The Hack is TV dynamite – you’d expect nothing less from the makers of Adolescence

A lot of eyes will be on The Hack, Adolescence writer Jack Thorne’s urgent retelling of the phone-hacking scandal – not least because it digs into the real and extensive details of a story Rupert Murdoch will have hoped to shut down when he closed the News of the World in 2011.

We see these scandals from the corner of our eye, they briefly distract us and then the news cycle moves on. But The Hack draws us back to a story we only half know – and the truth is a lot worse than those half-glimpsed headlines suggest.

The first episode gets off to a pacy start. David Tennant brilliantly embodies Nick Davies, the journalist who drove The Guardian’s investigation into phone hacking, as he follows an anonymous tip-off and meets the mysterious Mr Apollo (Adrian Lester), who tells him to start digging into wrongdoing at the aforementioned tabloid.

Like a persistent terrier, he doorsteps and calls potential witnesses to unearth evidence the News of the World broke into the voicemails of people of interest and stole their messages to get stories. And the proof is out there. As Mr Apollo puts it: “It’s evidence that could burn, f**k and destroy everything. Twice over.”

News International denies that it destroyed any evidence in the face of a police investigation, and also denies that any evidence exists to prove that it did.

Davies is one of those lone maverick reporters we always meet in newspaper dramas, insistent strings accompanying him as he marches past Parliament, a man on a mission. But Tennant, deploying Thorne’s brilliantly idiosyncratic script, gives him so much more than the leather-jacketed surface. His performance has all the depth and drive to keep us rooting for Davies as he chases the story like a dog with a rabbit. It really is dazzling to watch him at work, hair silvered and eyes searching the horizon for answers.

The pressure is all on Tennant in episode one as he turns to camera often to fill us in on background detail and context. As a device, fourth wall breaking is overused, but here it works perfectly with the character, Davies urging us to keep up and ask questions.

The occasional plunges into our hero’s own biography could be a distraction, taking us back to vignettes of childhood and his cruel, violent mother. But it adds another dimension to Tennant’s portrayal and creates an origin story for Davies’ burning sense of injustice wherever he sees an abuse of power.

Toby Jones plays Alan Rusbridger, former Guardian editor and the man who sanctioned Davies’ investigation, with quiet intelligence and his usual exquisite restraint. But Thorne never leads us to view this as a simple story of goodies vs baddies. Rusbridger and Davies are flawed, human, not just avatars for the quest for truth but people trying and sometimes failing to do their jobs well.

As the series goes on, we’ll meet Robert Carlisle as Met detective Dave Cook who became embroiled in the story when he reinvestigated the unsolved murder of a private detective. He’s joined by an impressive cast of familiar faces including Steve Pemberton as perfectly judged press mogul Rupert Murdoch and Rosalie Craig as a frostily charming Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch’s right-hand woman.

The Hack is a complicated story, brilliantly told by a group of creatives at the very peak of their powers and Thorne manages to weave the many strands into a galloping narrative spiked with wit and bold emotional flourishes.

The press and politicians will be no doubt be watching the audience reaction to The Hack closely. Whatever the outcome, it is TV dynamite.

‘The Hack’ continues next Wednesday at 9pm on ITV