Eleanor Matsuura

The Red Top preview

It's 75-minutes of pure entertainment and pure escape, and if nothing else, watching Maxine Peake, Russell Tovey, Eleanor Matsuura, Johnny Vegas, Alexei Sayle, Harry Enfield, James Buckley, John Sessions, Stephen Mangan and Peter Richardson share the screen is a real joy.

Written by Guy Jenkin (co-writer of Drop the Dead Donkey and Outnumbered), Hacks is a satirical comedy about the phone hacking scandal.

This comedy wasn't as funny as it could have been for one simple reason: what happened in real life was much funnier and shocking than what happened in this programme. I know this to be true personally. During the actual phone hacking scandal I thought, "There's no way that this can get any weirder." Then I found out that one of my old university lecturers had been arrested on suspicion of phone hacking and, well, you get the point.

The thing with the phone hacking scandal is that it's so ridiculous and stupid that i''s almost impossible to think how you can make it even funnier than it really was. For me, the funniest thing in the whole show was this world's version of an enquiry in which the Murdoch-esque owner (played by Michael Kitchen) was attacked with silly string and then the attacker was nearly beaten to death by his owner's wife (Eleanor Matsuura).

When Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton satirised media values in their Nineties sitcom Drop The Dead Donkey they produced a perceptive but gentle chiding of failing newsroom standards and most journalists loved it. They won't have found Hacks so funny.

The phone-hacking scandal is no media industry in-joke but an already much-publicised story of shameful events that the audience will have instantly recognised.

It was snappily written but it seems almost futile to try to exaggerate for comic effect the extreme methods that we know were actually employed at the News of the World. So when we saw Tabby, the pearl-wearing royal correspondent for the Sunday Comet, tasked with hacking the phone calls of the "Ginger Prince" we well knew the dapper Clive Goodman - her real life equivalent at the News of the World - was up to so much more.

Channel 4 ran the inevitable disclaimer: "The characters and events in this film are entirely fictitious." That may not have satisfied ex-staffers at the News of the World. Former showbiz editor Rav Singh and former investigations editor Mazher "The Fake Sheikh" Mahmood (neither of whom have been accused of criminal activity) can't have been impressed at the portrayal of the Sunday Comet's most scurrilous reporter Rav Musharraf (Kayvan Novak), who is shown trying to blag documents in the voices of Desmond Tutu, Sean Connery and Prince Philip ("just fax me the bleeding bank statement you imbecile").

Novak's was one of many slick performances. Claire Foy was scary as a ruthless editor with some of the ambitious traits of Rebekah Brooks. Michael Kitchen deftly played Stanhope Feast, a media baron with an Australian accent, a fruity vocabulary and a feisty young Oriental wife with a talent for close combat, Ho Chi Mao Feast (Eleanor Matsuura).

Hackgate has been such a gripping and multi-dimensional story that the hour-long drama rattled along at the pace of a good Sunday tabloid. And with the Leveson inquiry still unfolding, much of the material felt hot off the press. Scotland Yard should have squirmed at Russ Abbot's portrayal of a top cop and politicians were expertly lampooned for their obsequiousness towards the media.

But the Channel 4 audience, amused as it might have been by this all-too-real tale of tabloid excess, will have been left with little sense of the value of journalism. The role of other newspapers in exposing hacking was skipped over, leaving Ray (Phil Davis), a veteran reporter with an aversion to the dark arts, to represent Fleet Street's conscience.

Rupert Murdoch's influence on British media culture was mercilessly satirised. Hacks ended with an abandoned Stanhope Feast, hopping mad on his skyscraper helipad as the pages of his dead newspaper blew away in the wind. But the real life mogul is still worth more than $7bn and his News Corp empire generates $33bn a year in revenues, so that part at least was indeed entirely fictitious.

The phone-hacking comedy Hacks might have been the first entry in a new genre: the reverse satire.

Written and directed by Guy Jenkin, the co-creator of Drop the Dead Donkey and Outnumbered, it took a swipe at a real-life farce that has aroused intense public ire - the parade of newspaper executives explaining that they never asked where the stories on their front pages came from - and turned culpability into one big joke.

Its characters included an Antipodean media magnate (Stanhope Feast, played by Michael Kitchen) with a much younger wife called Ho Chi Mao (Eleanor Matsuura), plus a tabloid editor, Kate Loy (Claire Foy), who was aware of the nefarious means used to extract celebrity pay dirt, and oblivious to its human cost and cruelty.

Except she wasn't oblivious - the voices of phone-hacking victims were keeping her awake at night - and Foy, promising actor though she is, has something about her that suggests warmth and vulnerability.

This put Hacks in the indelicate position of making its targets sympathetic. Kitchen's character even got all the best lines. Now where's the fun in that?