It is almost certainly a sign of a drama that is losing its capacity to grip when one character advises another that the Petrie Museum can be found three stops along from Knightsbridge and you think to yourself, ‘That’s a rather circuitous route to get to Bloomsbury’.

We’re guessing that wasn’t supposed to be our reaction. But if, like us, you heard the repeated references to ‘honey traps’ tonight, and thought, ‘I must go onto Google to see if that’s an anachronism’, then our sincerest commiserations: not only do you share our capacity for pedantry, you’re also, like us, falling a little out of love with The Hour.

We suppose that it’s the languid pace that’s doing it for us – that and the ineptitude of some of the characters, c.f. politically astute feminist, Bel, who doesn’t realise that maybe, possibly inviting a showgirl-hooker to snitch on her violent gangland boss isn’t going to be a means to said character’s redemption. So much for her feminism in action.

And then there are those characters who hide their motivations behind the script. With every episode that passes, Randall (Peter Capaldi) becomes more and more like a dour Scottish Yoda, dispensing oblique advice from the 1950s’ equivalent of a Bear Grylls survival manual. In one particularly fractious discussion of editorial policy, Randall alludes to the macabre traditions of the tribes’ people of Borneo. ‘To him who is in fear, he intones, ‘everything rustles.’ It is just one instant, among many, where characters are heard to speak as if in inverted commas.

The Hour is so self-consciously stylish a drama that everyone favours aphorisms over, you know, the way normal people speak and stuff. At times, it feels like an exercise in Brief Encounter-style role play: everyone walking around cutting themselves on their own brittle emotions. But then a line of dialogue comes along so thunderously clunky that all you can do is goggle. ‘I may not be Evelyn Waugh, Hector,’ says Julian Rhind-Tutt’s repressed Head of Press, McCain, ’but I do know the meaning of the word ‘scoop’.’

Still, a reference to a 1938 novel is positively historic for a drama that is so keen to show off its 1950s’ context. Poor old Harold, we learn, has never had it so bad. There is on-going fallout from the first NATO summit. Meanwhile, poor marginalised Camille has invited around a group of earnest young Lefties to make CND leaflets, thereby ticking off the box marked ‘arms race paranoia’ on The Hour’s great bingo card of contemporary allusions. It’s like a boy scout desperately trying to earn his ‘post-war proficiency’ badge. You almost yearn for dvd surtitles to appear on the screen to clarify every reference you miss.

So much of this stuff feels like part of our collective memory – #raceriots #nuclearwinter #Windrushgeneration #homosexualreform – that we receive it with the hoary predictability of cliché. But the details – the whos and whens that history is already erasing from our consciousness – feel so much less familiar that they require a drama that is a little more inclusive with its explanations. Table-thumping young politicos may be good for many things, but not, perhaps, for delivering clumsy infodumps disguised as journalistic debate.

By the end of the episode, drama and history have met face-on and the Chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, is offering an account of his resignation, live on air, to Hector. It’s a genuine historical situation, if not meeting, and one that sent us scurrying back to Google to research the marginalia. Thorneycroft, it turns out, isn’t the best remembered of the 1958 resignations that shook the Macmillan government: that honour goes to a Junior Treasury Minister by the name of Enoch Powell.

All interesting stuff, but whether it works as drama – whether it works in this drama – is open to debate. If you go beyond the dialogue to the footnotes, then it’s certainly an educative experience watching The Hour. But when it’s properly engaging, the thing that makes it so is the human drama, and sometimes the footnotes swamp it.

Thus, tonight, it wasn’t for us the debates about nuclear armament that lingered in the memory, but the scene of damaged, captive Kiki, entertaining Laurie Stern in the certain knowledge that in a hairs’ breadth violence would follow. For a moment, there was a terrible kewpie-doll vulnerability to Kiki: spaced out and giggling, but eyeballing him, too, to provoke the moment to its conclusion. And in the end, it wasn’t her goading Laurie to ‘do it’ that prompted the violence. It was her telling him that she loved him.

That was dark. That was drama. And none of that had very much to do with the production team of The Hour at all.

Aired at 9pm on Wednesday 5 December 2012 on BBC Two.

> Buy Series 1 on DVD on Amazon.

> Order Series 2 on DVD on Amazon.

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