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Writer Abi Morgan talks about the creating The Hour

I've always loved drama with a deadline. Broadcast News, All The President's Men, The Front Page, His Girl Friday four very different films but all enhanced by the pace, drama and office politics of the newsroom, be it for broadsheet or broadcast. When Jane Featherstone at Kudos first suggested the idea of doing a newsroom drama set in the Fifties it was already irresistible. The research that followed sealed the deal. As a year 1956 felt like a real turning point, Prime Minister Eden was leading a government through times of monumental change. The empire was nearly over and the establishment was on the edge of reinvention. The birth of the teenager was heralded by the arrival of rock and roll. The "new" was on the horizon ready to kick down doors.

BBC news had spawned Panorama and Tonight, both ground-breaking and relief from the static news and newsreels that had so far been the porthole to the rest of the world. Television needed to feed a hungry audience and the news programmes were ready to meet that challenge, bringing front line stories into the British home. There was revolution in Hungary and the fight for black rights in America at a time when the British Communist Party was active in London and immigration was rapidly increasing. A new world order was unfolding and Britain was eager to keep up.

The Suez Crisis has all the ingredients of a modern day crisis; a Middle East leader that the West could no longer ignore and a government orchestrating a phoney war. Snaking its way into the heart of The Hour it was the obvious and brilliant news story for our team of journalists to pursue. Brilliant, bold and yet caught in the shifting sands politically, socially and sexually, Freddie Lyon, Bel Rowley and Hector Madden spar and reconcile, unite and divide as they pursue moments of history in the name of journalistic truth.

The good thing about writing a drama about a news team is that journalists like politicians are vigilante note takers of the times in which they live. A melting pot of real life characters was there to guide and inspire the creation of these three fictional characters. At the time there were only a handful of women working in the BBC, but Grace Wyndham Goldie's influence over 20 years in British Broadcasting could not be ignored.

Bel Rowley is a fiery, passionate news programme producer. Grace Wyndham Goldie was the springboard to create a pioneering career woman working in broadcast news succeeding in what was traditionally a male institution. The effortless charm and brilliance of Richard Dimbleby and Cliff Michelmore had an extraordinary impact and I hope has brushed off on Hector Madden, our highly educated and witty anchorman who helms our fictional news programme. And finally Freddie Lyon, our spirited and maverick journalist, was an amalgam of all that seemed brilliant about the time. He has a fearlessness and thirst to swim against the establishment and to never accept no.

I wanted to interlace it with a thriller, to challenge the team both professionally and personally. A murder fobbed off as a robbery unravels to reveal an explosive journey that goes into the heart of government. Irresistible to Freddie, the murder exposes a web of lives and deceit that our team must unpick.

The brilliance of period drama is that there are no cell phones, Twitter or Facebook. Relationships unravel, sexual liaisons are slowly unpeeled. Yet the challenges of the time remain oddly unchanged. The struggles with fidelity, professional jealousies and political ambition are as rife now as they were in 1950, only with a little more glamour and with the new look of Dior.

Dramatically irresistible, Eve Stewart's set designs and Suzanne Cave's beautiful costumes transformed what was on the page into a thrilling landscape of corridors and edit suites, glamorous bars and private members clubs where the women are always elegant and the men are dressed like Hollywood matinee idols. The illicit and darkness of the thriller seeped into the visual, I hope making it even more tantalising. It has been fascinating to watch the germ of an idea embraced by such a huge creative team, each putting into place another piece of the jigsaw puzzle that renders the final scene.

It was always designed to be a ride, a fast-paced drama, the romantic triangle pin balling at its heart, knocking the characters between the walls of Westminster, the world of the establishment and the back alleys of international espionage. Writing six episodes was always going to be a challenge, but the joy of a show which is written, filmed and edited all in one building means that someone was always in sight, be it actor, director or to designer to tweak a line or offer inspiration. As a writing experience it felt like being part of an old Hollywood studio system, one of the best of my career to date.