Television - Andrew Billen watches a tense "political" drama about hacks from central casting

Any good newspaper drama should contain the line, delivered from editor to reporter: "You've got 48 hours." A really good one, such as, I think, Capricorn One, has the reporter answer back: "I saw that movie, too, and it's 72 hours." In State of Play (9pm, Sundays, BBC1) we get a newspaper's lawyer telling the editor he might, at a push, get them five days before they have to hand over evidence to the police.

It is hard to know what to make of this suspense-killing gobbet from the experienced pen of Paul Abbott. Is it gleaned from research? Is he convinced that a paper's job is to outwit the law? Is it simply to buy him time so that he can stretch out State of Play over six episodes? Or, perhaps, does Abbott feel compelled to address the shrieks emerging from a million living rooms that his plot (an attempt to connect Stephen Collins, an adulterous Labour MP, with a gangland killing via his dead mistress) has more holes in it than a chunk of Edam?

We in the fourth estate, however, should be the last people to look for cavities in the mouth of this gift horse. Not since Watergate has a TV drama dared to make us look so good. State of Play is Lou Grant for the Noughties and, my God, the BBC has already commissioned a second series.

The Rossi figure (the hard-nosed investigative hack on Lou Grant) is Cal McCaffrey, played by John Simm, the weaselly toughie from The Lakes and Crime and Punishment. Being a journo, Cal, naturally, is unable to "commit" and spends the "silly money" he earns on "silly things" (not shown). He has stuff going for him, however, should any girl be interested. Turning up for work seems optional, as is filing copy. And, although he is meant to be unkempt, he wears a nice green moleskin suit and has a house so girly that it boasts a fitted kitchen and a Buddha.

The Billie (the sensitive, socially concerned girl reporter) is Della Smith, just a typo away from being quite something in the kitchen. Nor, just because she's a Glaswegian lesbian, does it mean she can't flirt with male detectives from Edinburgh. As played by Kelly Macdonald (from Trainspotting), what makes Della unusual, given the tradition of hard-bitten hackettes established by His Girl Friday, is that she keeps bursting into tears.

The Charlie (or wise-owl editor) is Bill Nighy, playing Cameron Foster. Nighy steals the show as he always does, although here he impersonates a man who impersonates (rather than is) a fearless, wisecracking, cynical editor with a heart of gold. Popular with his staff and lacking a proprietor, Foster is like no editor I have ever known. He backs his reporters' assumptions "fully" when the police are on their backs, yet, with equal assurance, can talk from the gutter about MPs "knobbing" their researchers. A Renaissance ed.

The Lou Grant is - well, there isn't a Lou Grant, because Abbott has done away with the post of news editor in favour of an over-obviously comic newsroom secretary. Never mind, The West Wing hasn't got a Secretary of State either, yet we still half-believe in the Bartlet White House. Unfortunately, you don't have to have worked in journalism to conclude that for all their research Abbott and his director, David Yates, have got broadsheet newspapers completely wrong, from the Herald's shiny modern offices (journalists turn wherever they work into pigsties) and the illiterate headlines ("Journalist's union condemns arrest of senior reporter") to the flow of booze and the way they pay, all the time, for information.

Mind you, this series lacks believability wherever it strays. The underground drug scene is set, as cliche demands, in a disused warehouse. The coppers have bad skin and say "cuff him" when they make an arrest. In the Commons, a whip tells a junior spin-doctor: "Collins needs all the help he can get. Brief in his favour." As they do. The best thing on the Westminster side is David Morrissey as Collins, an idealistic chairman of the energy committee with a wandering willy. For all his sanctimony, we sympathise with Collins - although he was a damn fool to play away from home when he has a wife as beautiful as Polly Walker (Anne) waiting for him back there.

By the way, my money's on Anne Collins being the killer of her husband's mistress. Not that I much care. As a conspiracy thriller, State of Play works better as a soap. In fact, you have to wait for the third part and a well-done chase scene in a London hotel before your pulse even begins to quicken.

Where it really disappoints is in its failure to make the world of spin, the show's milieu, come alive. Everyone is in the presentation game here: the politicians, the police, the dead drug dealer's family and one of the primary suspects, an Eddie Izzard type who runs a PR company. At home, Collins even accuses his son of being "the frontman for your mother's moods". When the spinning starts in a kid's bedroom, we should feel as paranoid as a peace-loving Labour voter at the next election. Instead, we just want to know if Cal and Anne, who predictably hit the sack in episode two, have babies together.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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