LOSING THE HOUR

It’s always feels a little bit sad when one of your favourites bites the dust, even if it is just a bit of old telly that nobody ought to get all that worked up about.

So it was with “The Hour”, the BBC drama set in and around the lives of a team of investigative journalists working upon a TV show not entirely unlike “Parorama” back in the 1950s. It has run for two series of six episodes, and the second year had seemed much “stronger” that the first, and it had all ended on a little bit of a cliffhanger, with one of the main character’s life hanging in the balance, and it had been good enough, I felt, to come back for at least one more year.

Because it was the kind of good, solid, slow-burning character-based drama that is all-too-rare on television nowadays, and whilst the episodes did sometimes be taking an awfully long time to get to the point, it was rather wonderful to be able to wallow in that rather beautifully constructed world for an hour each week, and when they did allow the plot to unfold, it usually packed one hell of a punch when it did.

I’ll admit, from a pernickety point of view, it was the anachronistic telephones that I had always struggled the most with when I had been watching it, because I could swear that the model mostly being used in the BBC offices at Lime Grove hadn’t actually been introduced until 1960, but having been able to smugly point that out to anyone who cared, I was prepared to let it go and get involved in the drama.

The problem was, I was only rabbiting on about that very point again at work the other day, and the very next day the BBC announced that there would not be a third run, so I am beginning to think (in that way I can have of making everything be about me), that it might have been all my fault.

I’m also now running a particular risk of being made to appear rather foolish when somebody points out that I’ve got it quire wrong about the telephones, and those particular versions were available far earlier than I thought they were, especially in the London Metropolitan area and in publicly owned buildings.

The cast was pretty astonishing, too headed up by Dominic West, Ben Whishaw and Ramola Garai and with a supporting cast involving the likes of Anna Chancellor, Julian Rhind-Tutt and Peter Capaldi, so I imagine that it might have been difficult to corral that lot back together any time soon.

And period drama is far more expensive to produce than contemporary drama is, I suppose, even if you are able to film hefty chunks of it on location in your own premises. Well, either that, of those sets were very good indeed. But, with all of the set dressing and the authentic props (give or take the odd telephone receiver), and all of those fabulous old cars to hire and those beautiful fifties fashions, it was never going to be a cheap do, even if most of the investment was already made by the first couple of years.

I added my “Bah!” to the general sense of frustration the loyal few had displayed in TwitWorld when the story broke, and I was surprised to be almost immediately encouraged to add my name to a petition attempting to “save” the show, set up by an irate and protesting former viewer, but I was disinclined to do so, much, I am sure, to the disappointment of the “true” fans…

But I’m old enough and realistic enough to know that when the axe has fallen it’s already too late, and the pleas of a few disappointed viewers is unlikely to change a decision that’s already been made, although it would be nice if the powers that be could be persuaded to make one more episode, maybe a one-off TV movie to round off the story and give it a more satisfying and rounded conclusion, or at least to let us know quite what became of Hector and Bel and Freddie…

Especially Freddie…

I read someone online wailing that they’d “left Freddie with broken hair! You can’t leave Freddie with broken hair!”

But it seems that they can and will, and whether that damages a real someone for a lifetime or not remains to be seen…