Emmys Watch: Abi Morgan on \'The Hour\' and How \'West Wing\' Saved Her

September 17, 2012, 12:24 pm

By KATHRYN SHATTUCK

We will be talking to Emmy nominees leading to the awards show on Sunday night. Previous entries in this series include Don Roy King, director of “Saturday Night Live.”

The Emmy Awards

More coverage of the 64th Primetime Emmy Awards, including reports, reviews, interviews with nominees and more.

Queen Elizabeth II had her annus horribilis. 2012 might well be the screenwriter Abi Morgan's annus mirabilis.

Not only did she write three of the previous year's most talked about films and series, but she also spent the first few months of this year watching the awards flow in both for their stars and herself. Meryl Streep took home her third Oscar, for her portrayal of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in “The Iron Lady.” “Shame” earned Michael Fassbender Bafta and Golden Globe nominations for his role as a sex addict in New York. And Ms. Morgan is in the running for an Emmy Award for outstanding writing for a mini-series for “The Hour,” the BBC America series about murder and romance in a BBC newsroom in the midst of the Suez Canal crisis in the 1950s. A second season is scheduled to begin in November.

In a recent phone interview from London, Ms. Morgan, 44, spoke with Kathryn Shattuck about the inspiration for “The Hour,” her love of American television and how “The West Wing” helped with motherhood. Following are excerpts from their conversation.

You've had quite a year.

It has been a phenomenal year. There was a lot of juggling. I was very lucky because with both “Shame” and “The Iron Lady,â € most of my work was done by the time I'd started writing “The Hour,” but I had to run a lot of publicity at the same time. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth. I drank a lot of coffee and ate a lot of cakes in the last year to keep myself going.

How'd you learn about your Emmy nomination?

I had a congratulations text from Kevin Cooper, my American agent, but I wasn't really sure what I was being congratulated for. I had to do a bit of Internet investigation to find out exactly what I'd done.

What was your reaction?

You know, writers are quite myopic. I spend most of my life in my pajamas in front of my computer, so it's always nice when the light comes in through the window, and you think, “Wow.” And I'm a huge fan of American television, so just to stand in the same room as Matthew Weiner and Steven Levitan is terrific.

What do you watch?

“The Newsroom,” “Modern Family,” “Boardwalk Empire,” “Mad Men,” jus t started watching “Girls” and I really love it, “Breaking Bad,” “Homeland,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” I'm a huge fan of “The West Wing.” I've got two children now who are 8 and 10, and I think my marriage and bringing up children has basically survived around boxed sets of American television. “The West Wing” got me through having babies.

How was it writing your first long-running series?

It was wonderful and relentless. The shock for me is that I'm used to doing self-contained narrative work where you get to know characters for a time and then you let them go. The revelation with series is that it eats up story and your characters stay with you, and that's very exciting because you can really see the progression of a character through a life. But it's a bit of a beast. I have huge admiration now for anybody who sustains beyond a first season.

Why did you center “The Hour” on the Suez crisis?

I think it marks a sort of s eismic change in Britain at the time. We'd just come out of the austerity of the Second World War. And we were really facing the next new challenge, and that was the taking over of the Suez Canal by President Nasser. And also I loved the fact that it was kind of the end of colonialism. So there were a lot of interesting thematic choices. And secondly, what was interesting was the way it really affected and changed fundamentally how we presented news. It was the first time that government actually took on the BBC, and in turn the BBC took on the government and said, “You know what, if we're going to present this story then we have to be impartial.”

Where did you find your characters?

When I looked at the BBC at that time, there was just an amazing pool of characters, and only a handful of women, like Grace Wyndham Goldie, who was an inspirational female producer at the time. So I think she was the early genesis for Bel Rowley, although fundamentally she's a very different character. But I also wanted to write beautiful Hollywood romantic couplings, like Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, and Bogart and Bacall. And for me, “The Hour” has a slightly heightened form, and the characters came out of that. So you have Freddie Lyon, who's this sort of working-class maverick within the BBC, then you have this matinee idol Hector Madden who comes from the kind of upper classes, and that allowed me to explore another theme that I feel is very important in “The Hour” and very true to Britain, which is the notion of class, and how class worked at that time.

Do you find yourself glued to the facts?

I always think that history is really important to inspire me but ultimately I'm a writer of fiction.

What do you think of the recent corruption charges in British journalism?

I have huge respects for journalists. I think it's a much-maligned profession. We know that level of corruption has been endemic in a certain area and among certain journalists, not only in the U.K. but I suspect globally. But I still believe in the pioneering investigative good journalists. And I read a lot of newspapers and I read the good journalists and I sort of see them as heroes.

I heard you originally wanted to be an actor rather than a writer?

It wasn't so much I wanted it. My family were actors, and I got my first job inadvertently, but I was pretty terrible and it was pretty apparent to everybody. It was just like if your dad is an electrician, you know how to change a plug. The difference is, I didn't know how to change a plug.