On the box: The Hour | Regional TV: Life Through A Local Lens

Alas, this is grown-up entertainment about the 1950s TV news revolution. It's got good performances from Dominic West and Romola Garai and a great one from Ben Whishaw.

The attention to detail is nifty (freeze the action for the photo of Walter Winchell above Whishaw's desk) and the scene where money changes hands between journos and police is simply too delicious at this moment in history. So, yes, The Hour is surviving the chronic absence of any connection with The Hour.

But is it the British Mad Men? Well, the first time we see Garai's Bel Rowley she's sashaying down an office corridor in a tight skirt much like Joan Harris in all the outstanding episodes of Matthew Weiner's ad man saga.

Rowley immediately confronts sexism – very Mad Men – and there's the same sense of social revolution in the air with young thrusters in a hurry for change.

The youngest and thrustiest is Freddie Lyon, increasingly bored by newsreels, deference, the old guard, debutantes, having to report on debs' frilliness and fatuousness – oh, and he's also frustrated by Rowley, and how she seems to prefer orchid-bearing bankers to him.

Whishaw makes Freddie one third genius, one third loony, one third dysfunctional and one third chippy (you know what I mean). When a smoothie in a sharp suit gets the job he craved – presenter of a new BBC current affairs programme – Lyon snorts: "What is he, Oxford-educated?"

Eton, actually. West went to David Cameron's school and, as Hector Madden, turns up here with all the social graces and all the right connections.

Is he The Hour's brilliantined bastard in the style of Don Draper? Well, he fancies Rowley, too, even though there's a glamorous wife at home but, unlike Draper, Madden is a himbo. A promising start, then, if not quite as engrossing as Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, the last great TV-show-within-a-show.

Down at Television Centre in The Hour, someone mentions the importance of "the regions" but Lyon is unimpressed.

So much so that I'm sure he would have chortled, 35 years later, at the news spoof On The Hour whenever it went to the local headlines opt-out ("A cardboard box blew along Main Street today...").

But Regional TV: Life Through A Local Lens celebrated the big-fish-small-pond stars of the silly season voxpop, the weathergirl-handover-flirtation and fearless inquiries such as: "Mr Clayton, you're planning to bring the twist to Carlisle – why?"

A few of the fish made it to big ponds, including Michael Parkinson, seen being painted with the old Granada logo during a report from a tattoo parlour. Some of the regional output was plain daft but there were Emmy wins too.

Then, when the ITV companies swallowed each other up, this distinct local colour started to disappear from our screens.

What a shame. The final shot in this sweet tribute was Derek (Mr And Mrs) Batey, potentate of Border TV, ambling down a cobbled street in the company of an accordionist playing Edelweiss to the butcher, the baker et al.

If Parky once had a Granada tattoo you've got to wonder whether Jim Eastwood has Lord Sugar inked on his chest, such is his devotion to The Apprentice overlord, and whether his home is a shrine of posters and plastic models, of the kind discovered by Alan Partridge when he was kidnapped by his most obsessed fans.

The hilarious highlight of a still addictive series was the bold Jim dropping the Lord to address his idol as "Sugar". But in the end the right man won.

THE HOUR

BBC2 Tuesday, 9pm

REGIONAL TV: LIFE THROUGH A LOCAL LENS

BBC4 Wednesday, 9pm

THE APPRENTICE

BBC1 Sunday, 9pm

This article was first published in Scotland On Sunday, 24 July, 2011

On the box: The Hour | Regional TV: Life Through A Local Lens | The Apprentice