into the producer's chair/ we were premature in letting her getting fired/it's far easier to retcon the s1 ending so Freddie gets fired instead because it's easier to explain how a journalist gets hired back after a firing than a producer". Ah well.
A preliminary glimpse at the fanfic shows me there is plenty of Lix and Lix/Randall backstory, which is pleasing, but only a few Bel/Freddie/Hector threesomes, which surprised me, because I thought the late s1 time frame (though not earlier or later) is practically begging for such a scenario. Incidentally, I was also glad Marnie got fleshed out as a character in the second season, complete with overdue revenge on Hector and believable reconciliation later on. And speaking of the minor supporting character, Angus McCain as a gay government spin doctor (though with the term not yet existing in the 50s, he's called something else, but that's what his job amounts to) at first made me wonder whether he was inspired not by someone in the 50s but by the very much alive Peter Mandelson, but later on I dropped the idea, because having to be in the closet and open to blackmail is very much part of his character (and not Mandelsonian). I also appreciated that while McCain often (though not always) functions as an antagonist, he's not demonized or caricaturized, and the narrative has sympathy for his situation as a gay man throughout.
All in all, as I said, I show I enjoyed watching. Pity it got cancelled.
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