Ella Purnell’s character works on a local paper in Sweet Pea

SKY’s punky new drama series, Sweet Pea, has been getting mixed reviews.

Every bus in central London seems to be dressed with lead actor Ella Purnell’s face, but the response has been a little more lukewarm than they might have expected from this blanket promotion.

The story of an “unseen” young woman who decides slash-stabbing to death the people she blames for her social invisibility is perhaps struggling to grab the national attention as people wonder what the series is actually trying to say.

Harrington watched it with the same confusion but persevered because Purnell’s character, Rhiannon, is an editorial assistant at the office of a fictional local newspaper.

It’s interesting how ‘we’ – local paper reporters – are portrayed on TV.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a drama get even close to depicting what it’s really like.

The rodent reporters on the Walford Gazette in Eastenders are all sneaky AF and have long afternoons free to eavesdrop on people in the cafe in Albert Square.

If they are not impossibly underhand, local reporters are cast on screen as journalism’s slow horses – where newslists consist exclusively of oddball stories about people seeing Jesus in a burned piece of toast or growing a large marrow. Ricky Gervais, who in less salaried days used to deliver our paper, went down that path in After Life.

We’ve also had the omnipresent comics Nish Kumar and Josh Widdicombe tour offices across the country for Hold The Front Page. Their ‘tribute’ to the papers came across more as patronising slapstick. It’s all part of the same recycled tweet template which smugly shares local paper headlines with the line: “It’s all kicking off in [insert name of town].” You can throw in the ‘Angry People In Local Papers’ Facebook group too if you like.

In Sweet Pea, we get more dufus reporters chasing small chip stories, while struggling to work out the killer is sitting in the desk down the aisle. The clown editor character, meanwhile, might as well have come straight from a 1970s comedy not asked back for a second series.

Don’t be so sensitive you might say, but it is funny that the same TV writers and media types are the first to call our sister paper, the Camden New Journal, when they get a parking ticket they think is wrong, a neighbour noisily starts digging a basement or the rubbish hasn’t been collected on time.
Suddenly then, it’s no longer all a killer joke.