“No one took charge” – that is the rail regulator’s view of the timetable travel chaos that left thousands of passengers stranded. So I’d like to talk umbrellas with the man who was supposed to be in charge.

This year already, the East Coast line has been renationalised for the second time in ten years; delays have been caused by strikes and engineering works; and the summer rolled in miserably as those timetables caused massed cancellations across the North and for commuters into London.

Transport Secretary Chris Grayling has not taken the blame for any of this; he is always failing to do that. Instead, he talks up private ownership, saying in a garbled way that “privatisation has delivered huge benefits of [sic] passengers on Britain’s railways – doubling passenger journeys and bringing in billions of private investment”.

Here now is my umbrella parallel. In a wet country people buy umbrellas; in a particularly downpouring year, they buy even more umbrellas. This does not suggest that ownership of the umbrella industry is a huge success for private industry: it suggests that people buy umbrellas when it rains.

More people travelling on the trains can be for many reasons, not least that driving anywhere is torture. Maybe where they work lacks parking; or perhaps they work in London where driving is discouraged. Or maybe they commute by train because there is no other reasonable choice.

None of this indicates that privatisation is responsible for that rise in passenger journeys; people take the train because they have little alternative. Umbrellas and rain.

Hymning rising passenger numbers as a success of privatisation is therefore specious logic. Especially when the Virgin/Stagecoach operation has withdrawn early from the East Coast line, leaving the taxpayer to step in again.

And here’s another thing, how much does privatisation cost the taxpayer in supporting private industry, and then taking over when running a line proves to be too much?

Much the same happens with privately run prisons. Birmingham prison was run by G4S until recently, when the government took over declaring it had fallen into a “state of crisis”.

Isn’t this often the way? Private industry creams off the state until everything goes wrong.

But back to Mr Grayling. The concluding part of his statement said: “But it is clear that the structure we inherited is no longer fit to meet today’s challenges and cope with increasing customer demand.”

You will look long and hard at that sentence before you find Mr Grayling admitting that he is “no longer fit to meet today’s challenges”. No, instead he blames “the structure we inherited”.

In his interim report in the timetable failures, Stephen Glaister, chairman of the Office or Road and Rail, singled out for criticism train operators Govia, Northern and Northern Rail, Network Rail – and the Department of Transport (you know, the one run by Mr Not My Fault Grayling).

Mr Grayling has announced a review of the railways, although it is not reported whether he has announced a review of himself.

Shadow transport secretary Andy McDonald reversed into the sidings mumbling about rocketing fares, failing franchises and timetable chaos. Then he said: “The railways need a Labour government which will deliver public ownership of rail.”

Ah, yes. That one. It is one of the confusions of life that you can feel privatisation isn’t the answer – but neither is taking everything back into public hands. I honestly don’t know how to untangle that one. Would the state running the railways be an improvement or an endless drain on money and a distraction from other jobs a government ought to concentrate on, such as tackling poverty and building social housing and keeping the NHS afloat?

It is easy to suspect that Labour wouldn’t take the railways into public ownership so much as come up with a different sort of public/private hybrid.

Best advice is to buy an umbrella and walk.

IT’S often seen as a cliff edge, so here goes.

Do you want to jump off this steep edge without a parachute and with no knowledge of what lies below, although rocks might be a fair guess? Or would you rather have a chute to carry you down gently? Or are you having second doubts about taking that leap?

Are you prepared to stand on that lofty place and just spring over, holding hands with Theresa as she recites headlines from an article she wrote for the Daily Express – “BREXIT PLAN DELIVERS FREEDOMS PEOPLE VOTED FOR”?

Would you like to borrow Jeremy’s chute? Oh, hang on he hasn’t decided if he’s going to wear one yet. Not made up his mind about Brexit at all. Still hoping Theresa will mess things up and be forced into a general election like the one Labour almost sort of won last time. And as near victories/defeats go, it was a good one.

Trouble is, chances of that happening are about as slim as Boris Johnson saying: “Oh, let’s not make it all about me, chaps.”

