You know a nation is in trouble when the PM changes the law because of what’s on TV

Now we know where power lies. In the unsuspecting hands of a middle-aged character actor from Hammersmith. Toby Jones’s quiet, sympathetic portrayal of former sub-postmaster Alan Bates has gripped the hearts of the nation and seen PM Rishi Sunak leap from his Peloton – not pausing even to rate his online cycling instructor Cody Rigsby – and dash to the Cabinet room to rally the troops to the moment’s most pressing and populist agenda.

This week the Government pledged to speedily change the law to exonerate sub-postmasters caught up in the Horizon software scandal.

Last week none of us even knew what a sub-postmaster was. The nerves of households across the nation have now been shredded by the issue: is it one word? Is there a hyphen? If that’s a sub-postmaster behind the glass screen, where is the all-powerful postmaster? Is a female one a subpostmistress or is that non-PC? Apart from being a refuge for victims of injustice what happens in a Post

Office? Weren’t they just warm places for old people to go and queue in and be told “No, I’m sorry, my duck, you can no longer pay for your TV licence in here. You need to phone them or go online.” “On where?” they ask, weeping with confusion.

After all, does anyone buy stamps anymore? I thought all communication was done on WhatsApp. I actually reckon I’ve identified our subpostmaster in Wiveliscombe.

He’s called Mr Bond. I go in there to buy stamps I don’t need or Sellotape which I can lose just so I can stand at the counter and say: “Good morning, Mr Bond.”

But just like you, I was gripped by

Mr Bates vs The Post Office. I’m also now an expert on the glitches and bugs in

Horizon software, I’m wagging my finger at Paula Vennells. Hand back your CBE? Everyone should resign. Keir Starmer, as he was running the CPS at the time of various prosecutions, and Ed Davey for not listening to Mr Bates while he was postal affairs minister. And what of Tony Blair? Forget allegations that he took Britain to war illegally and was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands. I mean he signed off the Fujitsu software that we are now all over.

Until this issue was on the telly, dramatised, fictionalised (remember that line at the start of each episode “Based on a true story. Except for all the bits we made up”) and was duly lapped up by all of us, it didn’t matter. The fact that there were years of lobbying and hours of (factual) TV and radio on the subject didn’t matter. The public inquiry is into its third year. But now it is a drama on the medium that everyone said was finished and was going the same way as books (killed by digital) and radio (killed by video), it matters. Now, it turns out, TV drama can bend real life, can actually bend political will.

We’re down the same rabbit hole that The Crown entices us into, where nuggets of reality (in The Crown’s case, some names, Court Circular references and lookalikey actors) harness and augment the impact of, or in The

Crown’s case even blur, confuse and abuse actual historical truth.

The secret, of course, is to harness the power of drama to your advantage: “History will be kind to me. For I intend to write it,” as Churchill didn’t say. Today, instead, if you are massively famous your agent lines up a meeting with Netflix and, hey presto, there’s a six-part part-factual, part-fictionalised series on your life. It’s a triumph of the power of fame in an age where we’re obsessed by trivia. The Beckhams did it, as did Taylor Swift (indeed it’s sweet retribution for Swift that there is, currently, coursing through the veins of cyberspace, a “deep fake” video of her promoting Le Creuset cookware, which seems much more plausible than her promoting her own simulation of herself ).

When Robbie Williams looked at his diary and saw not much occurring in subsequent months he got a crew into his bedroom to film him sitting, scantily clad, watching old footage of himself on his laptop which then served as a marketing campaign to keep him in our minds in advance of his next project.

So where’s the upside? Will we only pay attention to real and deep scandals – river pollution, the outdated and pointless money pit of HS2, the lack

Will we only pay attention to scandals if they become prime-time drama? of rural transport infrastructure – if they become prime-time drama? Which won’t happen of course.

Who can blame politicians for being so shallow as to actually change the law, to stamp on hundreds of years of legal precedent by ignoring the courts and exonerating people from the floor of the House of Commons, when the ebbs and flows of our telly-made outrage proves we are just as shallow?