News journalism, as has been noted in these writings hitherto, has oft been under-represented in television dramas.
While once in a situation under which I had temporarily lost my liberty for a period nominated by an official of the court, I had time to make a very careful study of the phenomenon.
That study discovered newsrooms feature as a site of action in just 0.13% of all television dramas.
Hospitals feature in 99%, and other workplaces in the other 0.87%.
Field of Blood: The Dead Hour does a good job of adding to the 0.13%.
The two-part series begins on Thursday evening on Vibe, which occasionally throws up some good stuff.
The show is based on the novels of Scottish crime writer Denise Mina, whose work has been described by someone witty as ''tartan noir''.
The Dead Hour is the second of three written featuring the character Patricia ''Paddy'' Meehan.
Paddy is clearly a fictional character.
For a start she is young, female and attractive, and portrayed in the show as a police reporter.
That is clearly miles from reality, as the police round in real life is peopled by the most loathsomely unpleasant, malodorous, lecherous and wretched men one is likely to meet in a month of unpleasant Sundays.
But this is television, and reality can be forgotten.
The Dead Hour is a BBC Scotland (I thought the BBC had moved to Wales) drama, set in the 1980s, with Margaret Thatcher waging war on mining unions and the Clash playing on the radio.
Paddy spends her time sitting in a cold car listening to the police scanner and chasing stories.
She and a colleague turn up at what the coppers tell them is a case of domestic violence.
But later, the victim in question, a lawyer, turns up dead.
Then another lawyer turns up dead a couple of days later.
But that's not all.
Just as we are taking in this fatal turn of events, who should turn up but Becky McDonald (Katherine Kelly) from Coronation Street.
Becky McDonald!
But in The Dead Hour she is not the hard-bitten little minx from Weatherfield, but the new editor-in-chief of the Daily News that Paddy works for.
And she turns up with an Armani trouser-suit and a greed-is-good '80s attitude, to boot.
Poor Paddy is left to solve crimes, save the striking miners, take down Thatcher, vanquish laissez-faire economic policies and neo-liberalism, discover Madonna and Michael Jackson, join the Clash, and make early '80s post-punk acceptable.
Can she do all that?
Seriously though folks, The Dead Hour is pretty good, amusingly retro and very well acted.
Rock the Casbah.
- Charles Loughrey