Yes, this is Brexit we’re talking about again. And I know that’s a risk because on this ledge, Brexit blogs aren’t as widely read as non-Brexit blogs.

The campaign for a people’s vote is gathering momentum, although a second-thoughts referendum still seems unlikely. It’s a hard sell in the sense that we’ve had more than two years of arguing about this, and a second vote would send us back to the start.

But I’m still in favour of a second vote, and here’s why. The first referendum was badly run and poorly argued on all sides and seemed mostly to be won on loose pernicious feelings of dissatisfaction with modern life.

It was vaguely about sovereignty, something which itself is vague and difficult to define; and it was covertly about immigration without anyone saying as much, until Nigel Farage blurted it out near polling day.

Most importantly, the 37 per cent of people who voted for it hardly represent a thumping majority. A narrow squeak ‘yes’ vote has been tattily thrashed about as a banner made by the people (you know, all of them, every last one).

Two years of infighting, blather and bollocks has left us in a poisoned vacuum. A popular vote on the terms of our departure would settle things properly – even if the notion sends the Eurosceptics into spluttering mode (a setting they are rarely a twitch away from).

A second vote makes sense, especially as politics has let us down and behaved badly for the past two years, with endless spats and spitting, and the constant unfurling of shabby lies and exaggeration.

And feel free to consider these thoughts shabby lies and exaggeration if you wish; or if your name is Nigel or Jacob.

As for the freedoms Mrs Maybe says we were promised, they were false promises mumbled into the wind.

Those ‘freedoms’ may well come with a “Made in the US stamp” – unless, like Trump’s “Make America Great Again” hats they were made in China.

Here’s what freedom might look like.

The NHS open to foreign competition, consumer and environmental regulations chucked on a bonfire, and delicious American delicacies such as chicken washed in chlorine back on the menu – alongside hormone-packed meat. And you can forget about anyone believing in climate change.

Exactly how any such a dodgy with the US would be better than what we have now remains a mystery. And another reason for a second vote.

Heavens, I do wish I could stop hating Nigel Farage. It’s a one-sided affair. We’ve been rubbing along like this for ages. Me grumbly swearing at the radio or the television. And Nigel carrying blithely on, unaware of my heartfelt hostility.

I’d like to say it’s nothing personal, but it is. Farage just sends antipathy crawling across my skin. Best not to think about the man at all, but here he is, ranting on the BBC again.

He is on the BBC Today programme, debating immigration with a man from the SNP. I didn’t catch the Scottish man’s name as I was too busy being cross with Farage, who was off on one of his pub-bore rants, tottering on the barstool, pint in his fist, fags on the table. Well, it was radio, so who’s to say, but that’s how he sounded. That’s how he always sounds.

It is one of the more depressing facts of national life that the politics and future of this country have been shaped by a pub bore who has failed so many times to enter politics by the front door.

What got me going was this: Farage was off on one again, blaming all the country’s ills on immigration. “People can’t get on the housing list, they can’t get a doctor’s appointment…” and so vilely, sweepingly on and on.

The obvious riposte to this was given by the Scottish politician (apologies, Google isn’t helping identify him and the programme isn’t on iPlayer yet). This is that many of the doctors and nurses and others working in the NHS are immigrants.

This doesn’t interest people such as Farage, who didn’t get where they are today without scapegoating minorities.

Yet societies need immigration, need ‘otherness’ to add new yeast to old dough, to give culture a lift. Mind you, plenty of people don’t agree; as is their righty-right.

Headlines the other day said that four out of ten people think British culture is undermined by multiculturalism. The first thing to say about that is: turn that figure on its head and you discover that six out of ten people don’t believe that. That already sounds more encouraging.

The survey was conducted by British Future, a independent think-tank that speaks up for equality and diversity. All power to it, then, for publishing a survey that seems, at least in part, to speak against its core beliefs.

Nine out of ten respondents to the survey either strongly agreed or tended to agree that “migrants ought to learn English, pay their taxes and respect democracy”.

