Doomed village post offices and the saddest show you’ll ever see
Asub-committee in the Fun With titles department at the beeb has had endless amusement from their documentary about the ailing Post office Ltd.
the producers must have considered the beatles’ hit Please mr Postman as a name. Perhaps they weighed up elvis’s Return to sender and even that buddy Holly obscurity, mailman bring me No more blues.
but they opted for a stevie Wonder smash — signed, sealed, Delivered — and, in case we didn’t get the pun, subtitled it Inside The Post Office (bbc2).
it’s a sure bet that there’s no frivolous wordplay or silly song title games in the high echelons of Post office Ltd. instead, their meetings are devoted to churning out anodyne jargon like this: ‘the network transformation programme is not a closure programme but a modernisation programme.’
Departmental heads were taught to parrot these soulless statements as they rang the death knell for hundreds of village post offices.
this was a depressing hour’s viewing. it’s sad to see the slow death of a national institution.
our affection for post offices is inexplicable. they used to be tyrannical places: you’d stand in a queue for 40 minutes because you had to renew your car tax or get a dog licence, and as you neared the counter that red roller blind would bang down like a fist on a table: ‘Position closed.’
A second-class letter could take a week to arrive, even if the sorting office wasn’t on strike. it was illegal, a criminal act, to buy a stamp anywhere but a post office. And every Wednesday afternoon, the sub-postmaster shut up shop altogether.
Yet we love them, and we’re going to miss them. For all the positive noises this documentary made about alternative operational practices and the challenges of change, it’s pretty obvious the community post office is doomed.
its monopoly is long gone: not only can we buy stamps in the supermarket, but many other transactions, such as paying for car tax, can be done online. the dogged souls who run village offices are barely scraping by, even with a £10,000 annual subsidy.
An air of defeat hung over the whole programme. the most interesting segment featured a protest meeting at Norton-in-the-moors, staffordshire, with a beleaguered lady from head office called caroline trying to fend off fury on all sides.
the High street post office was unviable, and to the disgust of many it was closing, to be replaced with a counter at the local filling station.
caroline got a hammering, but the anger was not all caused by the loss of the post office. Villagers had seen corner shops, greengrocers, pubs and butchers, and bus services, all shut down.
A lugubrious voiceover made it all seem utterly hopeless, though the penny didn’t drop until the credits: the narrator was tom Hollander, who played the disintegrating vicar in Rev. Parallels between the decline of the Post office and the ebbing of the church of england suddenly became obvious. the deranged grave robber in
Witnesses (c4) was still eschewing postal services and devising more convoluted ways of sending his messages to police in the Normandy seaside town of Le treport.
After posing corpses in showhomes and firing rifles at funicular railways, he rammed a detective’s car with his truck and, standing over her as she crawled from the wreckage, announced: ‘the ghosts are back.’
they certainly are. every other scene is shot in a graveyard, usually with a coffin being hauled from a hole, and the villain has been identified as a former dentist with a penchant for painting his face white like a mime artist and murdering young women by night.
the production can’t decide whether it is a noir police procedural or a dark fairytale.
the chief detective, Paul maisonneuve, is played by a leading French comedian, thierry Lhermitte and, though he hasn’t smiled once, there’s a suspicion that a geyser of black humour is about to erupt.
even that name, maisonneuve, might be a joke. it translates to Newhouse . . . or perhaps to showhome. Whether this is a twisted crime thriller or a gigantic Gallic gag, it will be fascinating to find out.