Before reviewing in the Guardian newspaper a programme about a famous Guardian investigation, a few disclaimers are probably in order. So, up top: I don’t know anyone depicted in The Hack, Jack Thorne’s seven-part drama about Guardian journalist Nick Davies’s investigation into the scandal of the phone-hacking perpetrated by various members of Rupert Murdoch’s News International, which led to seven major police investigations, nearly 40 convictions and the closing of the News of the World. I’ve never met Davies or the then editor of the paper, with whom the drama is almost as concerned, Alan Rusbridger (beyond a handshake from on high, literally and metaphorically – he’s much taller than Toby Jones, who plays him here – in a crowded tent at Hay-on-Wye 20 years ago). Disclaimer ends. Let’s get cracking!
The Hack opens in 2008, when Davies – played by David Tennant with his customary tension and earnestness, which I always find distractingly effortful, though I remain aware that I am in the minority – is tipped off about the News of the World hacking into the voicemails of celebrities to garner gossip and stories, with pictures and other evidence gathered after the fact to disguise the illegal source. The editor, Andy Coulson, had resigned in the wake of “one rogue reporter” doing so the year before. In fact, the practice is endemic. And Coulson is now director of communications for the then prime minister, David Cameron, which puts the story firmly within the public interest. Davies starts the painstaking business of stacking it up, then re-stacking as it becomes bigger and bigger and the Metropolitan police’s connection – sliding into complicity? cooperation? corruption? – with the tabloids becomes an ever more prominent part of his discoveries over the next six years.
The problem is that stitching together a sprawling story as Davies did is, in televisual terms, very boring – especially when played out across a very indulgent seven-hour run. More failed phone calls. More dead ends. More reluctant celebrities. More lawyers telling him to be patient, more Rusbridger telling him he needs more quotes, more documents, more names on the record. Small breakthroughs. Cowardly silence from the rest of the press. Thorne tries to liven things up with many breakings of the fourth wall by Tennant – wryly commenting on this and that, looking knowingly at the camera, taking part in little dreamlike sequences – but this only undermines any sense that the writer trusts his story and his viewers and further detaches us from a narrative that until the final couple of episodes cannot build up a head of steam.
More propulsive is the secondary strand, about detective David Cook (brilliantly played by Robert Carlyle) and his gradual realisation, as he works the murder case of the private investigator Daniel Morgan, of how enmeshed the media and the Metropolitan police were. But they are too long apart for the one to borrow much energy from the other.
The Hack is stymied, too, by the fact that unlike, say, another drama about an appalling scandal, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, it deals mostly in ideals (and journalistic ideals at that) rather than the human emotions that make ideals real and valuable to us in life and as viewers. Abstraction is harder to care about.
On top of that, the script is deeply lacklustre. It is repetitive (there is barely a character that doesn’t tell Nick he looks tired and he twice apologises to Rusbridger “for making your life difficult”). It simply has bad lines (“We’re in a firefight here! They’re going to keep slinging mud until something sticks”) and bad ideas (such as the recurring dung beetle trundling across the screen to remind us of the aphorism about eating lots of faeces before you can fly).
Also, it has a suffocating reverence for its subject that frequently borders on risible. Davies is a saint whose violent childhood has given him “a deep-seated urge to hit back against anyone who takes power and abuses it” and whose ex-wife still tells the children they have “an impressive dad” while making them watch and read everything he does. Rusbridger is full of cringe-makingly heroic lines (“My life? This is bigger than me”), and the air of smug righteousness that suffuses the drama (apparently unironically, for those who are about to write in saying there could be no better commentary on the leftwing media) is deeply unendearing.
Between the sprawl and the tone, much is lost. What remains feels oddly quaint. So many worse instances of police corruption, abuses of political and institutional power, the erosion of personal and collective privacy and other rights have emerged since the world was convulsed by social media that the damage News International did seems to sit in a different landscape. The Hack almost transforms into a period piece about – God help us – simpler, happier times.