Is The Hour the British Mad Men?

At times I feel I have to remind them that Panorama, in its magazine format, was once very big news indeed and not the kind of news that the powerful wanted to hear. As Cliff Michelmore, who worked on it at the time, tells me: “They would have preferred not to have had Suez discussed at all on something like Panorama. They would have preferred to have had it on the news — and left there.”

In the drama, Freddie, a pushy left-wing reporter played by Ben Whishaw as a young Charles Wheeler (he has the hair), stumbles upon the real story of the British invasion of Egypt after discovering that the murder of an academic has been covered up. Attempting to get his scoop on to the newly launched Hour, edited by the glamorous Bel (Romola Garai), he is soon in conflict with the BBC’s old guard, the Prime Minister’s spin doctor and an MI5 spy lodged in the production office.

“It has nothing to do with any newsroom I have been in my life,” splutters John Humphrys, of the Radio 4 Today programme, on the phone to me from Wales. “I have never once bribed a police constable to get into a police cell and steal a packet of cigarettes from a corpse. I have never once tampered with evidence.” Humphrys, as politicians know, has a way of picking narratives apart. But Mishal Husain, a presenter attempting to infiltrate the Egyptian authorities for a BBC Two series on the Arab Spring, sees much in The Hour that she recognises. “Overall, I think there was something reassuring in that they were grappling with the same things we do today. They just had a bit more space and a bit more time.”

The hard-drinking, chain-smoking male atmosphere evoked by The Hour was certainly familiar to my panel, if only from their early years at the Beeb. Jane Hill, the rolling-news anchor, recalls being congratulated by a senior journalist for ordering a pint after her first week at Radio 5 Live in the Nineties. Today, her colleague Bill Turnbull, the presenter of BBC Breakfast, points out, women flourish in the BBC hierarchy. “Two of the three deputy editors on Breakfast are women. The editor is a woman. Her boss, Mary Hockaday, is female and above that it’s Helen Boaden [director of news]. So it is run by women really.”

“But,” Sian Williams, his Breakfast co-presenter adds, “these are women who have been doing it for 20 years.” Nor does Hill find the youthful Bel credible: “I have never worked with an output editor who has simpered, ever.” She is more impressed by the foreign affairs producer played by Anna Chancellor, styled, thinks Hill, who is gay herself, to look as if she was a lesbian “and therefore OK to be a ballsy woman”.

But the real difference between the BBC women of The Hour and those of today is that someone with Garai’s looks would now probably end up presenting, an opportunity not open to women until the mid-Seventies. Instead, thanks to a little gentle nepotism, The Hour’s frontman is Dominic West’s Hector Madden, a matinée-idol goof incapable of asking a question of his own devising.

I ask the Panorama reporter John Sweeney, famous for his Scientology investigations and perhaps the nearest thing to Freddie working on TV today, has he ever worked with a good-looking, know-nothing anchorman? “Let’s not go there,” he says, and we progress down the path of censorship instead.

The political pressures on the BBC, we agree, did not stop with Suez. Williams, in her former life as a World at One producer in the Nineties, had told me that she was regularly phoned by Labour’s spin doctor David Hill to argue over the story that she was planning to lead on: “And I never discovered how they found out.” The question is whether the BBC of 2011 responds as robustly as the journalists in The Hour or as timorously as their superiors.

“What made me laugh out loud was Clarence, the one with the little glasses,” Sweeney says, referring to Bel’s creepily cautious boss played by Anton Lesser. “You still have these very ambiguous authority figures. Are they there to make sure we tell the truth or are they there to make sure we don’t? It is not that your boss is having lunch with Alastair Campbell; it is more sophisticated than that. In fact, you become your own self-censor. That is proper in some ways because you are a public servant and you are paid public money.

“It would be wrong for me to do something that decent voters or party members would feel was fundamentally unfair, but when you are putting a politician’s private stuff under the microscope it becomes harder. What programmes like Panorama did all those years ago was to create an environment in which it is perfectly fine to criticise policy and even wars and put them under scrutiny. What happened in the Fifties and Sixties blasted away all those cobwebs.”

But what did happen in the Fifties? How much of The Hour’s creation myth is myth? What was true, Sir Paul Fox says when I show him the first episode at his home in Hertfordshire, was that BBC News, until the arrival of ITV in 1955, had been tediously uncontentious.

Fox worked on Television Newsreel (Freddie’s posting when we meet him) and became Panorama’s second editor in 1961. He whoops when he hears the line “We don’t do scoops”. “That is brilliant,” he says. “The news division was run by a man called Tahu Hole. He was (a) mad and (b) a tyrant. He was the sort of man who said that ‘Unless this has been reported by two news agencies we cannot run this story’.”

