Cynicism about the mass media, and newspaper journalists in particular, is hardly a new phenomenon. In 1928, Chicago newsmen Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote Broadway comedy The Front Page, an instant classic that cemented the idea of the hard-boiled, hard-drinking hack in the popular imagination.
In Britain, the antics of the tabloid press in the years that followed Rupert Murdoch’s acquisition of The Sun in 1969 added layers of amorality and absurdity to an already tarnished image. By 1984, when the egomaniacal and deeply shady media tycoon Robert Maxwell bought Mirror Group Newspapers, the time was ripe for a scabrous sitcom about Fleet Street, as it then was.
The result was London Weekend Television’s Hot Metal, which ran for two six-episode seasons on ITV from 1986. (A quarter-hour sketch three years later, for the BBC’s Comic Relief telethon, is the last we ever saw of it.)
The show’s recent addition to BritBox’s library will, like the rest of the streaming service, appeal most to nostalgia buffs over the age of 50. What millennials and Generation Z will make of it is debatable, however, given how rooted it is in the mid-eighties media landscape.
Journalese
At the heart of Andrew Marshall and David Renwick’s comedy is Terence ‘Twiggy’ Rathbone, a smiling monster who embodies the most damning caricatures of Murdoch and Maxwell. As played by Robert Hardy, Rathbone buys the steadfastly fair-minded and boring Daily Crucible and gleefully drives it downmarket, picking up millions of new readers in the process.
To do this, he shunts editor Harry Stringer (Geoffrey Palmer) – no doubt inspired by The Sunday Times’ Harold Evans, a high-profile Murdoch casualty – into the ineffectual role of managing editor, based in the tower block’s lift. Stringer’s replacement, Russell Spam, an ethically challenged scrapper who speaks in high-flown journalese, is played by Hardy too, and to begin with, we and Stringer mistakenly assume they’re the same person.
The show’s most outrageous jokes usually involve scumbag reporter Greg Kettle (Richard Kane), a self-proclaimed representative of “Her Majesty’s Press”, uncovering or concocting some wild story for the front page. While several of these are fantastical – he maintains, for instance, that a befuddled old clergyman is a Marxist revolutionary and werewolf – others play like distorted echoes of the 1980s news agenda.
Raking through pornographic videos for an actress who looks vaguely like Prince Andrew’s new squeeze, Kettle and Spam devise an ‘is she or isn’t she?’ splash that, through sheer fluke, prompts the royal girlfriend to confess it’s actually her. In a later episode, after Kettle stumbles upon a woman giving birth to sextuplets, Spam literally buys the babies to give away as competition prizes. Stringer is horrified, of course, till it emerges that their father is a violent drunk.
Jarringly, Hot Metal valorises the same news team it seeks to mock, so that Spam and Kettle’s muckraking leads to positive outcomes more often than not. Each series features an honest, conscientious reporter – John Gordon Sinclair in the first, Caroline Milmo in the second – who, Woodward and Bernstein-style, unearths a scandal of national importance.
At the end of the first season, a Crucible scoop involving the Kremlin brings down a Tory government. In the second, the paper saves the UK from Leveson-style press restrictions. Were Marshall and Renwick worried, pre-Seinfeld, that a sitcom full of unsympathetic characters wouldn’t work?
Silicon Valley
It’s worth asking whether a Hot Metal reboot would succeed in the 2020s, and which prominent personalities are worth hanging out to dry. Maxwell drowned in the sea in 1991 after pillaging his employees’ pensions to stave off bankruptcy. The 91-year-old Murdoch, meanwhile, has watched his papers’ circulations plummet since the internet knocked the industry sideways more than 20 years ago.
On top of that, trust in the media has never been lower. The public were growing wise to its emotionalism, favoritism, hyperbole and manipulative framing in Hot Metal’s day. More than 35 years later– particularly if they’re social media activists – they’re liable to label stories they don’t like as “fake news” and insinuate that whole publications, no matter how mainstream or middle-of-the-road, can’t be trusted.
Let’s say we accept that Silicon Valley’s geeks hold more sway over our opinions than the hacks of Fleet Street or Wapping ever dreamt of. What, in that case, could a comedy writer get his teeth into? Mark Zuckerberg and Nick Clegg’s plans for Facebook? Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter? Google’s eccentric search algorithms, which assume anyone searching for an image of a white couple is racist? The suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story during a presidential election?
If you can find comic sparkle in that lot, good luck to you. But are you brave enough to risk upsetting a tech oligarch?
In Hot Metal’s second season, set during a fledgling Labour government, Rathbone keeps boasting that he’s a lifelong socialist, just as Maxwell was fond of doing. These days, while pouring billions into Chinese manufacturing plants, he’d be more likely to call himself a staunch progressive, committed to equity, diversity and inclusion.
Assuming you’re not Ricky Gervais, and for as long as cancel culture runs rampant, poking fun at notions like these could have lasting professional repercussions. And who wants to be banned from the public square for the rest of their life?
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