For some people it is the offer of a gong. For others, it is a seat in the House of Lords. But surely there is no greater or rarer honour in public life than to be played by Toby Jones.
Look what it did for Alan Bates, who for years had toiled away for untold years on behalf of the thousands of innocent postmasters, with barely anyone paying attention.
And then—the Toby effect! Within weeks of Britain’s leading character actor portraying him on the small screen Bates was victorious. The government caved in, announcing they would clear all the hapless postmasters, Mr Bates became Sir Alan Bates, and he duly got married on Richard Branson’s private Caribbean island. Result.
So you can imagine the thrill some months ago when it was whispered to me that Toby Jones might graciously consent to play yours truly in an ITV drama about the phone hacking saga made by the very same team which had made Mr Bates vs the Post Office.
I had known about the drama for some time and, as was only natural, had idly wondered who might be cast as the editor of the Guardian. Jason Robards is probably the most iconic newspaper editor in film, as the cigar-chomping hero (Ben Bradlee of the Washington Post) who brought down a president. Handsome, silver-haired, craggy, chiselled, lived-in features. That’s what a proper movie editor should be. A face to launch a thousand writs.
Who might be a modern equivalent? Could it be Daniel Craig growling commands to the quaking Guardian reporters arraigned in front of him? Chiwetel Ejiofor booming instructions to STOP THE DAMN PRESSES? Maybe, in a daring piece of gender-blind casting, Tilda Swinton?
I confess such thoughts flickered through my mind, and I am not proud to admit it. But then it never occurred to me that Toby Jones—who by then was so famous he couldn’t walk down the Stockwell Road without people begging him to take up their personal crusades for justice—would deign to play me.
Allow me to let you into a secret. In most newspaper offices, most of the time, the editor doesn’t prowl the floor in a green eyeshade and braces bellowing at cowering underlings. Most of the time these days there is a library hush. Reporters stare intently into the infinite blue light of their computer screens. There is a mild clickety-click of keyboards and the sipping of flat whites. Shakespeare himself would have struggled.
This has caused a bit of tension in the process of creating this particular drama. The team behind the series has occasionally felt the need to insert a little, um, strain between David Tennant (playing the real hero of the phone hacking saga, Guardian reporter Nick Davies) and me.
“But that didn’t happen,” Nick would protest. “There was never a cross word between us.” And the production team would sigh and explain to Nick that drama has to be just a little bit—what’s the word?—dramatic.
Now I don’t know if Toby has had any aspirations to play King Lear at some point in his career, but the part of Alan Rusbridger is about as far from the raging old mad man on the heath as it is possible to get. Unless you count the role of Dobby the House Elf, played with some distinction by Toby in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
The only other time I have been represented on celluloid was by Peter Capaldi, variously remembered as a controversial Dr Who or as the foul-mouthed Malcolm Tucker in The Thick of It. Disappointingly, his research for the part (as he later told me) consisted of watching a few clips on YouTube.
Toby was more thorough, insisting on coming into the Prospect office and quietly observing me taking an editorial conference.
I half expected him to quit the role the next day. Maybe he saw it as a challenge. If you can do Truman Capote, Alfred Hitchcock, Karl Rove, Alan Bates and Dobby the House Elf, then maybe playing a very softly-spoken counter-stereotype of a newspaper editor is the ultimate challenge.
This is a man, after all, who once played a town sheriff in a western despite being, well, a bit thinning on top and by no means a towering figure, no matter how high his cowboy heels. Not quite Gary Cooper or John Wayne, you might think.
“Doesn’t it strike you as obvious casting?” he teased an Independent interviewer. “The point is, in Hollywood, if you can act, you can act. The actor's contract is that, if the audience sees a sheriff, then you are a sheriff."
If the audience sees an editor, then he’s an editor.
When people think of the Watergate scandal today they think Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman more than they think Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They may come away with the impression that journalism is about fearless crusading. Hold the front page while I go to meet Deep Throat in an underground car park and tell my wife I always loved her if I don’t make it back. All crammed into two hours and 18 minutes.
That’s the running time of All the President’s Men, and brilliant it is, too. In fact, the Watergate break-in (into the Democratic National Committee headquarters) happened on 17th June 1972 and Richard Nixon didn’t resign as president until 8th August, 1974. That’s two years of making calls; of short incremental stories at the bottom of page eight; of numerous dead ends and false leads; of late-night arguments with tired lawyers; of yet more cul-de-sacs. Dull stuff, most of the time, but in the hands of William Goldman a gripping screenplay full of meaning and—yes—drama.
The dog end of the Callaghan government was dismal history until playwright James Graham got hold of it. The scandal of sixties housing in Britain needed Cathy Come Home to make people sit up and notice. Great writers made us see the HIV/Aids epidemic differently; to be angry about Hillsborough; to be furious about the hopeless of northern unemployment in the early 80s; to finally care about the full extent of the scandal of abuse in the Catholic Church.
Journalism started all these stories, but it took great dramatists to wake us up.
Nick Davies is an astoundingly courageous journalist; Jack Thorne is an outstanding dramatist. Now all this long-running scandal needs is the Toby effect. I shall modestly bask in his glory.
