Conspiracy drama with loads of grit

By GREG DIXON

Newspaper newsrooms are unlovely places. They are pokey, messy, sometimes spiteful cauldrons of tension, rooms of grind and the pressure of deadlines.

But when the big story hits, when someone in that room has discovered something of consequence, a yarn that everybody will want to hear, that everyone will want to buy, they transform. The newsroom becomes not a sweatshop of badly paid, questionably dressed hacks but something that feels like the most bum-clenchingly exciting place you could ever find yourself.

We saw such a moment last night in State Of Play, TV One's new BBC thriller which, unusually for television, pushes journalism, journalists and big stories into the front window of its drama.

And it all began, as it does in newsrooms, like just another day at the office. Episode one opened with the apparently drug-related assassination of a black youth in London's West End and the apparent suicide under a tube train of a female parliamentary researcher.

Soon enough, rising Labour MP Stephen Collins (David Morrissey), the researcher's boss and lover, was in the gun for infidelity after breaking down at a press conference, and two reporters, Cal McCaffrey (a friend of Collins, it turned out) and Della Smith, have linked the two deaths by a cellphone call and opened not a can of worms, but a suitcase of guns and compromising photographs.

It is the stuff of a classic conspiracy drama set in the nexus of politics, business, cops and journalists - and it's shaping quickly into the best British thriller to find its way on to our screens in what feels like a decade.

Comparisons can be diverting and unhelpful, but State Of Play has something of the brooding, creepy feel of seminal 80s nuclear waste thriller Edge Of Darkness, while offering the sort of grit and fire found in, say, British TV writer Jimmy McGovern's best work.

Like the classic Edge Of Darkness, a very handy cast has been gathered in State Of Play: John Simm (McCaffrey) impressed in the TV drama The Lakes (written by McGovern) in the mid-to-late 90s and in the recent film about Factory Records' impresario Tony Wilson, 24 Party People; Kelly Macdonald (Smith) has shown her talent in at least two fine films, Trainspotting and Gosford Park; and Bill Nighy, who plays the newspaper editor Cameron Foster, is a veteran who won Baftas this year for his work in this and in (the otherwise awful) Love, Actually.

Writer Paul Abbott also has what the cops and hacks in this drama call form. Ignoring his work on Robson Green vehicles, Abbott wrote episodes for what was the best British drama of the early 90s, Cracker (which, incidentally, McGovern also wrote for).

And like Cracker, State Of Play's high-fibre script, filmed without the usual distracting tricks, has a real feel for reality's greys, for the murk that is real life.

McCaffrey's and Collins' friendship - which sits at the centre of the narrative - hints at the real world interdependence and codependence between politics and journalism.

"[Journalism's] not a job, it's a waste product ... People like you can't move until somebody spoonfeeds you shit or misery or gossip," Collins spat at one stage last night.

"Oh, somebody like you, you mean?" McCaffrey fired back.

Abbott's script fair crackles with good humour in its dialogue, too. When Foster asks McCaffrey why Collins' tears are not a story, McCaffrey fudges with a "so what"?

"Well, either he's faking it or he's knobbing 'er," deadpans Foster, "either way it's worth running."

From a journalist's point of view, State Of Play offers a realistic (if British) insight into who gets the stories that fill newspapers, and how. And Simm's McCaffrey isn't the usual one-dimensional, conniving, bottom-feeding hack usually found in television and film.

He is a measured man and a complex mix - and that's all to the good with the sort of bad press journalists routinely get.

But really the best news fit to print is this: there are five more weeks of State Of Play, five more weeks to see TV drama as it should be.