LA: The doors to the El Paradis night club swing open, and it is like stepping back in time almost 60 years.This is Fifties-style Soho sleaze — dark corners, swirling clouds of cigarette smoke, the cloying smell of cheap perfume, overpriced champagne, under-dressed showgirls and male customers with a guilty giveaway look that tells you they haven’t told their wives where they are.
The girls are singing an Alma Cogan hit song of the moment, Never Do A Tango With An Eskimo, but nobody’s really listening. The men are looking at the girls, wondering how much they will charge for the night, and the girls are looking at the customers, wondering how much they can sting them for.
The scene is set for Big Trouble. ‘The first rule of temptation is to yield to it — it’s much more fun that way,’ drools a sozzled customer.
A famous TV news presenter sitting in the shadows is smitten by one of the showgirls, Kiki Delaine. She is blonde and beguiling, and will later slip away to bed with him, with disastrous consequences for her, his career and, inevitably, his marriage.
This is how the second series of BBC2’s hit drama The Hour returned to our screens this week. I was one of the few outsiders allowed on to the set during filming. And although I’m sworn to keep secret the unfolding story, I can report that there are a lot of surprises in store over the coming weeks, particularly for newsman Hector Madden, played so suavely by Dominic West.
The El Paradis has been specially built in the magnificent art deco Hornsey Town Hall, North London, where most of the series is shot. ‘But the reality is that the champagne and caviar style is only for the cameras,’ says ex-Hollyoaks actress Hannah Tointon, who plays Kiki. ‘All we really get are sandwiches and mugs of tea!’.
Hannah, 24, is the younger sister of former EastEnders actress Kara Tointon, who won Strictly Come Dancing in 2010. She says that in tackling the role of Kiki, she based much of her look and behaviour on Marilyn Monroe.
‘I watched several of her movies, and studied Fifties photographs of her when she was the world’s greatest sex symbol,’ she explains.
‘As soon as I read the script, I wanted Kiki to have some of Marilyn’s innocence and vulnerability, but she also uses her sexuality to get what she wants. Although I hope I’m not like that at all.
‘I was also given some weird pants to wear that basically fill a girl out and give her sexy hips. Apparently, Michelle Williams used them when she played Monroe in My Week With Marilyn.
‘My dark hair was dyed blonde and to get a swinging wiggle, I’ve been practising my walk at home. It’s quite a skill actually swinging the hips. My boyfriend thinks I’m quite mad!
‘Kiki is caught up in this horrible world,’ adds Hannah. ‘She doesn’t have any family and she comes from a poor background. Although she works at the club as a showgirl, she is basically a hooker. Part of her job is to mingle with the men at the club, make them spend lots of money, sleep with them and keep them happy.
‘She thinks she is rather amazing and she’s loving the spotlight. She naively dreams of becoming a star one day, and I think in her head she wants to be like Marilyn Monroe.
‘But she doesn’t have the class, so I play a bit of a Primark version of Monroe.
‘At first Kiki loved the performing, the showbizzy side and all these famous men coming to the club which she thought was glamorous. She’s got their attention, but she doesn’t like having to sleep with them — all the horrible bits behind it all. In many ways, she is trapped.
‘Then it all starts to fall apart and she looks for a way of getting out of it once she’s got her mink coat!’
This is Hannah’s biggest role since she was in the sitcom The Inbetweeners, where she met her boyfriend, actor and writer Joe Thomas, who played Simon, one of the four teenage boys who were the main characters. In The Hour, the chain of circumstances set off by Kiki’s night of passion with Hector Madden will involve all the main characters and storylines throughout this series.
El Paradis is a private members’ club, where call girls work as waitresses — a sleazy pick-up joint frequented by powerful men in smart suits, celebrities, and East End gangsters.
What they don’t realise is that the owner, Raphael Cilenti (Vincent Riotta) is collecting information about his customers to use against them when he needs to. At the same time, a police inspector is looking for any excuse to close it down.
The first episode ends with Kiki, who’s been beaten up, about to go to the police and the newspapers, accusing Hector of being responsible. In fact, the attack was arranged by Cilenti as his vicious way of reminding her that she is his possession.
But the unwelcome publicity is disastrous for Hector, who finds himself not only in trouble at The Hour, which is the name of the news programme he presents, but also with his wife Marnie (Oona Chaplin), who decides she has had enough of him.
His problems give secret pleasure to maverick reporter and rival Freddie Lynn (Ben Whishaw), who’s returned from a spell in the U.S. and been swiftly promoted to the position of co-presenter by the newly appointed head of news, Randall Brown, played by Peter Capaldi (The Thick Of It). He’s doing his best to undermine the programme’s producer, Bel Rowley (Romola Garai.)
Whishaw, most recently seen as gadget master Q in the new James Bond film Skyfall, confided to me during a break in filming that he would have made a hopeless real-life journalist.
‘In the first series, there was a shot when some men were coming out of the House Of Lords and I’d been waiting to interview them. I didn’t have a script, and when it came to it, I couldn’t think of a single question to ask them. I kind of just crumbled.
‘The director told me not to give up the day job!’
As The Hour — which is written by Abi Morgan, who also wrote Meryl Streep’s Oscar-winning film The Iron Lady — is meant to portray life in a BBC newsroom, the shenanigans and skulduggery could hardly have come at a more embarrassing time, what with all the current scandal and controversy.
But no one’s making comparisons on The Hour. Instead, the watchword is authenticity of detail rather than action.
The BBC’s old studios in London’s Lime Grove have been painstakingly recreated, complete with dark wood panelling and green walls, at Hornsey Town Hall. Fifties’ props include a vintage Teasmade, and even the cameras from that era are being used.
To get a sense of the time and the mannerisms, Dominic West has spent hours studying old footage of the clipped tones and style of the presenters of that era who became the first TV household celebrity names.
Meanwhile, as I watch the crew preparing the set for another scene, Hannah Tointon wiggles towards me. ‘I’m rather enjoying being a mini-Marilyn for a few weeks,’ she giggles.
She broke into showbusiness at the age of 12 when she appeared in the musical Whistle Down The Wind, playing a tomboy, and later went on to do a year in Hollyoaks. This was followed by the film The Children and some episodes of Murder City.
She never trained as an actress, but she did take dancing lessons. ‘It’s strange because Kara, my sister, always went along for auditions, but I was the shy one in our family,’ says Hannah.
‘I was probably influenced by her, although acting was always a hobby for me, because I’ve always loved art and went to art college.’
Is there any rivalry between them? ‘People are always asking us that, but we’ve only ever competed at the same audition once, and neither of us got the part, so that was all right! We’ve both been so lucky.’
They did work together once on TV’s Dream Team, when they were younger. ‘Kara looked so lovely, like the Queen of Sheba, and then to make me look different they scraped all my hair back and created a horrible style, and I just looked hideous,’ she says, laughing. ‘But at least I get to be glamorous now.’
The Hour is on BBC2 on Wednesdays at 9pm. # Source: The Daily Mail
