A superb, enraging drama. My blood’s still boiling days later...
Mr Bates Vs The Post Office Monday to Thursday, ITV1 The Tourist Monday & Tuesday, BBC1
But the Post Office,’ says a reporter from Computer Weekly early on in Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, ‘is so warm and cuddly’. Indeed. Was there ever a more trusted presence on every high street or in every village, even if you did always pick the slowest queue? Did you ever imagine, while queuing in the slowest queue, it would one day perpetrate one of the most widespread miscarriages of justice in British legal history?
That it would one day prove itself neither warm nor cuddly but mendacious, cruel, psychopathic, capable of destroying hundreds of innocent lives? I had heard of ‘The Post Office Scandal’, of course, but until I watched this drama I had no idea of the horrifying scale of it. It made my blood boil. It is still boiling now.
This stars Toby Jones and Monica Dolan, so you know you are in safe hands, right there, and is written by Gwyneth Hughes, who tells the story straightforwardly and concisely, which is in itself an achievement. (I did a lot of reading afterwards – she could easily have got bogged down.)
All in all, the Post Office prosecuted 736 postmasters between 2000 and 2014, but Hughes brings the human devastation home by sensibly focusing on just a few key figures. It opens with Alan Bates (Jones), a postmaster in North Wales whose post office is also a wool shop run by his partner, Suzanne (Julie Hesmondhalgh). We also see a trio of sleek black cars heading his way.
These are auditors due to close his post office down as there is a ‘shortfall’ in his accounts. He refuses to accept that this money is missing. He says it’s Horizon, the new computer system from Fujitsu, that blinks sinisterly under his counter. It’s causing the discrepancies, he maintains. The auditors call the police. Bates tells the police he’s the innocent party here. ‘Post Office Ltd,’ he says, ‘are stealing my livelihood, my shop, my job, my home, my life savings and my good name.’
Bates is told that no one else is having a problem with Horizon. Everyone will be told no one else is having a problem with Horizon. They’re being gaslit. Bates, who is steadfast and an absolute hero, sets up a website and contacts Computer Weekly and, lo and behold, more and more postmasters come forward. They are contractually obliged to make good any shortfall from their own money, and get this: the money was put into a ‘suspense account’ and then became part of the Post Office’s profit. Blood. Boiling.
We also meet Jo (Dolan), the subpostmistress who was so trusted in her Hampshire village that she kept pensioners’ bank cards in her drawer. She can’t understand why money is missing. We see her late at night, paperwork spread all around her. It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare. She calls the Horizon helpline and watches her ‘shortfall’ double in front of her eyes. She has already re-mortgaged her house to pay off previous losses. She is prosecuted and plea-bargains with the Post Office, pleading guilty to avoid prison while agreeing never to blame Horizon.
Meanwhile, Lee Castleton (Will Mellor), who had called the Horizon helpline 91 times, is prosecuted and landed with the Post Office’s costs of £320,000, which bankrupts him. I watched half behind my hands, while my stomach was in knots.
Over to the Post Office, where the CEO was Paula Vennells (Lia Williams), who was also, can you believe, an Anglican priest. I’m not sure we ever get to the bottom of why she would go with an outbreak of criminality rather than a fallible system, but she won’t have Horizon questioned. It’s ‘robust’, she keeps repeating. She appoints an independent forensic accounting team to look into it, but the paperwork they need is never handed over. She sets up a mediation service that’s a joke. Nadhim Zahawi (played by Nadhim Zahawi himself – he’s very good) runs rings around her during the Parliamentary inquiry but still she won’t shift.
Satisfyingly, the drama builds to the postmasters’ class action and Jo having her conviction overturned – the judge declared it an ‘affront to justice’ – but it’s not over yet. There has been no apology, the compensation redress is a mess, and no one has been held accountable. In fact, Vennells left the Post Office in 2019 with £400,000 and a CBE. This was superb television, well performed, cleareyed, affecting, enraging. It may be that my blood will boil for ever.
Quickly, quickly, The Tourist, the thriller from Harry and Jack Williams, which returned for a second series after the first one proved the BBC’s biggest drama hit of 2022. Jamie Dornan reprises his role as Elliot Stanley, who has now returned from Australia to his native Ireland to discover if that is, in fact, who he is. (He’s an amnesiac… remember?) It’s as twisty-turny and as violently slapstick as ever. The first episode alone involved an abduction, beatings, hanging off a cliff, a Molotov cocktail and rummaging inside a dead pig for a key.
It’s relentless, so much so that by the third episode – all six episodes are available on iPlayer – it becomes tiresome. It’s jeopardy followed by (an improbable) escape over and over. The convoluted story involves two warring families who are always trying to kill each other, perhaps by a butcher’s knife to the eye. (Oh God.)
Dornan is excellent, but now he and Helen (Danielle Macdonald), the Australian detective, are an item this misses the narrative propulsion of hoping they’ll fall in love.
It certainly doesn’t pay to think about any of it too hard. The fella with the broken leg? How come he’s miraculously recovered by morning? What passport is Elliot Stanley travelling on?
You’re in it for the ride, I suppose, and to see how far the Williams brothers will go. I admire their daring and preposterousness but, midway through, I was bored by it too.