Nominally, the story is about two rivals. On one end is the petty bourgeois turned artisto-by-marriage Lord Tony Baddingham (a delightfully peevish David Tennant), who is as nefarious as his Dickensian name suggests, scaling for power and prestige as the managing director of a commercial television station. Across the aisle is rakish, titled, and ravenous Rupert Campbell-Black (Alex Hassell), an Olympic show-jumper turned Thatcherite Minister of Sport, who, together with Declan O’Hara (Aidan Turner), a hot-blooded Irish broadcast journalist lured from the BBC to the countryside, forms a competing station.
