I HAVE been a journalist for longer than I haven’t been one. This summer it will be 33 years since I covered my first story - interviewing Temp of the Year at a Cleckheaton temping agency.

Over the three decades since, I have yet to see a television programme that represents local newspapers accurately.

There are of course great journalism movies - Spotlight, Broadcast News, The Post and All the President’s Men among them - quality TV dramas such as The Hour, State of Play and Press Gang, and sitcoms Drop the Dead Donkey and the Mary Tyler Moore Show. But that’s all heightened drama or comedy - set in busy national newspaper and TV newsrooms.

When it comes to local papers, from the Weatherfield Gazette to the free sheet in After Life, they tend to get it wrong.

People who don’t work in journalism often think they know how the ‘local rag’ works. They don’t.

There’s a myriad of skills involved in the news gathering and writing process - both print and digital - and in editing and production, as well as the daily challenges of breaking news, legal regulations, word counts, deadlines. I can think of no other job where being on the scene of a dawn police drugs raid, attending a corporate event in a local factory, interviewing a war veteran, trying to get 10 decent quotes in a vox pop on a busy shopping street, covering a council meeting, visiting a family who’ve lost a child in a road accident and turning a 10-minute phoner with a monosyllabic reality TV star into a 1,000-word double-page spread is all in a day’s work. Reporters have to make videos, engage with social media and take photos too. The working day often lasts well into the evening.

Yet regional journalism remains an easy target for ridicule. So when I heard that a new TV series called Hold the Front Page would be focused on a group of local papers across the country, it looked like, at last, there could be a spotlight on a working world most people know little about.

Alas, from what I’ve seen so far, it’s a missed opportunity. The series, on Sky Max, sees comics Nish Kumar and Josh Widdicombe take on ‘junior reporter’ roles on local titles. This could have been a real insight, albeit a lighthearted one with two TV funny guys at the helm, into how local newspapers tick, the work that goes into producing them and the role they play in their communities.

Instead, it’s all a bit Keystone Cops. Sent out to find their own stories - since when have local reporters worked in pairs? - Kumar and Widdicombe are left bumbling about, literally asking passers-by if they have any news. When they’re given assignments - such as being sent to write a colour piece on a vineyard in West Sussex and ending up sozzled, racking up a £300 sparkling wine bill on expenses - it turns into lame mockumentary.

It is of course a vehicle for the two comics, rather than a celebration of local journalism. They’re funny and likeable and they deliver plenty of laughs in the first two shows, not least when they join a battle re-enactment society and Widdicombe, dressed in chainmail armour, tells the warring knights: “We’ve got a 5pm deadline”. And when Kumar, deadpan and dressed as a mermaid, joins an all-female synchronised swimming group.

And there’s an occasional flash of insight into the demands of journalism, not least when the pair are sent to write a football match report and not only do they have no idea who any of the players are, they keep missing the goals.

Josh Widdicombe said in an interview that the project opened their eyes into “how many different things a journalist is now. You’re a writer, a photographer, a blogger, a video director”...”you have to be doing all these different things at the same time”.

It’s just a shame that he and Kumar weren’t filmed shadowing actual reporters, doing any of the above. I’m tired of seeing celebrities on telly clowning around on roller coasters and zip wires. How refreshing it would be to see them doing a proper job for once.