The Hour: "Crises at Home and Abroad" (Kudos Film and Television, British Broadcasting Corporation, 2011)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 p.m., before waiting for a pledge-break special on KPBS – a David Bowie concert film from his 1983 Serious Moonlight tour, shot on August 12, 1983 in Vancouver – I watched a peculiar program from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in association with a production company called Kudos Film and Television, The Hour. It was a BBC miniseries that lasted two seasons (2011 to 2013) and was about a BBC news program called The Hour that ostensibly ran weekly during the 1950’s. This episode, the fourth in the series, was called “Crises at Home and Abroad,” and the crises abroad were two quite famous real-life ones of the period. One was the rebellion in Hungary against Soviet domination of their country, which was quickly crushed by Soviet weapons and tanks. When a Hungarian representative complained on The Hour that without continued media attention from the West his country and its nascent struggle for freedom were doomed because once the world’s attention shifted and the Soviet Union could do whatever it wanted to his country, I had a plus ça change, plus ça même chose moment and thought of how after six months of utterly unprovoked war, Russia is utterly crushing Ukraine now that world attention in general, and American attention in particular, has shifted elsewhere.

The other crisis was Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s occupation of the Suez Canal and Britain’s determination to send bombers into Cairo to pressure Nasser’s nationalist government to give up the Canal and let it revert to its former British overlords. The crises at home are fictional, the work of The Hour’s creator, Abi Morgan, and have to do with young assistant Freddie Lyon (the quite cute Ben Whishaw) and his involvement in the death of an MI-6 (the British equivalent of the CIA) agent who fell down a flight of stairs after he and Freddie got into an argument and Freddie pushed him off the guard rail. MI6 responds by putting the entire staff of The Hour under surveillance, which bothers the show’s editor no end. The show’s producer, Bel Rowley (Romola Gare), is having an extra-relational affair with its anchor, Hector Madden (Dominic West). From what we see of the wife Hector is going out on, Marnie Madden (Oona Chaplin, granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin and great-granddaughter of Eugene O’Neill), she seems like a silly ninny who’s obsessing about whether th paper the walls of her house with plain or flowered wallpaper patterns – she even calls him at work while the crises abroad are keeping him very busy – but she’s also so glamorous from the looks department that at least in that respect, Hector is trading down.

The show is supposedly set in 1956 but almost nobody acts like it; the actors’ clothes look like those people would wear today in similar positions, and the only aspect of this show that reflects the 1950’s rather than today is that everybody smokes. Smoking in restaurants has been banned for so long now it’s a shock to see movies either made in the past or made in the present but set in the past in which people smoke wherever they are – in the office, in public places, wherever they happen to be. At one point Freddie is caught smoking by a friend who remembers Freddie telling him he doesn’t smoke, and Freddie says that with everyone around him smoking, he figured he’d better learn how. (One wonders if any of the actors on this show similarly had to learn to smoke to play these parts.) Still, despite the relative inability of the cast members to convince us they’re livingb in the 1950’s, The Hour is otherwise acted with the sort of cool efficiency British players were known for, and it’s an ongoing mystery why the United Kingdom (or, as it’s been for more than 110 of the last 185 years, the United Queendom) keeps producing the world’s greatest actors.