can we talk about THE HOUR on BBC?

first rule if this thread is, no-one call it 'the br*t**h m** m**'

just don't ok

The Brotash Moo Moo?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hour_(UK_TV_series)

Fuck me, that was dreadful.

I mean, was it supposed to be M*d M*n, a comedy drama, a romance, or spy fiction? Or none of the above?

Also lolz at the BBC fictionalising the BBC bribing policemen on today of all days.

got bored after 20 minutes. guess it didn't improve.
all that preamble re the stylish look before : "mad men" it aint.

[xpost ! ]

dont think it was supposed to be mad men, i tbf mean something actually happened

"mad men" it aint.
Fortunately for everyone involved.

I can see the kitsch putting people off but thought this was very well done. Excited about upcoming episodes.

Stand by what I said, it's too confused at the moment and doesn't seem to know what direction it wants to go in. If it's really about the lecturer dying and the guy looking into it then the focus isn't about the tv show at all.

Also the usual attempts to cram in modern references that are anachronisms - he insists on calling her Moneypenny, despite there only being three Bond books out at the time. They've got almost non-existent roles for Moneypenny in them (in fact, I think she's only even obliquely mentioned in Casino Royale) so she wouldn't be a 'thing'.

If it's really about the lecturer dying and the guy looking into it then the focus isn't about the tv show at all.
The two aren't incompatible. It's about Freddie being an investigative journalist trying to figure out how to have integrity on this big flashy new tv show *while* investigating this unpopular case.

I agree that it isn't perfect (ugh, the music) and I was slightly annoyed by the Moneypenny thing, too. But the good outweighs the bad for me and I find it mostly well-executed.

Perfectly prepared to keep watching for another couple of weeks, just not expecting much.

thought this was ok -- yeah a few glitches, especially 'moneypenny', but BW and especially RG brought it

the 'mad men' comparisons were a really weird red herring

presumably people are now calling it 'state of play 56' or summat

Thought it was OK, and it's probably not fair to fault a show for not being what it obviously was never intended to be, but it seems as though a really good writer could make an excellent series out of the making of a current affairs show in the late 1950s. The conspiracy stuff isn't needed for excitements.

would never watch bbc drama, ever. not least when it's made for news morons, tesco value us drama, filmed in elstree or whatever, dire.

So last night's episode was fantastic, despite bad direction & shit music. Love the dynamic between Bel & Freddie - kinda dgaf about Hector, though.

Yeah, much, much better but still feels like two stories thrown together a bit.

Really enjoyed this yesterday, cast feels like they're starting to mesh properly esp. Whishaw who was A+++.

would never watch bbc drama, ever.

Don't really get this. BBC are wildly inconsistent when it comes to drama, but The Shadow Line was the best thing on tv so far this year, better than any US drama I've seen.

yeah i like this, despite flaws. romola garai is brilliant.

it isn't a tesco value anything. i prefer US drama on the whole, but one advantage of bbc drama is it's written before it is shot. so it comes to an end, and you don't have so much repetition.

Whishaw who was A+++.
Yesssssssss! <3

So this is worth watching then? How many episodes through are they?

Just the two, and I really like it so far. The second episode improved on the first quite a bit, too.

I wasn't particularly impressed with the first episode, but I think it's got potential after the 2nd episode. I don't love it yet but it's watchable.

I've seen the third episode now... and it does keep getting better. It's beautifully shot, Julian Rhind-Tutt is better than I've ever seen him, Dominic West's magnetic, Whishaw's pretty grand, and the conspiracy plot is actually turning into something interesting. Albeit that I cannot identify a single character trait that Romola Garai's character is supposed to have.

Moneypenny-style possible anachronism. Someone teases Freddie for being into "conspiracy theories". Was this phrase even used in 1956? I don't remember it appearing in Hofstadter's Paranoid Style essay, which came out a few years later.

Wikipedia sez "The first recorded use of the phrase "conspiracy theory" dates from 1909. Originally it was a neutral term but during the political upheaval of the 1960s it acquired its current derogatory sense."

xp ha, we have completely different opinions on this show it seems. I hate the way it's shot & adore Romola Garai's character.

I just... didn't think it was possible for someone to like Dominic West.

If there's anyone in this show who lacks personality traits it's Hector.

I quite liked the first episode!

Could do without the repeated 'moneypenny' thing for sure

But like the period, 1950s etc, BBC, corporation corridors, accents - good!

Must get back to watching this.

Just watched the first two episodes - I'm on board with this. I agree with seemingly everyone about the second episode being a considerable improvement on the first. Partly because the ensemble cast meshes much better and the secondary characters and general on-set atmosphere add a bit of light relief. Could do without the Mad Men-style "look how things have changed, a WOMAN with a CAREER and nearly 30, how people tut" moments, they feel a bit obvious. The scene with the Egyptian interview was great.

