Press, an ensemble current affairs drama starring Charlotte Riley, Ben Chaplin, David Suchet, Ellie Kendrick and more, starts tonight on BBC One. It’s written by Doctor Foster creator-writer Mike Bartlett, and set in the UK print newspaper industry.
We chatted to Bartlett about the new show, and why he hopes it will change the way viewers think about their morning dose of current affairs…
“Press is a drama about journalists and the world of news. It’s got two different papers, a tabloid called The Post and a broadsheet called The Herald, and you see the lives of this group of journalists on both papers, their home life, their work life, their contradictions, all those sorts of things.
It’s a depiction of that industry but also a depiction of people who have a vocation and care about what they do and how they balance going into work and their personal lives and all the things they go through.
Hopefully, it’s also going to help viewers to see the news in a different way. Hopefully when you watch an episode of Press, the next morning when you read news on your phone or however you get your news, you’ll understand it in a different way and you’ll understand the context of where it comes from and the sorts of people that have made it and the agendas and the interests behind it.
It’s a big ensemble show, they made these huge sets for the newsrooms which are just amazing. It’s really important because you want to show a world and a scale to it which is representative of the truth and how important newspapers are.”
Six-part series Press starts tonight, Thursday the 6th of September, at 9pm on BBC One.