It was against this background that Panoroma was launched in September 1955 (more accurately, it was relaunched from the ashes of a failed magazine of the same name). Early subjects included housing shortages, unemployment in Northern Ireland and the colour bar on the railways. Where news reporting had been bland, Panorama’s was forceful. Interviewing had been deferential; on Panorama it challenged. Soon 8 million people were watching each Monday.

And it was, indeed, launched by a woman, Grace Wyndham Goldie, deputy to the head of television talks. At 56 she was, however, twice Romala Garai’s age, straight, married, childless and soon to be widowed. Educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and Oxford, she had joined the BBC in 1944 and shown a flair for factual television. She was not the only powerful woman in the corporation. “The reason there were women was that the men had gone off to war,” Fox explains. “After it ended there were women like Grace, Joanna Spicer, Mary Adams and Doreen Stephens, all heading major departments.”

The brilliant, acid-tongued Goldie made two key appointments: Panorama’s editor, the 25-year-old Michael Peacock, and its anchorman, Richard Dimbleby. Among her on-screen talent was Michelmore, who for Panorama interviewed pilots who had guided ships through the Suez Canal. Now 91 and, like Fox, a widower, he greets me, stick waving, outside his home in a Hampshire village. As sharp and avuncular as I remember him from my childhood viewings, he has his own critique of the first two parts of The Hour.

“When the so-called frontman said: ‘Ban that man from the set’, I burst out laughing. The notion that the frontman was in any way in charge was a ludicrous notion, absolutely ridiculous. You would get a boot up your backside and you would be out.”

Hector is nothing like Michelmore, let alone Dimbleby, who even by 1956 was a BBC legend for his war reporting. The only quality of Hector’s that Dimbleby lacked was his looks; the only quality he shared, perhaps, was his conservatism. “Richard was really formidable, physically big, but also essentially a very nice man,” Michelmore says. “He had his snipers, of course. Charles Wheeler and some others wanted Richard removed and thought he was too dominant, and he was much more conservative than the young reporters.”

Ah yes! Was it true that they were all pinkos at Lime Grove? “Were we? I was! I was. But the interesting thing is the MPs who came out of Panorama: Geoffrey Johnson Smith, Conservative; Chris Chataway, Conservative; Woodrow Wyatt. But I think, in retrospect, yes, there was a general feeling of more sympathy to Labour than the Conservatives, although there were lots of very high Tories there, too.”

Talking to Michelmore and Fox, I understand that the division of mentality, dramatised in The Hour, between BBC News in its northerly fortress of Alexandra Palace and Lime Grove in Shepherds Bush was real. It continued for years, until, finally, John Birt as Director-General merged the two in the Nineties, not least to cut down on duplication. John Humphrys, who “as a youth” worked for news at Ally Pally, recalls flying to report the build-up to the Pakistani civil war in 1971. He went tourist class, while a current-affairs crew drank champagne at the front of the aircraft. “They were the aristocracy and we were the poor bloody infantry,” he recalls.

But back to 1956. Suez was indeed a turning point for television’s relationship with Westminster, but not in the way The Hour depicts it. The defining moment had less to do with Panorama than with the BBC allowing the Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell, to reply to Anthony Eden’s prime-ministerial broadcast on the crisis. Fox believes that this was as crucial a moment for the BBC’s independence as in 1922, when Lord Reith insisted on reporting both sides of the General Strike. When it came to “scoops”, the day was won by the new boy, ITN, whose Robin Day secured an interview with President Nasser of Egypt.

Yet not all the fantastical details in The Hour are imaginary. “There was a spy working at the BBC,” Fox says. “He was there to check out to see if people had communist leanings and if so they would not be employed on current-affairs programmes. There was a thing called the ‘Christmas tree’, which was put on your file. He was based at Broadcasting House. He brought a dog into work. He was a real creep.”

There is a certain irony that just as Panorama is about to be celebrated by The Hour as a beacon of journalistic light, the real programme, 55 years on, has suffered one of its worst weeks. Censured for showing possibly faked footage in an exposé of Primark, it has just handed back a Royal Television Society award. Grace Wyndham Goldie would turn in her grave. Mad Tahu Hole would spit on it. But the story of the birth of BBC current affairs is undoubtedly worth telling — not least, perhaps, to a generation of television journalists to whom, it turns out, it is news.

The Hour begins on BBC Two this month