Favorite Characters: Randall Brown (The Hour)

Back during Capaldi Fall, I made my great appreciation for Randall known in no uncertain terms.  A simply gorgeous character, wonderfully written and exquisitely played.  If you want to get technical, I’ve said my piece on Randall.  However, rewatching The Hour around the end of summer brought my love for the character flooding back, and now there’s no getting around it:  Randall needs his own separate write-up.

Randall Brown, the new Head of News brought in to oversee The Hour (the in-show news program, not the actual BBC period-drama,) doesn’t appear on the surface to be what anyone wants.  His OCD behaviors cause him to “fiddle with things,” and the ‘50s weren’t exactly a sympathetic time for anyone dealing with mental health issues.  His staff members gawk uncomfortably when he reorganizes thumbtacks or fastidiously straightens chairs – Bel goes so far as to ask Lix, “What have they sent us?”  (Yep, not “who,” but “what.”  Yikes.)  His general demeanor is somber, acutely-focused; when he drops by for a taping, one can’t help but feel they’re being graded.  He isn’t content to enjoy the critical praise the program has received, instead keeping an eye on a competing show and pondering how The Hour could be improved, even “fixed.”  His ideas on how to go about this don’t mess around, and in the early days of his reign, most of his news team seems to be trying to get around him rather than work with him.

Producer Bel doesn’t like his less-than-satisfied opinion of the program, and she really doesn’t appreciate his unilateral decisions, like when he rehires Freddie without running it by her.  When writer/presenter Freddie does rejoin The Hour, he sometimes regards Randall as a troll at the gate keeping him from telling the provocative stories he wants to tell (although, in truth, Randall lets them push the envelope pretty far.)  Writer Lix is uneasy with Randall’s presence for personal reasons – they have a complicated history together, and since he arrived, he’s been poking at days she’d have rather left in the past.  And virtually everyone on the team starts covering for presenter Hector – the face of the program, famous and charismatic but notoriously unreliable – when Randall makes it clear that he won’t tolerate Hector’s continued unprofessional behavior.

But all these impressions don’t quite get at Randall.  Yes, he’s strict, he doesn’t allow free reign, and he doesn’t think The Hour is the pinnacle of news programming.  Yes, he’s unable to let matters lie (as he tells Lix, “We dwell on things we cannot bear to leave undone.”)  This is all true, but that’s not a bad thing.  He’s stringent and dissatisfied because he wants what’s best for The Hour – he sees its raw potential and wants to make it better.  When he doesn’t let his reporters don’t run about unchecked, it’s because he’s been playing the news game for a long time, and he has a good spidey sense about just how far they can push things, what they’ll be to get away with, and what would get them shut down.  Instead of saying, “No,” to a story outright, he’s far more likely to say, “Not like that,” or even just, “Not yet.” 

He places high expectations on his team, in large part because he understands them all so well.  He may seem inaccessible or emotional at first, but Randall is actually deeply, almost painfully empathetic.  He has an uncanny ability to get at the heart of someone’s behavior, often recognizing his own destructive qualities in others.  He gives off a sense that he wants to help his team outrun the personal demons that will drag down their work and, as with The Hour itself, continually pushes them to be better.  Would we were all so lucky to have a boss like Randall.