Nothing wrong or surprising about that. In a sense it’s about attitude and interpretation.

If you rant and bellow and rave and believe every half-baked anti-immigration urban myth peddled by the likes of Farage, you will say those things in a shouty voice that rattles the windows.

If you say them quietly and gently, they sound more reasonable.

Sadly, right-wing ideologues usually shout the loudest to capitalise on people’s fears about the world – then wheel on the ‘others’ who are ‘to blame’.

Britain is already multicultural, although more so in some parts than others. The different elements need to mix and accept each other, and that embraces getting to know strangers and bridging the differences between us.

And in times of hostility, here to end is the title of an old song resurrected by Ry Cooder on his fine new album – “Everybody Ought To Treat A Stranger Right”.

Just as everybody ought to ignore Nigel Farage for being wrong.

ONE week to go for Bodyguard (BBC1), and I am loving the tangled web. Writer Jed Mercurio is the king spider when it comes to this sort of thing and spins the deadliest silk.

One of the great joys of immersing yourself in this made-up world of duplicitous politicians and dodgy characters scuttling through the shadows is that it’s a happy distraction from the real world of duplicitous politicians and dodgy characters scuttling through the shadows (with their shirt untucked and their hair in a tangle).

Over in that less appealing place, Boris Johnson is again on the front page of the Daily Telegraph (aka the Boris Beano) moaning about Mrs Maybe’s Brexit plan. While the prime minister herself is telling the BBC: “It’s either my Brexit deal or no deal.”

And in the Guardian, you will find the rather amazing story of five baby squirrels that had to be rescued when their tails tangled into a Gordian knot. You will be glad to hear they are said to fine now.

If you wanted an image for the intractable puzzle that is Brexit, five baby squirrels with their tails knotted together isn’t a bad place to start. It’s also, as it happens, a neat reflection of the plot of Bodyguard.

One week to go, and it’s still not easy to say what is going on. Or to know who is doing what to whom or why. Is David Budd the lone hero of the scrabbled hour; the only one in search of the truth? Or is he the king-pin baddie at the dark heart of it all, the man behind everything?

I stick to the hope that he is the bruised and bloodied hero. But the pull of this drama is that any theory can be blown away in the wind.

Last night’s episode was a quiet, nervous place compared to earlier outings. But that worked because it built the tension before next Sunday’s extended finale (75 minutes and counting).

Mostly it saw the never knowingly less than gruff Budd rushing about trying to find an answer, while all about him people said he wasn’t in a fit state to be in such a hurry.

Eventually, he was stripped of his police credentials, like a disgraced sheriff in a western; and just like that sheriff, you know he’ll keep going until the final shoot-out.

Last night I spotted something before it arrived and that was pathetically pleasing. Everyone was hunting for the Home Secretary’s missing iPad and I offered up the theory that it was behind the ‘Death Star’ photo of Julia Montague with David Cameron.

This proved to be right – punches the air in self-congratulatory manner – and was doubly pleasing as Cameron has a hidden role in our national life as the Death Star of Brexit.

The assassination of Julia Montague was shown this week not to have been caused by the briefcase, but by a bomb hidden underneath the stage in a sandwich box; or something.

Incidentally, the most common conspiracy theory among fans is that Julia Montague isn’t dead at all. I hope not as that would seem to be a rather obvious cheat but, honestly, I’ve no idea.

Another pleasing strand of plot saw the return of Chanel, the woman sacked in the first episode. She sidled up to Budd in a coffee bar and invited him out for a drink. But he photographed her getting into a sinister black Range Rover and shared the photo with his police friends (or possible enemies). Is Chanel really the public school-educated daughter of a crime syndicate? And could that be at the heart of it all, rather than various arms of the realm wrestling with each other to stop a dangerous Home Secretary?

Oh, we’ll find out next Sunday. And how good that we must wait a week rather than doing a Netflix binge (yes, guilty as charged sometimes: but waiting is so much better). And most viewers are watching as the show goes out. An old-fashion notion, but a good one.

