A flagship BBC investigative news programme is under threat, both from complacency within and external opposition without. The uncanny timing that has seen the second series of The Hour premiere in the same week as Newsnight has been put on the rack is either a gift to the production team or an unwelcome distraction. It would be a rare reviewer who avoided the parallel – and we are not going to be the first.

But then, it has always been like this with The Hour. Inherently zeitgeisty, and regarded by some as a curious hybrid of a drama, it has tended to invite comparisons with things it is not: whether it’s to the beleaguered Newsnight, or to Mad Men, or to those BBC Four heritage television biopics. The Road to Coronation Street as peopled by Richard Dimbleby and Don Draper.

Such critical vacillations suggest a lack of confidence in what The Hour is. But if there is one thing The Hour screams, in abundance, it’s confidence. When you’ve got actors of the calibre of Anna Chancellor, Romola Garai and Ben Whishaw, you know you’re onto a good thing. But the real star of the show is Abi Morgan’s script, sharply conjuring up a world of cocktails and misogyny and “You’ve never had it so good”.

Patriarchy, in the person of Dominic West’s Hector Madden, is the focus here. First seen lounge lizarding his way through the Soho nightclub scene, he has ‘hubris’ written all over him – and that’s even before the appearance of new Head of News, Randall Brown (Peter Capaldi), to act as his newsroom nemesis. In other hands, Hector’s aura of public school confidence and sexual double standards would mark him out as a first class cad in the making, but Hector, for all his complacent charm and morning-after stardust, is a little too shambolic to do deviousness convincingly. As compromised BBC figures go, we can all think of a lot worse – and none of them look so dashingly square-jawed in a suit.

Hector alone would be libido enough to disprove that sexual intercourse began in 1963, were it not for the fact that, in The Hour, everyone is being screwed or being screwed over or endeavouring to screw the opposition. It’s a screwgasm of sexual politics. The smoky glow of post-coital muzziness hangs over the action, but in the manner of a Katharine Hepburn comedy, where everyone is hot for it, but too damn classy to proceed without irony.

‘I offer no regrets and will not talk about the past,’ says Anna Chancellor’s glorious Lix Storm, the foreign correspondent who has enjoyed an affaire de coeur with Randall Brown, and who is cynical and hard-drinking enough to realise that his talk of leaving the lens cap off may just be a euphemism for something else.

Lix, with her foreign desk experience, brings a little of the entente cordiale to proceedings. But this series, she faces competition from Ben Whishaw’s Freddie Lyon: formerly The Hour’s terrier-in-chief, now returned from Acapulco and New York with the kind of loucheness that comes from having a glamorous French wife in tow.

The scene where he reveals her existence to Bel is a quiet little betrayal of something that was never promised or assured in the first place. That’s how good the writing is. The fact that it also plays out while British Defence Union extremists are pamphleteering the street is an indication of how sexual and social politics combine in The Hour to create a cocktail of emotional and political instability.

Those who don’t ‘get’ The Hour, or who wish it to be something other than it is, may consider it style over substance. But for the rest of us, in a week where the BBC has come under so much fire, it’s nice to be reminded of the integrity, onscreen and off, which produces the gold standard.

Aired at 9pm on Wednesday 14 November 2012 on BBC Two.

> Buy Series 1 on DVD on Amazon.

> Order Series 2 on DVD on Amazon.

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