Is it possible for a news story to be both widely known and not really known at all? The News of the World phone-hacking scandal may be such a paradox. Everyone knows the rudiments of the story – when it emerged that News International (now News Group) employees had engaged in phone hacking and police bribery, over a period of years and involving thousands of victims. It led to the shuttering of the News of the World in 2011, and a spate of high-profile resignations. And it ruined the lives of some of those dragged into it. But the complexities of the case, a sprawling fractal of crime and corruption, remain, to this day, widely underacknowledged.
It’s easy to see why the subject would have appealed to Jack Thorne, the acclaimed TV writer known for Channel 4’s This Is England miniseries and this year’s timely, debate-provoking Adolescence. Along with co-writer Annalisa Dinnella (Sex Education), Thorne explores parts of the phone-hacking scandal – including the tenacious journalism that brought it to the public’s attention – in ITV’s new seven-part drama The Hack. It’s one of the broadcaster’s best series in years: a fast-paced but substantive drama that seems poised to ignite a national conversation. “This is a strange, deceptive piece of our recent history,” said Thorne, ahead of the series’ release. “One with so many layers to it. I hope we find a way to do justice to the complexity of what happened and of celebrating the incredible reporting that sits underneath it.”
“It’s been one of the key British scandals of the past 20 years,” says producer Joe Williams, previously known for Mr Bates vs the Post Office, another state-of-the-nation drama. “Even though voicemail hacking feels kind of old – it’s quite an analogue device, people don’t use them any more – it’s actually a bigger story than that. It’s about the abuse of power, the power we give to large media companies, and what that can do to public trust. We’re still living under the shadow of it.”
For the first few episodes, The Hack adopts a bifurcated approach. Half of the series is fronted by David Tennant, who was himself awarded substantial undisclosed damages from News Group in 2018 after being a victim of phone hacking. Tennant plays the wry and persistent Nick Davies, the investigative reporter who first broke the phone-hacking scandal in The Guardian in 2009, while Toby Jones turns in a characteristically strong performance as then Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger. The other half follows DCS Dave Cook (Robert Carlyle), a Met Police officer tasked with investigating the historical killing of PI Daniel Morgan. The murder happened in 1987, and remained unsolved decades later; the reopened investigation eventually reveals vital ties to the phone-hacking conspiracy. (The exact links between the Morgan case and the phone-hacking scandal take several episodes to become apparent, but have to do with a suspect in the original crime, and institutional corruption within the police.)
For Carlyle, as with Tennant, the project has a somewhat personal resonance: in the 1990s, when the star of Trainspotting and The Full Monty was at the height of his fame, he would have been a prime target for phone hacking. “There were a few things that happened to me around that time that were unexplainable, really,” he tells me. “I didn’t know what was going on… it was like every move was being watched. And I can’t prove that it was happening to me, but I wouldn’t be surprised.” If his suspicions are correct, Carlyle would be among the myriad high-profile celebrities to have fallen victim to the hacking, from Hugh Grant to Jude Law to Sienna Miller, with everything from affairs to banal everyday gossip being hung out like dirty laundry. Relationships and friendships were ended, reputations in some instances irrevocably harmed.
It was, as Carlyle points out, the case of Milly Dowler – the murdered schoolgirl whose phone was hacked by the paper – that proved a turning point for public outrage. It emerged that, during the period when Dowler was missing, perpetrators deleted voicemail messages from her phone left by grieving relatives, giving her parents false hope that she was still alive. “At first, there was a kind of feeling from the public in general that, because [phone hacking] was happening to celebrities, they didn’t really care,” Carlyle says. “‘They’re rich, and deserve it,’ or whatever. But that changed with the whole Milly Dowler thing. It became very, very serious.”
The Hack manages to strike a tricky tonal balance, injecting Tennant’s parts of the programme with a healthy amount of puckish, fourth-wall-breaking levity, while playing Carlyle’s plotline more or less entirely straight. To prepare for the role, Carlyle spent time with the real DCS Cook. “It can be quite difficult when you play police officers, particularly the ones that are higher up,” he suggests. “There’s something kind of unemotional and detached about them. Of course, it’s the job that does that. Being confronted with absolute horror, sometimes on a daily basis. What does that do to your head?” During his conversations with Cook, Carlyle was told “horrific” anecdotes about his time as a criminal investigator, so that the actor would “understand the gravity of the things he was investigating”.
“You think, what do you do with that information as a human being? Do you take it home with you? Do you become immune to that? It makes for a very particular type of personality, I think,” Carlyle continues. “But the beauty in Jack’s script is that you have that slightly removed quality, but also the human being behind it, a guy with a heart.”
Ultimately, the human drama of The Hack – also evinced in the charming and well-scripted back-and-forths between Tennant and Jones – yields to the bigger picture. While unsuccessful attempts to make a series based on the phone-hacking scandal have simmered for the past several years, the underlying themes of The Hack have never felt more timely.
It’s very, very difficult now for good, honest journalists to be believed
“We’re living in the ‘post-truth’ age, and truth is a commodity,” says Carlyle. “It’s very, very difficult for the general public to believe any more. When I was a kid, and watched Trevor MacDonald on the News at 10, he’d tell you something and it was, you know, a fact. You believed that. And that’s under attack, worse than ever nowadays. I remember first hearing the phrase ‘fake news’ and thinking, Jesus, that’s such an incredibly powerful thing to say. Because it then puts doubt in your mind – and it’s very, very difficult now for good, honest journalists to be believed.”
Williams says he expects the series to have a “different” kind of reception to Mr Bates, last year’s ripped-from-the-headlines drama about a miscarriage of justice that won a Bafta, effusive reviews, and, ultimately, led to legislative action. “With Mr Bates, we sort of had all forms of media and broadcasters on our side,” he says. “This is about journalism, so I expect it’ll be reported in a different way.
“But at the same time, it’s not quite a journalism-bashing series,” he adds. “Hopefully, it’s showing journalism at its best – even while it’s investigating journalism at its worst.”
‘The Hack’ airs at 9pm on ITV1 on Wednesday 24 September, with all episodes available to stream now