Those Russian spies/poisoners/hapless tourists with their desire to see Salisbury Cathedral’s 123-metre spire have me wanting to pull an old paperback from the shelf in the spare room. But the Airbnb guest is still snoring, a distant rumble through the floorboards.

Google and the threadbare grain of memory will have to do instead.

The two suspects, identified as Alexandra Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, gave an interview to RT – not the Radio Times, as I momentarily misunderstood, but Russia Today.

“Our friends had been suggesting for a long time that we visit this wonderful town,” said one of the men, who identified himself as Petrov.

This absurd dialogue has been mocked by everyone from Theresa May downwards; and who can blame them, for it is almost comically ridiculous.

The height of the spire is mentioned twice, as if that’s the sort of information innocent businessmen/possible poisoners always carry around in their heads. Such precise knowledge sounds suspiciously as if it has been gleaned from Wikipedia. Heaven knows, we all do that – although not when appearing on Russian TV while trying to clear up any confusion about your apparent role in bringing a deadly nerve agent into Britain.

British police investigating the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy who passed information to the British, want to talk to the two men.

Boshirov said he and his entirely unsuspicious friend had gone to visit Salisbury Cathedral – “famous not just in Europe, but in the whole world”, he said. In case that didn’t sound convincing enough, he buttered his story further: “It’s famous for its 123-metre spire, it’s famous for its clock, the first one ever created in the world, which is still working.”

He means the first clock of its kind, but it’s easy to get confused when you are trying to explain to the whole of Russia that the dog ate your homework.

Away from the grim absurdity of this interview, all this talk of the famous spire stirred the silt of university days. That’s the trouble with having studied English literature; the dusty pages stay in your mind.

William Golding is mostly remembered for Lord Of The Flies, but he wrote many memorable novels, including The Spire. Written in 1964, The Spire is a medieval tale of one man’s obsession with adding a pinnacle to a cathedral without the necessary foundations.

Golding is thought to have based the cathedral on Salisbury, which is something those spies missed in their cut-and-paste Wikipedia dip. What has always stayed with me is the astonishingly visual language, and the fact that the narrator, Jocelin, the Dean of the cathedral, is haunted by a pain in his spine. He sees the pain as angelic inspiration or punishment, depending on the moment. And a spine is also a sort of spire hidden inside the body of a man.

The spire in Golding’s novel is never finished and speaks of instability and the possibility of disaster. The spire in Salisbury still stands – and right now it stands as the unlikeliest excuse you’ve ever heard.

Still, at least those men purporting to be Alexandra Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov have reminded me that it is time to start reading William Golding again. For that, if nothing else, I am grateful.

Ian Bone is a veteran anarchist, apparently. Here’s the thing, how can you be a veteran anarchist? People normally start that way out and end up somewhere else, hopefully with curtains and a place to put your feet up.

To be honest, I’d never heard of the man until just now. But I resent the way he’s made me feel sorry for Jacob Rees-Mogg (or Rees-Moog, as he is known round here; see wandering rants passim).

I don’t want to feel sorry for Jacob Ress-Mogg-or-Moog. The man drives me onto the rocks of a rotten mood every time he appears on the television or the radio, droning on about Brexit in that faux-reasonable way he has, like a thug with impeccable manners and a big house or two.

It was outside one of those houses, the one in London, that Bone stood with his pals from Class War. As the right-wing MP and Walter the Softy impersonator and his wife attempted to usher two of their brood inside the house, Bone shouted to the children: “Your daddy is a horrible person.”

He then said: “Lots of people don’t like your Daddy, do you know that? He probably hasn’t told you that. Lots of people hate him.”

Bone also included the family’s nanny, Veronica Crook, in his rant, when she arrived with two more of the couple’s many children, including baby son Sixtus. “Daddy doesn’t pay her very much,” he shouted. “Poor Nanny Crook who looks after you and wipes you bottom, doesn’t get enough money every week. But Daddy doesn’t care.”

There was more, but that is quite enough of Ian Bone and his tiresome tirade.

