Jack Thorne’s lacklustre script – full of cringe-making lines, strange dreamlike sequences and a recurring dung beetle – fails to capture the drama of the Guardian’s landmark investigation into media corruption
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.
