Move over, Mad Men

So here it comes: the British pretender to the

Moreover, it's a perfectly judged period brand of whisky: Black & White, with two terriers on the label - Dean Martin's favourite. You can trust this team to get the detail to a Matt Weiner (the creator of Mad Men) level of perfection. The Hour has been hewn by a best-of-British trio: screenwriter Abi Morgan (currently working on The Iron Lady with Meryl Streep), director Giedroyc (fresh from Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch) and production designer Eve Stewart (twice Oscar-nominated, for The King's Speech and Topsy-Turvy).

Meticulously drawn British 'austerity chic' is the aesthetic here, and everyone is impeccably turned out, even the assassins: in the first episode there is a trilby-on-trilby murder. A BBC newsroom in 1956 is the setting: the Suez crisis is kicking off, and the news show The Hour is torn between treating Sir Anthony Eden's government with the same deference it showed in wartime and taking a stronger, more interrogative line.

Ben Whishaw plays Freddie Lyon, a cub reporter who passionately believes television has to change (you can tell he's a renegade because he wears his top button undone), while Dominic West is Hector Madden, the starry news presenter who is, according to Abi Morgan, 'Richard Dimbleby crossed with Gary Cooper'. Romola Garai plays their producer Bel Rowley, a woman in a man's world. In 1956, there were only four women at the BBC more senior than a secretary.

One of these pioneers was the redoubtable Grace Wyndham Goldie, often described as the First Lady of television, a Cheltenham Ladies' College alumna and Oxford graduate who developed the formats of Tonight and Panorama. Her team of 'Goldie's Boys' included Robin Day, David Frost and Huw Wheldon. There is a lot of her in Romola Garai's character Bel: 'She's feared and adored,' says the director. But unlike Grace WG, who took her husband's first name as well as his surname (he was the actor Wyndham Goldie), Bel Rowley has a problematic lovelife. She cannot marry and keep her job (Grace WG was exceptional) and she also has a penchant for the wrong type of man. As Giedroyc explains: 'She really breaks my heart as a character because she's an incredibly strong, brave, dynamic, intelligent woman, ahead of her time, but her fatal flaw is that she falls for married men. Her own sexuality is the thing that's going to wreck it for her. She's a very contemporary character in that sense. I see that type of character all around me, in the industry, in women I know.' It seems that, as the series gets under way, that crackle between West and Garai will spark into something altogether more professionally compromising.

Garai's character is improbably glamorous, modelled style-wise on Simone Signoret, Katharine Hepburn 'and Deborah Kerr, for just a touch of head girl'. Her vintage costumes, designed and sourced by Suzanne Cave, include wonderfully clingy sweater-dresses, paired with trench coats, berets, pearl earrings (always clip-ons) and statement brooches, as well as a fine repertoire of raw silk Balenciaga-style suits, with scalloped lapels, peplum waists and tapered skirts. 'The other characters have flared skirts, but mine are always pencil-shaped, to be less girlish,' says Garai. She must have worn weapon-grade conical brassieres as well. 'Yes, very, very pointy ones! At the beginning I wore a Waspie, which is a little corset, literally just a very tight belt. It was the most uncomfortable corset I've ever worn' - for Garai, star of many a costume drama, from Daniel Deronda to The Crimson Petal and the White, that's really saying something. 'It made me feel like I wanted to vomit constantly, so after the first episode I changed to a corset with more structure. The dresses were very tight, and the idea was to create a strong silhouette. She's supposed to look glamorous and she always has to be totally perfect, immaculate, because, as a woman in this job, if there's anything flawed about her at all, she can be dispensed with. It's like Hector Madden tells her: "You have to be ten times better than everyone else." And she is, and that extends to her costume, and it's also part of her nature.'

West is on marvellously debonair form as the newscaster Hector Madden. 'Debonair? My wife would be rolling in the aisles,' he says. He enjoyed the period's smart suits, tie pins and collar studs enormously, but less so the tinned lunch products. 'It always seemed to be Spam and jelly, eaten with a cigarette on the go. That I can live without.' Oona Chaplin (granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin and great-granddaughter of Eugene O'Neill), who plays his wife Marnie Madden, is a costume designer's delight in princess coats, bracelet watches, chignons and manicured red nails. Betty Draper, eat your heart out.

Fine supporting work comes from Anna Chancellor (a reporter-photographer vaguely based on model turned photographer Lee Miller), who sports high-waisted slacks, mannish brogues, winged spectacles and a cheery professionalism. Julian Rhind-Tutt, as a private secretary to Anthony Eden, wears pinstripe suits, period specs and a discomforting moustache.

For all its period detail, this doesn't feel like a museum piece: the newsroom's tickertape machine (which took five weeks to source) actually works, spooling out tape; the Bakelite phones and tan nylon suspenders have the gleam of desirable, must-have items; a single carnation in a vase is the hallmark of a smart restaurant. Yes, this is a very different world from the consumer paradise of Mad Men. 'Britain was bombed-out and miserable and still on rations, still stuck in colonialism, fighting over a distant tract of land,' as Garai puts it. The nation is united in front of one news channel in the evenings. But there is still a sense of high style. Ladies carry gloves like their reputations depend upon it, and everyone wears a watch. There is something uplifting about The Hour: despite the dark undertones, there is a convincing jauntiness of mood, a seen-it-all-and-survived, post-war optimism. Despite everything, it seems to say, austerity can look great and feel good. ES
The Hour starts on BBC Two next month