This incident set the editor of the Daily Express on a rant of his own under the headline: “HOW HAS OUR COUNTRY COME TO THIS?”

Over in the Guardian, the report says: “Sources close to the family played down the incident, suggesting the children had thought it was amusing.”

MPs from all sides came out in support of Jacob Rees-Mogg. The Labour MP Ian Lavery tweeted: “Rang Mr Rees – Mogg tonight. In terms of upbringing & politics we’re polar opposites not sure if he ever worked at the pit! but NO politicians families should ever be targeted under ANY circumstances. Politics aside this abhorrent behaviour is never ok.”

That seems fair enough, more on the button that the hand-wringing Express. Can one small incident sum up the state of the nation and all that? No, but perhaps Brexit can, and Rees-Mogg is a one-note Brexit bore trying to bully his party towards a hard, uncompromising break with the EU.

That’s why we should carry on disliking the man. For leading the so-called European Research Group (ERG), a potty pro-Brexit propaganda rabble that pretends to be something loftier.

This week, Rees-Mogg and his gang have been insisting that Britain will be a trillion pounds better off in 15 years for crashing out of the EU (didn’t Rees-Mogg earlier say that it might take 50 years to feel the benefit? Yup and double yup).

They’ve also solved the insoluble problem of the Northern Ireland border with a bit of blather about new technology and data sharing.

All that and innumerable glib assurances that everything will be sunshine and rainbows once we leave Europe.

That’s why I am annoyed with Ian Bone. I want to go on disliking Jacob Rees-Mogg-or-Moog for the very good reason that he is an impeccably polite menace to society. I want to carry on swearing at the news whenever he appears. I want to grumble: “Why do they give that ******* man so much airtime on the BBC?”

I want to do all that. But now an ageing anarchist has made me feel sorry for the dreadful man by shouting at his children. MPs’ children should always be out of bounds. Just shout at the daddy instead.

I bought a copy of my old newspaper yesterday for the traditional reason that it contained a picture of our daughter. This was a miscalculation as the picture was only used online.

I’d already read the feature on my phone, but holding the newspaper in my hand stirred the inky echoes.

Let’s not dwell on the difference, as life moves on. Now it’s a this-and-that life, or what one of my colleagues in one of my jobs yesterday referred to as a “portmanteau career”.

A new element is being added to the bag soon: a different pass to hang around my neck, a new email address to check. That’ll make three jobs, plus a spot of freelancing.

It’s another journalism lecturing gig, three hours a week until Christmas. I am properly pleased but looking at the newspaper revived memories of more stable days. Except they weren’t that steady as that guillotine was long predicted. Anyway, instability does force you to show a bit of gumption, or so I try to tell myself.

The feature in the paper was about the Japanese tearoom our daughter manages and it was a good and lively read. The photographs were fab, and therein hangs a sad story. They were taken by the last remaining photographer on that newspaper, and he has now been handed the black spot of redundancy.

I passed on advice that can be summed up as: it’s shit but you get through it. And I’m sure he will.

The feature looked good, but the old designer in me wondered why the best picture wasn’t used larger than the others. “No one cares what you think,” my wife said, and she is right (incidentally, I just mistyped that as “my wise” and perhaps she is that too).

Life is better in some ways: busy and fractured and challenging, although doing this and that for a living does see you spinning plates all the time.

WE haven’t managed a holiday this year, but that’s all right – Facebook is spending all month reminding us of the one we had last year.

Every day something pops up, a memory spun out of an algorithm. Look at the fun you were having a year ago today. We were in Australia to visit our daughter who has returned to manage that tearoom. Fabulous times were had, and now that times are less fabulous, or let’s say just tired and ordinary, Facebook is there to throw up another reminder of brighter days.

I’m not sure this is much of an advantage, but perhaps it will spur us on to have a proper holiday next year. Then Facebook can remind us about that one, too.

Most of the albums pulled from the collection are likely to be familiar to at least a few of those milling by; here’s one that probably isn’t in anyone’s collection.