Albeit that I cannot identify a single character trait that Romola Garai's character is supposed to have

Seriously? Professional, ambitious, takes no shit for three. Also she is lovely.

OED backs up 1909 as the first recorded use of 'conspiracy theory', the quoted examples are:

1909 Amer. Hist. Rev. 14 836 The claim that Atchison was the originator of the repeal may be termed a recrudescence of the conspiracy theory first asserted by Colonel John A. Parker of Virginia in 1880.
1952 K. R. Popper Open Society (ed. 2) II. xiv. 94, I call it the ‘conspiracy theory of society’. It is the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists in the discovery of the men or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this phenomenon.

Seriously? Professional, ambitious, takes no shit for three. Also she is lovely.
xp Matt DC OTM

Moneypenny not really an anachronism, Bond had been 4 books and played by Bob Holness by 1956.

Could do without the Mad Men-style "look how things have changed, a WOMAN with a CAREER and nearly 30, how people tut" moments, they feel a bit obvious.

They seem less extreme though than Mad Men in many ways, and there have been none of the "DO YOU SEE?" moments so far with children with bags on their heads and the like. I also like that Bel's career so far has not been presented as a Cinderella or Ugly Betty sort of thing. She has her own power and her own ambition and drive.

Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai are great, too. And I actually think the thriller aspects are so far fairly elegantly entwined with the production of the news hour aspects.

The music is wretched, though. It's kitschy and often tonally inappropriate for the scenes.

Freddie is surely exactly the sort of person who would be a Bond early adopter, "Moneypenny" also shows off that he's a bit of a prick.

xp I know the phrase was around but I don't believe it would have been used casually in the modern sense in 1956. It must be hard writing period dialogue though. I was trying to track the history of "sellout" and "fan" for different articles recently and in both cases there was a long gap between the first OED-cited usage and the word becoming widely used.

I'm sure I heard Freddie talking about the time they "went for a Chinese" and was wondering if that's the sort of thing anyone actually said at the time.

I think: no

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/chart?content=conspiracy%20theory%2Cwent%20for%20a%20chinese&corpus=0&smoothing=3&year_start=1800&year_end=2000

I think Le Ho Fook and Wong Kei were in Chinatown in the '50s.

(I have to admit I'm cross-referencing with Love Is The Devil and To Sir, With Love here to determine 1956 veracity).

Loved the last 20 minutes, was completely losing patience in it up until then. Freddie is too dumb to work out the obvious plot that is in front of him i.e. the relationship between JR-T and the widower of the woman from Ep 1 and/or Burn Gorman's previous/current relationship with him. He also hasn't spotted that Anna Chancellor is clearly a spy as well and is probably the one passing all his info onwards.

wonder why that guy decided to chuck himself down the stairwell

Compromise, innit. Freddie has bettered him in a fight and has discovered something BIG. There's no way way forward for him to pretend it hasn't been discovered and he can't keep it hidden any more.

Last night's episode was amazing. I think I'm in love with Freddie.

Last night was the first time I felt gripped.

Though the centrality of the thriller plot suggests a certain insecurity that nobody would watch a well-made workplace drama set during the Suez crisis without it. Take that away and the material is still hugely promising but the dialogue would need to improve. What I love about (sorry) Mad Men is that it makes the nuts and bolts of advertising and the interactions between normal people feel meaty enough without much embellishment - the Don's-secret plot was never the most interesting thing about the first season.

Is anyone still watching this? *SPOILER**SPOILER**SPOILER* I was half watching it last night but was it suggested that Ruth was a brightstone and this was the reason for her being murdered? It seemed a bit far fetched if it was. Why would they pick of the brightstones just for them being suspected Soviet spys? I probably wasn't paying enough attention.

Just seen the Guardian blog - seems I missed a crucial scene.

Really enjoyed the last episode, it works so much better now we've got to know the characters. Anna Chancellor's character still feels like the most likely Soviet agent but almost too obvious now - I've had a suspicion about Hector for a while and it might explain his unhappy marriage of convenience.

Maybe Sissy is the agent.

That would break my heart, poor Isaac.

I like this programme and wish it well. I watch it when I can. I don't know it well enough to follow all the plots.

I have one problem with it, namely, more crudely put than I would like: the people in it do not talk nearly posh enough.

The Freddie character IS quite good accent wise I think, at a particular lower-middle-class manner.

The others, mostly not. In the last scene last night two 1950s aristocrats were talking to each other as though they were on a 1990s episode of Causalty.

You could say that historical drama does not need to be, or cannot be, true to the past. You could add that 1950s historical dramas, like Gainsborough melodramas, probably were nothing like the real C17 - etc - and that we are always reinventing the past to suit our own time.

But you can make more, or less, effort at certain things. Or you can let your drama be 'now' rather than 'then' in ways which are not interesting (in a Brechtian opening up of history) but banalizing, deadening (as though all BBC TV drama has to be the same, and historical difference is never really allowed to alter it and challenge us).

