The Hour BBC 2.

The Hour is also on STV with that fat bird that is trying to get thin and used to be a singer, but now she’s a presenter. And I must admit she is not pretty, but pretty good. But, although there are plenty of them about, it’s not that hour.

It’s the other The Hour, which is not Mad Men. It’s nothing to do with Mad Men. And anything to do with Mad Men is incidental. In fact, don’t even mention Mad Men.

My first impression of The Hour is it is not Mad Men. My first impression, before my first impression was that I didn’t like it. As psychologist will tell you first impressions are very important. You need to start running from the big bad wolf that is going to eat you before you find out it’s actually a black bin bag or it would be too late and the wolf would have ate you before you could laugh at yourself and call yourself a turkey.

Not that I’m saying The Hour is a turkey. It does a nice piece of triangulation between the woman producer, the young go-getting journalist and the slightly upper class, but doesn’t want to show a stiff upper lip, front, for the show.

They’ve all been bedded into character. Romola Garai plays Bel Rowley. She’s pretty as you would expect, but not from another planet beautiful, just the ordinary girl next door Girl Friday that has a crush of sorts on the leading man.

Domnic Madden plays Hector Madden. He is the front man for the proposed new news show, but oh, dear he’s married to someone that knows someone that is the daughter of someone big in something not worth talking about.

Ben Whishaw plays Freddie Lyon, the real front man and the apex of the triangle. He’s bolshy, bad and brilliant. And he has a thing for Bel(la), but he would never admit it. Only he can make sense of the killing of a university lecturer by ‘Them’ the establishment and the subsequent murder or suicide of one of his debutante paramours. The clue lies in a cigarette paper and there is a cross between Sherlock and Edge of Darkness, A Very British Coup, kind of way. Or so the programme makers would have us believe. But I don’t. I think Freddy is a bit of a pain. If the sharp bit of a triangle isn’t pointy, what’s the point?