When the phone-hacking scandal was exposed by Guardian journalist Nick Davies in 2009, it unearthed the scale and impact of the criminality at the News of the World newspaper.
Private investigators were routinely hacking the phones of actors, musicians, sports stars, the royal family, politicians and others in positions of power, and newspapers were buying the stolen content.
Stories they had no right to know about were being published – leaving the victims of hacking understandably feeling paranoid, suspecting friends or family of selling out their deepest secrets.
As Davies reported, Rupert Murdoch’s News Group Newspapers had been settling cases out of court for huge sums to cover it up. And after it was published? John Yates, assistant police commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, reported back within 24 hours, saying, effectively, ‘nothing to see here’.
It was, according to former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, “the shortest investigation in history” and afterwards, “You know the police are in on it too.”
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Only a combination of the revelation that missing teenager Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked and messages had been marked as read, giving false hope to her family she’d be found alive, plus the might of The New York Times backing up The Guardian when there was a wall of silence in the UK media, prevented the story from fizzling out.
Andy Coulson outside court in 2014. Photo: Associated Press / Alamy
All this despite Andy Coulson, about to enter Downing Street as prime minister David Cameron’s director of communications, having been editor of the News of the World from 2003-7 (he was subsequently found guilty of conspiracy to intercept voicemails in 2014 and sentenced to 18 months in prison).
New ITV drama The Hack tells this story. It is vital television. The story is bigger than dodgy journalists. Bigger than corrupt police. For many, justice has still not been served, and real change has not been enacted.
Just as Mr Bates vs The Post Office built on what had previously been reported about the scandalous mistreatment of subpost-masters and exposed it to a mass audience, so The Hack shines a new light on layer upon layer of corruption. The scale is staggering.
“Mr Bates got Traitors-style audience sizes,” writer Jack Thorne told Big Issue.
“It used to be that those sort of shows were for awards or kudos, but now they’re for big audiences. The importance of telly is in the light we can shine on things. That attracts me as a viewer and a storyteller. I’ve just finished watching Say Nothing – which is extraordinary, suddenly the whole Good Friday Agreement is being shaped for me in a completely different way. That’s what good TV can do.”
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And The Hack is very good TV. Thorne, fresh from winning all the Emmys for Netflix’s Adolescence, alternates episodes between the phone-hacking scandal – featuring an outstanding performance from David Tennant as Nick Davies, playfully breaking the fourth wall alongside Mr Bates star Toby Jones as Rusbridger – and a 2002 inquiry into the police investigation of the murder of Daniel Morgan, a private investigator, in a South London pub car park in 1987. The two apparently separate stories come together in the final episode.
Never mind bent coppers, never mind bent journalists, this is an entire bent system – rigged to keep power in a select few hands. It all adds up to a sobering inquest into our long, slow loss of trust in big institutions.
“When I grew up, if Trevor McDonald said something on ITV News, I trusted every word,” Thorne said.
“Now we’re living in a world where no one seems to trust anything, where everything is about what point of view you sit at. The idea of fact is really under threat. We need to be asking, how did that happen?”
Given that members of the DCMS select committee investigating phone hacking were themselves hacked, does Thorne fear reprisals?
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“I’m not especially frightened of Murdoch,” he says. “The thing that scares me most is journalists watching it and judging it and whether we got journalism right.
“I think the show is in praise of journalism. This is about extraordinary journalists who did very brave things to uncover the truth. So I hope we get that right.”
When we can’t trust the popular press or the police, we’re in big trouble. When politicians are advised and paid for by people defending their own advantage rather than serving the public interest, we are in big trouble.
The Hack lays bare the hugely troubling ways power operates in the UK. We see the good, the bad and the downright criminal of both policing and journalism in a smart, playful, but frightening seven episodes of high-class drama. Turn on, tune in and prepare to speak out.