Perhaps that is wrong, and I do hope so, for Billy Jenkins should be listened to by all lovers of waywardly brilliant guitarists.

The album has a ‘review copy’ sticker on the front and it was delivered by hand to the house in Lewisham where I rented a room. Jenkins later expanded this into a series, but here is the 1986 original: six tracks from the man John Fordham of the Guardian called “South London’s free-jazz catalyst”.

I first came across Billy when he played in Trimmer and Jenkins, a duo who described themselves as possibly being “alternative musical comedy”. Behind the larks and the inspired silliness, there was a solid core of music; and as Billy moved on, he concentrated more on the music, although the jokes never went away.

At around the time we met, Billy ran Wood Wharf Studios in Greenwich. In 1984, his uncle, David Jenkins, was consecrated as Archbishop of Durham. Uncle David triggered accusations of blasphemy when he compared the resurrection to a “conjuring trick with bones” – comments said to have been widely misquoted.

Two nights after he was consecrated at York Minster lightning struck and the cathedral suffered a devastating fire: some blamed the arrival of Billy’s uncle.

Billy had been making music for a few years by then, releasing albums including Sounds Like Bromley, with the Voice of God Collective.

Apologies for the preamble, but you always get a degree of incidental detail with Billy Jenkins. What you also get is a man who seems chaotic but knows exactly what he wants to do.

Billy was reviewed by the serious music press. Richard Williams said in The Times of this album: “An impressive example of a man in absolute command of his materials. Vibrant in a way that often recalls the spirit of the late Charles Mingus, Uncommerciality is an accomplished and sometimes provocative piece of work.”

Also writing in The Times, John Bungey described the expanded series as “a landmark in warped jazz pleasure”.

The six tracks begin with Brilliant and the music is full of barely controlled energy, breathless, reckless guitar solos and great honking sax from Iain Bellamy and Dai Pritchard, with drumming from Roy Dodds. It all sounds as crazily vibrant now as when first heard all those years ago when Billy rode round to drop off this copy. In fact, I reckon this album is better than I recall, and finding it in the vinyl vault known as the wardrobe in the spare room has been an absolute pleasure.

All these years later, it deserves to be heard again. As for Billy, he is 62 (aren’t we all) and still around on the fringes

FAKE news is a thing much muttered or even shouted about. Let me now introduce you to flake news.

Yesterday the news flaked. Or maybe it was the day before that. Or the headline-battered week before that. Whenever it happened, yesterday was the day I noticed all the flakes falling off the headlines, leaving a mess like that created when the cat scratches the rattan basket where we keep newspapers. On reflection, maybe the cat is just trying to get at those headlines.

Almost every day the news is filled with whatever stupid thing one of the usual suspects just said. “People saying stupid things” seems to be the prime generator of headlines. Donald Trump says something stupid and the journalists scurry to report the stupid thing he said, did or tweeted; Boris Johnson says something stupid and the journalist scurry to report the stupid thing he said, did or wrote in a column.

In doing this, we pay unending homage to attention junkies afloat on a sea of self-made stupidity. Trump with his tweets; Johnson with his ‘me-me-me’ interventions in political life. And the newspapers and the TV stations, the websites and the bloggers – we all oblige them by reporting the stupid thing and then commenting on it or following up what was said about the stupid thing.

“Stupid man says stupid thing,” becomes the headline of the day, until a fresh stupid thing supplants the first stupid thing.

Yesterday this seemed to a new nadir after Boris Johnson had used a lively but unwise metaphor to describe Mrs Maybe’s handling of the Brexit negotiations.

In a column for one of the Sunday newspapers, he wrote that the prime minister had “wrapped a suicide vest around the British constitution” and handed the detonator to the EU.

Far too much was made of this, with the whole day’s news being filled with Johnson and his suicide vest. And when I put it like that, I don’t mean that he was wearing it, more’s the pity. Perhaps it is a string vest that he wears. Maybe we could ask some of the many women he has had affairs with, as they might be better informed.

