Last call for the phone-hacking scandal - but is anyone still listening?

ITV's The Hack tells how Murdoch's reporters illegally intercepted voicemails. Will the story's loose ends ever be tied up, asks Ceri Thomas

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On 31 January this year, an unlikely group assembled on a video call to discuss the idea of taking out a private prosecution against Piers Morgan over phone hacking.

Prince Harry and former prime minister Gordon Brown were on screen alongside actor Hugh Grant, former Liberal Democrat cabinet minister Chris Huhne and the press standards campaigner Evan Harris.

In front of them, they had a briefing about private prosecutions prepared by the House of Commons Library. The plan they chewed over was to bring Morgan to court to face allegations that he knew voicemail interception phone hacking - was widespread at the Daily Mirror while he was editor from 1995 to 2004, and later lied about it under oath.

Even before that meeting, Huhne had been going through old phone records and stumbled across something new: a pattern of calls that made him suspicious his phone might have been hacked in 2010 by Rupert Murdoch's News International, now News UK - publisher of the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times while he was taking part in talks to assemble the coalition government. It was a political and constitutional moment so significant that we had never seen the like of it before.

And today, on billboards and television screens, you will see The Hack, the phone hacking drama. The cast list alone, including David Tennant and Toby Jones, leaves no room for doubt that ITV budgeted for a hit.

Nearly 20 years after the first big break in the story, when the News of the World's royal editor and a private investigator were arrested, phone hacking is back. Except...

The Hack is playing to half-empty houses. There is no sign so far, anyway of the slow-building outrage that turned Mr Bates vs the Post Office into much more than a drama.