HEAVEN knows the Today programme needs no encouragement to be smug, but yesterday it reached new levels of self-importance during a chat with Jed Mercurio, the writer of Line of Duty and Bodyguard, a new BBC drama starting tomorrow.
Bodyguard is about a headline-grabbing Home Secretary and the close protection police officer at her side. As part of his research, Mercurio visited Today to talk to Martha Kearney. I wouldn’t say they made a lot of this in the interview, but at one point I feared Kamal Ahmed was going to pass out from gushing.
Well wind your neck in Kamal, and step away from the stardust, Martha, because this town is only big enough for one red-hot media property, and it’s The Herald.
As you may have seen from the trailer out this week, autumn’s other major dramas include Press, set in two fictional newspapers, the red top Post and the highbrow Herald.
Says the blurb: “Press will immerse viewers in the personal lives and the constant professional dilemmas facing its characters. The series follows their lives as they attempt to balance work and play, ambition and integrity, amid the never-ending pressure of the 24-hour global news cycle and an industry in turmoil.”
Ooh-er. The real Herald is no stranger to showbiz, of course, with our good offices frequently being called upon by writers and directors seeking a whiff of the real thing. For example, when making The Field of Blood, an adaptation of Denise Mina’s novel about a Glasgow newspaper, the set designers drew heavily on a 1983 documentary about The Herald.
Back then, the paper was in Albion Street. Helen Mirren and Tom Conti came to the Albion Street offices to film scenes for the 1986 comedy Heavenly Pursuits. Both drank in The Press Bar next door, aka Tom’s, aka the unofficial break room for staff from The Herald and Evening Times and many another paper. Christopher Walken (The Deer Hunter), whose mother was from Glasgow, drank in Tom’s.
More? Victor’s paper of choice in Still Game is The Herald. One of our writers, Susan Swarbrick, has visited so many sets she has been called upon to be an extra in two shows, Case Histories and Still Game. (Between us, she was rotten.) Do you hear The Herald boasting about any of this, Martha and Kamal? No. We’re not in the media tart business for the glory, we throw open our doors for the greater good of the industry. As such, and having watched the trailer for Press, perhaps we might suggest a few ways in which the drama can be made even more like the real deal.
First, the carpet that Post editor Ben Chaplin strides down is far too clean. A floor covering in a real newspaper office is a sea of stains. Most can be traced back to some clot spilling their tea, but others would keep a CSI team in business for a year. Indeed, there has been a chalk outline of a body near The Herald newsdesk for years.
Second, all those bodies (live ones, not dead). Courtesy of the internet, there are no more casts of thousands putting out papers.
Third, dress the set with lots of clutter. Any newspaper office is a Channel 4 documentary about hoarders waiting to happen.
Next, you need vastly better looking men. Walk into The Herald and it is like striding into a model agency where they are casting for a major commercial. Okay, it might be for stairlifts, hair dye, or denture fixative, but it is still a commercial.
Find lots more women while you are at it. Doesn’t matter what they look like. It is well known the industry loves the ladies, pays them far more than men, and cannot wait to promote them.
Next, all those shiny, functioning computers? That will never do. What you need is a reporter, whose machine has crashed for the umpteenth time, throwing the thing out the window, rock star-style.
No Herald office can be complete without an animal being hidden under the desks. I brought two Labrador pups in for a year and the editor never rumbled. There was, admittedly, one hairy moment when a bark went up, but since the rest of the office, in on the caper, carried on as usual the editor was left to feel he was going mad.
Speaking of management, let’s have no more of this cliched depiction of editors as shouty sociopaths. Smaller offices mean they hardly raise their voice at all these days.
Finally, create a character who is a charming, not at all knackered woman journalist of a certain age. She might, say, write a Saturday column. As for casting, I’m thinking face of Helen Mirren, brain of Laura Kuenssberg, legs of Taylor Swift, name of Alison maybe? Just a suggestion.
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