The News

A young woman trainee reporter fights for survival in a man’s world in the Fleet Street of the Seventies.

Those were days of cut-throat competition when reporters actually went out and talked to people face to face instead of tracking them on Twitter and Instagram.  You had to be faster, smarter, better and above all luckier than the opposition and possessed with the traditional ‘rat-like cunning’ of a good reporter. For women it was tougher than tough, in the days when newsrooms were often brutal, misogynistic places and there was no place for tears.

Tina Forrester, a young trainee reporter, has to learn quickly and grow a thick skin as she takes on stories ranging from interviews with pools winners to major political scandals, at the same time fending off opposition from old-school hacks who think she’s keeping a man out of a good job.

There’s one staff job to fight for and she’s up against her trainee pal Rob Reynolds backed by his mentor, chief reporter Don Tucker.

Eight very different characters are bound together with a passion to produce the best possible newspaper every day in the high-octane atmosphere of The Street of Dreams.

The show tracks a slow decline of moral standards in the red-tops, the stretching of a story with the resulting consequences for ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. Hard hitting with a sense of humour and a twist of irony, we see the rise of PRs – like the late Max Clifford, whose main job is keeping stories out of the press while feeding its voracious appetite for naughty celebrities.

Blending fact with fiction, long before the internet, mobile phones, the Nanny State, obsessive Health and Safety and the demise of common sense. It’s “Life on Mars meets The West Wing” – The Newsroom without the moral lectures, The Paper without the glitz. It’s Fleet Street warts and all.