Television drama, like film-making, theatre and net start-ups, thrives in creative hubs. Yet when they try to produce intelligent and original work, British writers find that the commissioning editors and channel controllers they need to encourage and guide them are not there. Instead, they meet cultural bureaucrats who have wasted their careers churning out hack work, and do not have the talent or the artistic integrity to schedule dramas that can compete with the best American work. When they try, the result is an embarrassment.

The BBC described The Hour as Britain's answer to Mad Men. It was nothing of the sort, but not only for the reasons the critics gave. They have been hard on the series because it showed the 2010s telling off the 1950s for it fuddy-duddy attitudes. No viewer of The Hour can feel the slightest concern for Bel Rowley, the heroine. She is the equal of the men around her and damn well knows it. Rowley is a BBC producer, who begins a current affairs series — The Hour — just as the Suez crisis is looming in 1956. She never looks nervous or daunted by the prospect of breaking into a man's world. She is not a feminist pioneer, but a bright, 21st-century career woman who has stepped into a time machine. Contrast The Hour's phoniness with Mad Men. For all the elements of make- believe, its women feel as if they are a part of Madison Avenue before the second wave of feminism. Sexism is normal. The writers do not lecture us about it. They just show it, and thus create suspense. The viewers wonder whether the men around the talented copywriter Peggy Olson will casually destroy her career without even thinking about it because she is an interloper in a world that has never been meant for women. They worry about her in a way they never worry about Rowley.

If didacticism — the curse of British writing — was The Hour's only problem it would be bad enough. What makes the series symptomatic of the wider troubles of British television, is that after failing to create a coherent fictional world, the programme-makers overwrite in the hope that a frenetic plot can distract attention from their shortcomings. They have Rowley and her tangled love life, the first stirrings of the decline in deference to authority in the BBC that anticipate the arrival of the 1960s, the Suez crisis, the collapse of empire and the Eden government trying to cover up its folly. All that is not enough. The BBC has to throw in — what else? — a crime story as well. An impulsive flamboyant, convention-defying reporter working for Rowley realises that a beautiful woman has been murdered by dark and dangerous forces working for the state, which...well, you can probably guess the rest.  

The sadness of it is that Abi Morgan, who wrote The Hour, and Anthony Horowitz, the author of Injustice, show flashes of dramatic ability. Yet the superficial and cowardly hierarchies of British television prevent them  from flourishing. In future critics should not hold writers and directors to account but persecute a generation of television bureaucrats who have wasted creative talents that they are unfit to command.