New season

Two new "original British dramas" are scheduled to start on BBC1 in the first week of September.

The blurb for "Press" starts thus: "London, present day. The Herald, a left-leaning broadsheet struggling to adapt to the age of digital news, and The Post, a thriving populist tabloid, occupy buildings in the same square." The trouble is that the script, by Mike "Dr Foster" Bartlett, was written in 2015, when it was commissioned by Polly Hill, now with ITV. 

Say the left-leaning paper struggling to adapt to the digital age was modelled on The Guardian, it went tabloid in January. And whilst the Sun might be thriving, print circulation has fallen by 325,000 copies a day since 2015.

The same week, BBC1 viewers are being softened up for explicit, if embarassing, sex scenes, in Nick Payne's "Wanderlust", a development of his 2010 Royal Court Theatre Upstairs drama of the same title. Exotically filmed in and around Bury in the winter of 2017, it features Australian actress Toni Collette as a therapist trying to re-light the fire in her marriage, while her children follow their own routes of sexploration. One wonders if the version to be released on Netflix around the world is perhaps even more explicit. Another Polly Hill commission.