Johnson and Trump at brilliant at deflection and causing a distraction, with Johnson’s efforts arising just as news of his divorce hit the headlines. The logic seems to be that when one fire starts burning, you start another.

My favourite reaction to Johnson’s stupid metaphor came from Paddy O’Connell on Broadcasting House. This BBC radio 4 magazine offers a sane place to consider the news, mixing serious reporting with the enjoyable slap of the smart-aleck. After reading out the latest stupid thing Johnson had said about handing the detonator to the EU, Paddy guffawed and said that Boris didn’t seem to know how suicide vests worked.

That seemed to be the best comment of the lot. All that needed to be said, although, sadly, an awful lot more was said.

JOURNALISTS can be a touchy lot when their trade is put on television. Mike Bartlett’s new drama Press (BBC1, Thursday) drew plenty of comment on Twitter, some enthusiastic, some scathing.

Ninety minutes after it had ended, more than 3,600 tweets about the drama had been sent, according to the Press Gazette website.

Bartlett wrote Doctor Foster, and perhaps that series got under the collars of doctors called Foster. For reasons lost to time and too many television dramas, I gave up on that one.

TV dramas often get journalists wrong. The male reporters are caricatured gnarled hacks without a moral atom beneath their shabby raincoats; and the women are immoral tarts in tight dresses who’ll sleep with anyone for a story.

Often the job isn’t portrayed right at all; and those mock front pages are habitually awful, looking as if they’ve been designed by someone who squinted at a newspaper once on a dull day.

Skimming off the top of my head and Google – that modern adjunct to the brain – here is a list of some that hit the target.

The BBC drama the Field of Blood, based on the crime novels by Denise Mina, had the authentic smell of Glasgow ink.

Stephen Spielberg’s historical political thriller The Post began slowly but built to a racy climax. It retold the story of how The Washington Post fought to publish the Pentagon Papers, classified documents about America’s involvement in the Vietnam War.

The footage of the presses finally rolling is truly stirring – or it was to this ageing journalist. The rumble of the press and the flashing sheets of taut inked paper is an uplifting sight, even if what is printed on those sheets might not always match that excitement.

And no short list is complete without All The President’s Men, the 1976 political thriller about the Watergate Scandal; great story, great film.

Still, dramas about newspapers are aimed not at journalists but at ordinary people. Seen through that lens, Press wasn’t all that bad. The premise is slightly forced: journalism as seen through the interaction of two rival newspapers. The Post is a brash tabloid amalgam of the Sun and the Daily Mirror, while The Herald is The Guardian more or less.

Ben Chaplin has great fun as tabloid editor Duncan Allen, while most of the upmarket action is given to deputy news editor Holly Evans (Charlotte Riley, out of Peaky Blinders). Holly is hardworking, unsmiling and kind of dull – but she does carry an important bit of plot that I won’t mention.

The upmarket editor, Amina Chaudury (Priyanga Burford), wasn’t much of a role in the first episode, and seemed curiously without swagger or charm – leaving all the best lines to the tabloid devil, as it were.

The first episode was titled Death Knock, which is what journalists call having to turn up uninvited on the doorstep to interview relatives of someone who has just died. Press captured that awful task well, showing the pressure it puts on the reporter, and touching on the morality of getting a story. And Bartlett also addresses one of those newspaper mysteries: why are grieving people even prepared to talk to journalists at all?

At one point, Holly Evans was shown writing a story about a police car knocking over and killing a young woman. Her intro was pored over by journalists with nothing better to do. And, yes, that was one dull story in need of a sharp rewrite.

Other Twitter bombs addressed the morality of the death knock reporter – with some worrying that Press will given viewers an even dimmer view of newspapers.

Press gets three stars out of five from this journo, but there was enough there for me to want to return. It’s not up to Bodyguard, the Sunday thriller from Jed Mercurio, but it’s better than Wanderlust, the relationships/sex drama – good acting in that, but those dramatic pauses went on for so long, I thought the TV box had frozen.