Taking on the Tabloids - review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/nov/28/taking-on-the-tabloids-review

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Actors are often uneasy when asked to be themselves in public and it was noticeable that Hugh Grant, fronting Taking on the Tabloids, a documentary rushed into the schedules on the eve of the Leveson report, rapidly gave himself a character to play – a plucky guy called David.

"We're David taking on a terrifying Goliath," Grant declared, referring to the Hacked Off campaign that he heads with the Lib Dem former MP, Evan Harris, with the aim of promoting legislation against press misbehaviour.

As portrayed for an hour on Channel 4 last night, "David" is a 52-year-old former heart-throb actor who, though rumoured to be due to appear in the third Bridget Jones movie next year, has recently cut back on acting and taken to appearing as an anti-tabloid pundit on Newsnight and now in this documentary. David isn't quite as handsome as the movie-star Hugh Grant because he eschews make-up, dark half-moons of fatigue visible beneath his eyes in many of the scenes.

Taking on the Tabloids was unusual among TV shows in incorporating a bad review from the Daily Mail within the body of the programme. During filming, the actor reads in that newspaper a report in which an MP argues that the Channel 4 documentary should be reported to the regulator Ofcom for breaching rules of broadcasting impartiality because Grant's views are so well-known.

"I'd like to make a balanced film," he pleaded to camera, "but we keep getting refusals from the other side."

This unwillingness of Goliath to engage with David – which would surely have made the story less famous if it had happened in the Bible version – left the film feeling short of material.

The presenter was shown talking on the phone to Paul Dacre's secretary, failing to persuade the Daily Mail editor to be interviewed. In another sequence, he stood in his London home watching TV news reporting Sven Goran Erikkson's decision to sue the Daily Mirror for alleged phone-hacking.

Boris Johnson, £250,000-a-year Daily Telegraph columnist and defender of an unfettered press, also refused to be interviewed, a tactic Grant countered by agreeing to appear as a fellow-panellist with Bojo on the ITV1 talk-show The Agenda. The actor's visible nervousness before the recording was surprising and will have won him some sympathy, although not from his opponents in the newspaper world.

In the hospitality room after The Agenda, Grant's film crew ambushed Johnson – a presumably non-ironic use of the notorious tabloid tactic of doorstepping – but the mayor of London showed the gap between the media skills of a seasoned politician and an actor-activist by smoothly out-manoeuvering his challenger. Seeing that the camera was on. Johnson smoothly slid his own glass of champagne out of shot while Grant continued to guzzle the fizz. "Look, folks," said Bojo directly down the lens, beginning a homily on why the media needed to be free.

The majority of witnesses who willingly appeared were already sympathetic to Grant's views: including the parents of a dead girl whose life was misrepresented by the Scottish press and Chris Jefferies, who was falsely identified by many UK media outlets as the murderer of the Bristol architect Jo Yeates. Nobody could argue with their experience but the piece was persistently weakened by the reluctance of the other side to argue with Grant.

The actor's enemies in the press will like to present this project as the most boring movie of Hugh Grant's career. In reality, that would be difficult to achieve – as his credits include the 2007 rom-com Music and Lyrics – and the truth is that he played the role of David efficiently and interestingly. Grant's problem is, as the film seemed to become ever more gloomily aware as it continued, that whatever Leveson says, the prime minister seems likely to side with Goliath.