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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
It’s a measure of where we are in the age of “peak TV” when a much-admired drama brings about a prime ministerial intervention. Last weekend, Rishi Sunak announced that the victims of the British Post Office scandal, in which hundreds of sub-postmasters were wrongly accused of theft and accounting fraud due to faulty computer software, could be exonerated under plans being considered by the government. On Wednesday he announced new legislation. For some it will come too late: they lost their jobs, their homes, were sent to prison, even driven to suicide. Meanwhile, former Post Office boss Paula Vennells this week said she would be handing back her CBE. All this came about not through political pressure but because of the remarkable public response, fanned by social media, to the ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
The four-part series stars Toby Jones and Monica Dolan as the sub-postmasters leading the fight against their former bosses. The scandal is by no means recent — problems with the Post Office’s IT system first became apparent in 2000 — though reporting on it didn’t gather pace until the early 2010s, after many of its victims had served custodial sentences. A 2020 BBC Panorama documentary, Scandal at the Post Office, offered a comprehensive account of the case, courtesy of reporter Nick Wallis who also wrote a book and fronted a 10-part BBC Radio 4 series on the subject. Nonetheless, for many viewers, the dramatised version, written by Gwyneth Hughes, will be the first they have heard of the scandal.
Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which has been streamed 12.3mn times in eight days, is not the only drama to have galvanised the public and politicians. Cathy Come Home, a play written by Jeremy Sandford and directed for TV by Ken Loach, told the story of a couple’s descent into poverty and homelessness and the inhumane system that let them fall through the cracks. Broadcast on the BBC in 1966, it was watched by 12mn, prompted a House of Commons debate and led to a surge in donations to the homelessness charity Shelter. Victim, a 1961 thriller starring the then-closeted movie star Dirk Bogarde, similarly brought about a shift in public opinion. Through a plot in which blackmailers targeted gay men, it deliberately espoused a compassionate attitude towards homosexuality, and is said to have been influential in parliament passing the Sexual Offences Act decriminalising homosexuality six years later.
In 1984, the BBC’s harrowing docudrama Threads terrified a generation with images of melting milk bottles, charred babies and obliterated towns as it chronicled the devastation of nuclear war. The writer Barry Hines received a letter of praise from Labour leader Neil Kinnock, and the film is said to have impacted the Reagan administration’s nuclear policy after the US secretary of state George Shultz saw it on CNN.
Writer Jimmy McGovern picked up the mantle for campaigning drama in 1996 with Hillsborough, his film telling the stories of the victims of 1989 football stadium disaster in which 97 Liverpool fans died, and again in 2002 with Sunday, about the events of 1972’s Bloody Sunday, when British soldiers shot and killed civilians at a civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland. Both dramas drew out the human stories behind the tragedies and contributed to a change in the respective narratives around culpability.
Mr Bates vs The Post Office might appear less incendiary on paper — it is, at its most basic, a story about accounting. But it’s also a classic underdog tale as small-town workers take on the malign forces of capitalism and technology. The series also disrupts a very British strain of nostalgia which views the Post Office as a cosy British institution, emblematic of community, integrity and pretty red pillar boxes. Seeing it portrayed as a cruel corporate behemoth driving its workers to bankruptcy and, in some cases, death, it’s little wonder viewers have been shocked to their core.
That the series has provoked national debate — and prompted performative outrage from ministers who have known about the case for years — is testament to the capacity of drama to humanise, empathise and create a space where viewers can see the emotional fallout of issues from which they might otherwise feel removed. And with increased understanding comes a desire for change. Following Wednesday’s announcement of measures to speed the process of exoneration and compensation, Mr Bates vs The Post Office will not only be remembered as a high-quality TV show, but one that made a tangible difference to people’s lives.
‘Mr Bates vs The Post Office’ is available on ITVX