This has become a large point, larger perhaps than my complaint about the accents. But I would maintain that complaint - what I'm saying is, I think the failure to let them talk like 1950s people deprives us somewhat of an encounter with the strangeness and particularity of the past.

they just started showing this in the U.S. on BBC America and i like it.

should I torrent this?

i didn't say i loved it...

oh ok, sorry

;)

adamrl when i come out to california (december or may?) let's hang out okay

of course!

The others, mostly not. In the last scene last night two 1950s aristocrats were talking to each other as though they were on a 1990s episode of Causalty.

Romola Garai was asked about this in an interview and she said that the producers and writers talked it over endlessly, eventually deciding that, like all period pieces, you have to have compromise when it comes to speech. Basically if everyone in it talked like the Queen, you wouldn't watch it. I do like the fact the Dominic West's on-air voice is noticeably posher than his everyday voice in the show as well.

I love it. I really hope they do another one.

think the actors are all very good, west has grown on me, but the writing needs to be better. it's not so much the anachronisms but their way with exposition. but id watch this cast do another season.

They ARE doing another one - it's been re-commissioned.

Customer at farmer's market who now works on Peter Morgan films joined the BBC at 18, roughly contemporaneously to The Hour's timeline. She said it was a bit creaky for the first two episodes and gave up but conversation turned to what Dominic West's arse was doing in the previous episode and now she will watch the rest.

Honestly love love love this, apart from a few medium-to-minor issues.

The ending was... underwhelming somewhat? Thought it was going well up until the face-off between Freddie and Clarence and copped out completely. Are we seriously supposed to believe that Clarence would just let Freddie walk off and write his story with only a moment's reflection?

Loved Anton Lesser. Clarence was the best character in the whole thing and Lesser did a good enough job suggesting mental collapse that I could just about swallow the hurried, procedural-style confession/surrender conclusion. Acting generally >>>> writing. Hector's wife's ability to convey both obnoxious, controlling privilege and real hurt and vulnerability was great too.

Yeah I'd go with that - the actor playing Clarence was brilliant in that scene and made the best of a pretty botched writing job.

Hard to disagree. Really thought the ending was just a whole pile of nothing and expected far more to come from the Tim P-S interview than did.

Hector's collapse and return to his wife felt like a last-minute addition to keep will-they-won't-they sexual tension in the newly-commissioned Series 2 tbh.

I really enjoyed this. Not great TV but very well executed entertainment. Three leads were great, supporting characters at the show were nicely sketched. Garai/Hector's wife scene was amazing. Wish it didn't feel the need to spell everything out but I guess it kept with the level that the show was operating at. Looking forward to the second series.

tbh i ended up not really following the espionage plot. there's drama enough without it.

No discussion of Series 2 so far? I watched both episodes last night and I'm enjoying it. The whole thing feels tighter than the first series, partly because we know the characters but also because police corruption and fascists on the streets of London is better-fitting subject matter than the spy thriller stuff in S1. There appear to be fewer writing clangers as well.

Peter Capaldi is in danger of being typecast now but I was so delighted to see him join the cast that I don't really mind at all. Looking forward to things getting darker for Hector as well.

My best buddy is pretty fuming about this show as he spent a year developing a TV series about journalists uncovering police corruption/race relations/prostitutes/artists/secret gays in soho in the 50s and the talent company he was working with scaled their UK staff so it got shelved in development hell. Now it will definitely stay there. It is a really interesting period of time that i ended up finding a lot about, the fight that became the sexual and artiostic revolution of the 60s was fought in a microcosm in this small area in the 50s

Its definitely much tighter and the racial/sexual revolution stuff feels much more historically grounded. Plus that girl whos dawn from eastenders little sister is smo-ho-hoking as a show/callgirl.

My girlfriend told me that Mathilda (the lobby cat) at the Algonquin Hotel was on facebook to inform her followers that The Hour was filming there last week.

well, the series is cancelled now, but is the second series worth watching? i thought the first series was entertaining but not great, so i might not bother if it's just downhill from there

I liked (and enjoyed) the second series more than the first, but obv ymmv. Def worth watching I'd say, quite miffed that it's been cancelled tbh as it felt like it was really getting into its stride.

the second series was overall better - the workplace stuff, the politics, the overarching plot, a lot of the character development - but the romance plot got really tedious.

Yeah the second series is great, and Peter Capaldi is a great addition to the cast. Shame it's been cancelled but keeping a cast of that profile and quality together must have been virtually impossible.

Not to mention expensive. I think its viewing figures were relatively low?

Admittedly I'd watch Ben Whishaw reading the phone book, but I hear that the cast were disappointed and wanted to continue.

Sorry, I thought I was still on the BenElton "Wright Stuff" thread for a second...