First class drama with a truly shocking stamp of scandal
◆ The first stand-up-and-cheer drama of the year has arrived already and television critic Aidan Smith is firmly on Alan Bates’ side in his battle against the Post Office
The new year is but a few days old but already it’s produced a stand-up-andcheer telly moment which will take some beating. In Mr Bates vs the Post Office (ITV) the latter are accused of being either stupid or cruel.
This comes from the man heading the inquiry into why so many subpostmasters can’t balance their books.
Bob Rutherford had been commissioned by the Post Office and, we’re to assume, is about to find in their favour, validating the organisation for laying charges of theft.
Now, Rutherford is played by Ian Hart, an actor who’s impersonated John Lennon three times, Hitler once (once is enough), Lord Voldemort and both Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson – a fine and varied career, the famous and the notorious in almost equal measure.
But I’m wondering, when his work’s done, if it might be the role as an auditor in what’s been called “the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history” which brings him the most pride.
Rutherford isn’t even the hero of this saga, initially so impenetrable and almost necessitating Holmesian levels of detection – and while we might be tempted to call it Ealingesque because some little guys (and gals) are standing up to a big, bad, unfeeling corporation, there’s no comedy when things turns Kafkaesque and tragic.
If there is a hero it’s Alan Bates who’s first to have the Post Office’s heavies arrive in black cars and black coats to shut him down and eventually mobilises fellow victims into forming the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance – though in Toby Jones’ portrayal he’s a modest, unassuming fellow and so would probably shun the epithet.
Many times you have to remind yourself that Gwyneth Hughes’ drama isn’t a piece of fiction but shockingly true.
This actually happened. Horizon, the Post Office’s digital accounting system, was so rubbish it should have been hurled to the furthermost point on the skyline.
Instead, its problems were covered up and denied (the number of times a subpostmaster is told he or she is the only one whose figures don’t add up will cause you to want to scream).
The scandal lasted 20 years. Innocent people lost their jobs, reputations, savings, homes and in some cases reasons for living.
“I love my post office … I hate being so angry,” says a despairing Jo Hamilton, emphasising the subpostmasters’ ordinariness and decency.
She’s played by Monica Dolan who’s superb, as is Jones and also Will Mellor as Lee Castleton who’s first to fight his case in the High Court, having earlier made Rutherford cry on a park bench while relating his desperate plight.
“The more of you people I meet,” the latter remarks, “the less I know how you’re all still standing.”
Stupid or cruel? Put another way, by Jones’ wife Suzanne (Julie Hesmondhalgh): “Incompetent or evil? It comes to the same thing in the end.”
A reminder: we’re talking about the Post Office. Regarded at local level by those communities lucky enough to still have one, according to Hamilton, as “warm and cuddly”. But at head office level? You wonder how warm EX-CEO Paula Vennells, played by Lia Williams, feels right now as the petition to have her stripped of the CBE grows in size, Bates having already decided to turn down an OBE while she retains her honour as he continues to fight for justice.
Back for a second season, The Tourist (BBC1) can also lay claim to a moment other dramas in 2024 will have to top, this one for sheer – and sheer-drop – bonkersness.
It’s Jamie Dornan dangling from a cliff face while, a few feet above, one of his pursuers is remembering a dream. He
was at a dinner party, famous folk all around, and on his hands, sausages for fingers.
“I get losing your teeth or turning up at school naked – but what did that mean?” he asks his accomplice.
Meanwhile, like a hapless Hitchcockian leading man or Harold Lloyd in his most famous scene, Dornan continues to hang on for dear life by his sausages.
Hands figure in the second funniest scene so far, with the show having switched from the Australian outback to the wilds of Ireland. Dornan’s Elliot Stanley is already there and already in another heap of trouble. Meanwhile, on the next plane, is Ethan, hoping to win back his ex, Helen, who’s now with Elliot in Ireland.
After renouncing his bad old gaslighting ways, Ethan’s been helping lunkheads still caught up in toxic masculinity. The flight suffers turbulence and, thinking he’s about to die, he clings to the passenger alongside. This is Lena who in the first series appeared in Elliot’s Lsd-induced dreams and is now intent on “making him pay for everything he’s done”.
What he’s done is only unfolding gradually for Elliot, according to Ethan, is “that amnesia bloke”. By the way, I’m talking a lot about hands because I don’t really want to talk about eyes and what happens to them.
The Tourist continues in its blackly comedic vein, less of a road movie now but still involving burning rubber, and you imagine sibling creators Jack and Harry Williams wrestling over a steering wheel while working up the plot twists, arguing the case for humour or horror.
There’s a scene at the end of this week’s first episode – two divers in a deadly struggle – which seems to belong to another show entirely. If you’ve raced ahead, answers on a postcard please.
Marginally less confusing, we learn that Elliot’s surname is really Cassidy, and that he used to be a ballet dancer – skills which can be useful when poised over a precipice but not much good when your sudden reappearance reignites a war between rival clans.
Meanwhile, Helen (Danielle Macdonald) must be hankering for the weirdness of the Oz outback following her shock introduction to Ireland.
As a copper she has no jurisdiction here and can’t have much faith in the Garda finding Elliot before the bad guys – not least because Industry’s Conal Macneill, playing what seems to be their only working officer, lives with a blowup doll.
Even more challenging a watch than the other two but just as gripping, Truelove (Channel 4) begins like The Big Chill for retirees – the types sent junk mail about cruise holidays and walk-in baths – when a group of friends reunite at the funeral for a dear, departed chum who’d met a grim end. At the wake, after
Innocent people lost their jobs, reputations, and in some cases reasons for living
much drink, they seal a pact vowing to help send each other on their way, thus avoiding similar slow and painful deaths.
Lindsay Duncan heads a classy cast as Phil, an ex-deputy chief constable who irks her husband (Phil Davis) by binning the wrinkly-specific leaflets and balking at his plan for downsizing (“Everyone knows, it goes bungalow, hospice, crematorium”). But before long she and Ken (Clarke Peters), with whom she may have had an affair previously, are being summoned by one of their company just diagnosed with cancer of the lymph glands, liver and pancreas – “the full English.”
Iain Weatherby’s elegiac drama follows Esther Rantzen’s call for a reform of the assisted dying laws but is so good no added poignancy is needed.
Mr Bates vs the Post Office (ITV); The Tourist (BBC1); Truelove (Channel 4)