[music]
--So, we're in Fleet Street. It's 1969, and we're in the heart of Fleet Street, The
Sun offices, The Mirror offices. And it's hot, it's sweaty, it's under pressure.
You know, every night they've got to get their news in and they've got to get the
paper out. And there's a deadline. And it's this high-pressure kind of society.
There's lots of drinking. There's lots of smoking. And they must have felt like
they were kind of the center of the universe, in a way. There was this
heartbeat going on of the of the printing presses and the news. I think
it's incredible that it's all true. These were real people. This was a real story.
This really happened. So, the W's, right at the top of the show,
we start with Rupert Murdoch and Larry Lamb are two kind of heroes of the piece.
And they say, What's the what's the heart of a story? And the heart of the story
are the five W's. Who, what, why, where, and when.
So, we've got these five W's that
light up. Rupert Goold and i talked a lot about the the environment feeling a bit
like a a warren or a kind of like rat runs, of it being dark, and of it being
gritty and it being inky and oily and industrial kind of
because it was a very industrial process to print the papers. So, the set is is
like a playground, really, of loads and loads and loads of desks and loads and
loads of paper and newsprint and then typewriters and telephones. Every desk
has got an ashtray on it, but it also means that that can be a playground for
the actors, so that we can be having seen split-level scenes at different times
because we cross come from from different locations and different
characters in the piece really really fast. We get people up really really high.
We've got one of the guys right up at the top
there, so that it feels like is a kind of a gym just work and activity and sweat
and process. And we had great fun, of course, making all the different
workstations, so
each of the characters in the piece has their own desk and their own workstation
so that the actors, when they're in their little workstation , they feel like
they're really in that little in that world and that environment. And it's a
really nice period clothes-wise. I mean, I had a great fun dressing
particular girls. Almost everything is real period pieces. We brought a lot of
it over from London. I think, reading the piece, it's just got a kind of energy -
the drive and the quick move pace of it, that was really important that the set
would facilitate that. And that it felt fun, but it had a kind of witty feel to it
because the piece is really funny and good fun and good witted.
--We were looking at lots of photographs of the time, lots of news rooms. And I
did endless research on the printing process. So, these amazing YouTube videos
of how they actually print the newspapers, which is incredible that they
did that every single night. There's a kind of color palette as well
on the on the set. There's very very little red on it, so that when we punch
out little bits of red, because the sun's logo is red, so occasionally we pop out a
little bit of red on the set. But otherwise we're in a world of browns and
grays and greens and oranges. And that's quite a kind of late 60s- 70s color
palette. Around the back of the set, we've got this cyc of rolls of what look
like newsprint coming down. That means that we're able to project onto that, so
John Driscoll, who did the who did all the projections, that creates a kind of a
world palette, a kind of visual palette of the reality of the piece very often. And
then, obviously, we can do moving images on that, so you get this kind of speed of
the newspapers running off the presses, rolling off the presses, so you get this
kind of momentum building up. The thing about the show is
that it's a really fun show. It's got a kind of rhythm to it that when it starts,
it is like the presses are rolling, and then we're off on this journey and it
keeps goings, keep going, keep going until we land at the end of the show.
[music]