TV Review: PRESS + WANDERLUST

This article was originally published in The Courier on 8th September 2018.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/category/lifestyle/entertainment/tv-film/

PRESS: Thursday, BBC One

WANDERLUST: Tuesday, BBC One

The new six-part drama, PRESS, will anger The Daily Mail. The mere existence of the BBC angers The Daily Mail, of course, but this is a BBC drama in which, broadly speaking, a fictional right-wing newspaper, The Post, is depicted as an unethical, mendacious, barrel-scraping bully.

Meanwhile, its left-leaning rival, The Herald, is shown to be essentially virtuous and principled. It’s as if the writer, Mike Bartlett of Doctor Foster fame, is deliberately trolling Mail editor Paul Dacre. You have to laugh.

It will inevitably lend fuel to those who believe that the BBC has a blatant left-wing agenda (it doesn’t: have you ever witnessed a Laura Kuenssberg news report?), but you can’t reason with people like that.

Is Press biased in favour of its Guardian surrogate? Of course it is. Good. In spite of what anti-BBC types stubbornly maintain, it’s actually very rare to find a BBC drama that openly challenges right-wing dogma. It’s generally too scared to rock the boat. On this occasion, it should be applauded for having the guts to oppose its most vociferous critics.

Bartlett’s propulsive drama is a timely and engrossing meditation on journalistic ethics. It examines the power of the press, for good or ill. It feels necessary.

What’s more, Dacre and the Mail should actually be quite pleased that the scene-stealing star of the show is Ben Chaplin as the Post’s antihero editor. He’s a sharp, slick, crass manipulator who values a good story above all else, but he’s also horribly charming and clearly very good at his (dubious) job. Sure, he’s a tragicomic villain, but Bartlett and Chaplin still make sure that he comes across as a nuanced human being. Press depicts journalists as people, not some abstract ‘other’.

Stories under review in part one included the suicide of a gay footballer and the release of thirty-year-old incriminating photographs of a female cabinet minister. Bartlett has presumably done his research, as the handling of these strands felt authentic. Press is a political thriller that’s grounded in reality.

I obviously have a vested interest in this programme, as it examines the industry I work in, but you don’t have to be a journalist to appreciate it. After all, the mainstream media affects us all. It shapes our society. Bartlett is urging us to think about the news we consume, and whether we can trust it. That’s why the right-wing press will hate it. The last thing they want is a society that questions what it’s told to believe (man).

At first glance, WANDERLUST appears to be yet another comedy-drama about a middle-class white family with an enormous kitchen. However, depending on your tolerance for first world people kvetching about their emotional problems, it’s actually a wryly amusing and faintly depressing (in a good way) study of middle-aged frustration, stagnation and despair.

Toni Collette and Steven Mackintosh, both excellent as always, play a married couple whose sex life has become extinct. They still love each other, but the thrill has gone. When they admit to having brief extramarital flings, they hit upon an unorthodox plan to save their marriage: why don’t they continue to sleep with other people?

Packed with ‘scenes of an adult nature’, Wanderlust is a provocative drama that’s bound to prove divisive. The Daily Mail almost certainly won’t approve.

Yes, it sometimes feels a bit too pleased with itself. It wears its provocation on its sleeve, but it's also quite smart, funny and thoughtful. I could never truly dislike a drama in which a character says: “I find it unfathomable that you’ve never heard of Warren G.”