What a difference a week makes. Near the start of tonight’s episode, the camera pans over the detritus of a cocktail party at which Marnie has suffered a humiliating, perfunctory kiss from her husband following his arrest for assault. Mascara-stained, she stares into space.

By the end of the episode, she has found her inner Amazon and told Hector, pityingly, ‘It’s ridiculous! Two sane, beautiful women wasted on you. Aren’t you ashamed?’

For a moment, Hector looks crumpled – more broken than even his experience in the cells has left him. But Hector’s incarceration has been the means to Marnie’s emancipation. Perversely, Hector’s casual brutality has gifted Marnie the cynicism she needs to play the media game, and thus, it is a much more manipulative Marnie who wins herself the commission of Dinner Guest – a cross between Fanny’s Kitchen and Watch My Line, which riffs off her ‘perfect housewife’ persona.

Nor is Marnie is the only one with media ambitions. Isaac, always the office junior but channelling Bernard Levin in his tank-topped nerdiness, is aiming now for a role as an Arnold Wesker-alike: rattling up kitchen sink drama in his spare time and cultivating a relationship with the BBC script department.

It is a sign of the devotion which The Hour has to the early days of the BBC, and to the cultural zeitgeist that produced the angry young men when they were just getting angry.

Always a bit in love with the period it deplores for its seediness and bigotry, The Hour knows that the past is another country. It wouldn’t want to live there; but it’s happy for some of the glamour and working class radicalism to rub off. In these days of compromised BBC executives, it feels like a romanticised view of journalists as moral champions: of the kind of anger which can stand against moral cheapness and fuel creativity.

But, as The Hour casts its survey over London’s streets, we are reminded of a time when there was a lot to be getting angry about. Lines such as ‘Darkies live on cat food; I’ve seen ’em,’ carry with them the echo of the impending Notting Hill Race Riots, while, along the central line, in Soho, gangland culture starts to spread its wings, sustained by the secret vice of society’s most upstanding.

When Commander Stern is revealed as Kiki’s true attacker, it feels like both a surprise and a confirmation of something we already knew. Laurence Stern: even the name indicates that his was always going to be a cock and bull story. And Hector – poor, compromised Hector – is so hopelessly in thrall to the charms of El Paradis, that, by the end of the episode, he’s back in the lap of the club: an alcoholic returned for one last drink. He’s a Hector with an almighty Achilles heel, and not even Randall Brown’s sardonic Greek Chorus can be enough to save himself from himself.

Peter Capaldi is magnificent, of course, as Brown; but we need Randall to do more than stand in doorways, commenting on the action with the manner of one who has wrestled with personal trauma and agreed a settlement to forego further losses. So much more than simply jaded counsellor, Randall needs a proper storyline of his own. Fortunately, from the look of the Next Time trailer, it appears that he will be getting exactly that…

Aired at 9pm on Wednesday 21 November 2012 on BBC Two.

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