Channel 4’s latest attempt at biting, ultra-current satire, Hacks focuses on the on-going phone-hacking scandal to mixed effect. Written and directed by Guy Jenkin, co-creator of BBC hit Outnumbered, and starring Little Dorrit’s Claire Foy, you could be forgiven for placing your expectations fairly high given the timely content steeped in sleaze and satirical potential - which makes it a shame that Hacks fails so obviously.

Kate is a cut throat tabloid editor with a couple of unfortunate soft spots; she’s having an affair with a soap opera actor and starting to hear the conversations she’s hacked in her head. She runs the Sunday Comet, a paper staffed by villainous, amoral writers and owned by rough billionaire Stanhope Feast. It’s all achingly familiar, and as sordid as can be expected. Then the phone hacking scandal happens, and the shit, as they say, hits the proverbial fan.

The scenes set in the Sunday Comet’s office work to some degree. The writing is occasionally snappy and the characters are suitably loathsome. The problem seems to lie in the inability of the programme to pick a slant on the issue; it veers precariously from slapstick delivery to biting satire to inexplicably trite moralising, sound-tracked to Radiohead.

Another problem is Kate herself.When she’s not firing people randomly and lying to the police, she’s supposed to be vaguely sympathetic. Her harsh demeanor and brutal approach to life are, we are told, products of her job. This may have worked better if her character was fleshed out to any noticeable degree, rather than her uncertainty and ambiguous moralising; lazily depicted through hearing voices and being unable to sleep.

When compared to other political satires, Hacks falls flat. There will no doubt be many other attempts to send-up the phone hacking scandal in the coming years, and Hacks at least makes a start and provides a framework for what not to do. There are a couple of laughs to be found, but getting to them involves wading through a swamp of disappointment and failed opportunity.