There's been a measure of discussion about this film being elastic with historical fact, which seems churlish given that this is essentially drama telescoping history, and as such is surely due some leeway. The facts are all there - Van Doren, like Stempel, had been cheating and Twenty One's claim that their questions were held in a vault prior to transmission was found a little wanting. But then the film is not just about the scandal itself but the insidious racial undercurrents in US television at the time. As an "annoying Jewish guy with a sidewalk haircut" Stempel was no match for the erudite all-American intellectual and had to go. The Jewish contestants, as Stempel tells Goodwin, always lost out to gentiles who went on to win more.

Redford's direction of all this is capable and unobtrusive, although cleverly he does try and inject the odd flourish that seems culled from the period; cinematographer Michael Ballhaus (Goodfellas), designer Jon Hutman and composer Mark Isham chip in sterling work to finish the job. But Quiz Show is that all too rare and likeable thing, a talking heads movie, and as such belongs more to its performers.

The always excellent Turturro is terrific here, a bundle of nervous energy and self-righteous indignation in his post-Barton Fink hair and thick spectacles. Fiennes, sizzling on the back of Schindler's List, is outstanding as the WASP Van Doren, balancing Stempel's fall with his own Time magazine cover success every step of the way. Pulling these two together (they are, after all, seldom on screen at the same time) is Morrow (from TV's Northern Exposure) as the high-flying Jewish Harvard graduate, always out to prove something as much to himself as anyone else. And there's some terrific support from Paul Schofield as the venerable older Van Doren, and a notable cameo from director Martin Scorsese as the greasy, disingenuous sponsor.

None of them could do much though without Paul Attanasio's marvellously calculated, witty script. It's Oscar nomination is well deserved. What could so easily have been a Capra-ish tract is cleverly woven as the story of three people whose lives are inextricably linked through a television show. None is the star in the same way that Attanasio resolutely fails to offer his work a hero. All of these people, he is telling us, are to some degree culpable. The climax comes in a Washington hearing that exchanges the grandiloquent gesture we expect for a brilliantly sour, humiliating tone. As the postscript reveals, only the contestants on Twenty One really suffered for what happened. No one was ever indicted for what were in essence not even crimes.

"I thought we were going to get TV," says Goodwin at the end. "The truth is TV is going to get us." Maybe there is a case to be made (it has been) that the Twenty One scandal was just that, a TV thing hardly on a par with Watergate or the Kennedy assassination, but whatever the wider implications, Quiz Show the movie is tremendous.