THE HOUR BBC 2

I have a particular interest in the 1950’s since it was the decade in which I was born, at the very tip end of 1955, ten years and seven months after the end of World War 2. It is a cliché now that the past is another country moreover as Alan Bennett observed no era is quite as remote as the recent past, the stereotype view of the fifties being a grey interregnum between the vivid black and white newsreel violence of the forties and the Technicolor explosion of the 1960’s, long ago and far away. Here however it is presented as a period with a strong electric undercurrent, a strangely dark, though somehow exotically glamorous place, caught in a time warp, unable to escape from the oppressive weight of a hierarchical past where everyone knows their place. Enter the angry young man, all cigarettes and the intense typewriter clacking, if not literally, then in his head, determined to wrench the oppressively dull and reverential world of the BBC into a reality of a world that contains the burgeoning power of the civil rights movement, the struggle against colonialism and imperialism always with the ever present shadows of the cold war and the mushroom cloud. The cold war gave us the genre of the spy novel, mastered so brilliantly by John Le Carre and it is this genre that forms the sub plot of the first episode, though here the Brits are not necessarily the good guys, this is the spy story seen through an Orwellian prism.
The other central theme is the grotesque sexism of the period, a theme it shares with Mad Men, a series to which it has been compared. Though if anything the vicious and patronising sexism is here slightly soft peddled, given the strength of the two female leads. However this theme is only one of a number of sub plots the plethora of which threatened to throttle its central theme.
For all the quality of its historical dramas and bodice rippers contemporary British television often fails to match the adult sophistication of its American counterpart, here however it partially succeeds, as a visual feast, in the language which is razor sharp and in the moody atmospherics of sexual tension and political menace. It has, for this viewer, become something of a must watch.



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