TV drama makes the prime minister sit up and take notice
• Series leads to national outcry in UK and possibly stripping the Post Office of its powers to prosecute
ATV drama has led to outcry, outrage and debate in the UK parliament. It was not as you might initially think, outrage because of its inappropriateness or morally dubious depictions of a lifestyle the public doesn’t want to see on TV; nor is it a drama about a highly charged political issue like Northern Ireland or the inner workings and soapopera machinations of the house of Windsor.
Rather, the show in question is a small, carefully crafted and moving story about the 25-year battle by more than 700 UK subpostmasters to clear their names after computer errors in the Post Office’s lauded and expensive Horizon system led to them being charged for criminal offences.
They had been unable to account for shortfalls in the accounting for their often small and barely profitable Post Office operations in small towns across the UK.
Created and written by Gwyneth Hughes, who spent three years working on the four-part drama trawling through court transcripts, evidence and interviewing subpostmasters, ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office has done what few social dramas inspired by true stories manage
made the public furious and bay for former Post Office head Paula Vennells to be stripped of her CBE.
It even prompted Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to issue a statement that his Tory government is considering a bill to allow the government to strip the Post Office of its powers to prosecute. This was after the show’s depiction of the battles of several of the more than 700 subpostmasters who were wrongfully handed criminal convictions for a fault that the
Post Office refused to admit.
From 1999 to 2015 the Post Office accused 3,500 operators of committing crimes of theft, fraud and false accounting, and prosecuted more than 700, even though court proceedings have shown it knew from 2010 that there were problems with the Horizon system.
Some operators, faced with financial ruin, took their own lives. Others suffered breakdowns as they turned from beloved members of their small communities to pariah criminals facing the mighty judicial machinery of the state.
One of the accused subpostmasters who refused to accept the charges and dedicated his time to clearing his name and those of his fellow wronged colleagues was Alan Bates played in the show by veteran British actor Toby Jones who formed a support organisation for wronged victims that grew into a determined civil group. It worked tirelessly to hold the government responsible and eventually took the Post Office to court. In an era in which trust in government is perilously low and dissatisfaction grows daily, the story of the shameful selfserving actions of a stateowned institution and its effects on working people has touched a raw nerve with the UK public.
An average of 3.5-million people a night tuned in to watch the show, with millions more bingeing it on ITV’s streaming service ITVX. A petition to have Vennells stripped of her CBE has garnered 1-million signatures. It’s a call that even the usually public-sentimentdeaf Sunak has echoed.
In other countries it’s rare that a television programme and a dramatic interpretation at that can have the kind of realworld outcry and impact that Hughes’ solidly executed and performed story has. In the UK, where the national broadcaster, the BBC, has a history of creating hard-hitting docudrama series that have filtered through to docudramas on other channels, it’s less rare.
Shows such as Ken Loach’s
IT IS A SHOW THAT COULD ACTUALLY CHANGE THE LIVES OF THOSE WHOSE STORIES IT TELLS
1966 BBC television play about homelessness, Cathy Come Home; Jimmy McGovern’s Hillsborough about the 1989 football disaster; and Russell T Davies and Channel 4’s It’s a Sin
about the ravages of the HIV/Aids epidemic in the 1980s have all led to increased public awareness and calls for government intervention.
The furore around Mr Bates
has powerfully demonstrated that “drama is constantly downgraded as a subject of importance, but it’s historically always been a place that people, even if they don’t believe that it can deliver change, ... suggests change and so it cannot be ignored. In most of the political upheavals in history, not least ancient Greece and
revolutionary Russia, that drama has been at the centre of political change, that people have used it to humanise, dramatise and bring forth change”, its star, Jones, told the BBC this week.
Dozens of similarly wronged subpostmasters have come forward since the airing of the drama, calls for Vennells’ CBE to be stripped have grown louder and the UK government is on the verge of stepping in to stop the Post Office from continuing its persecution of its employees
Mr Bates is proving to be the little show that could actually change the lives of those whose stories it tells and one that offers inspiration to a cynical public that there’s nothing to be done by ordinary people about government corruption and mismanagement.
If only our own broadcasters and state cultural institutions in SA could learn the same lesson. But with the National Film and Video Foundation recently announcing that it would not be submitting any SA film for consideration for the 2024 best international feature Oscar because none of the films submitted to it “properly represent marginalised communities”, and local broadcasters preferring to churn out true crime docuseries and titillating telenovelas, don’t hold your breath for any local shows that deal with government corruption, or even the woes of our own postal service, any time soon.