Moment that mattered: TV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office is broadcast

LONDON, ENGLAND - MARCH 21: Toby Jones and Jo Hamilton attend the Broadcasting Press Guild Awards 2024 at Royal Horseguards Hotel on March 21, 2024 in London, England. (Photo by Tristan Fewings/Getty Images)

Toby Jones and Jo Hamilton at the Broadcasting Press Guild Awards, where Mr Bates vs the Post Office won the BPG Jury Prize, on 21st March 2024

Until New Year’s Day the story of the largest miscarriage of justice in British history was not very well known. But that changed when UK terrestrial broadcaster ITV aired a new drama about the Post Office Horizon IT scandal. Telling the sorry tale of how hundreds of innocent former sub-postmasters at the Post Office were wrongly convicted for theft between 1999 and 2015 due to a faulty Fujitsu IT system – and how a group of them bravely fought back in the courts – Mr Bates vs the Post Office made the scandal the biggest news story in the country, 15 years after it first broke.

Natasha Bondy didn’t know anything about the case until she read about it in the Sunday Times in 2020. “It was so shocking and incredibly sad that such a miscarriage of justice could happen here in the UK,” says Bondy, the show’s co-executive producer. “It struck me straight away that it should be a TV drama. I started making calls to all the key people.”

Since her background is in factual shows, one of the people Bondy brought on board was Patrick Spence, an experienced producer of true-crime dramas. The producers and their team spent a year compiling research on a case that dated back to 2000. That’s when former subpostmaster Alan Bates first told the Post Office that its Horizon software appeared to be creating shortfalls in his branch’s accounts. He wasn’t alone. More than 900 other former sub-postmasters, dozens of whom were sent to prison, were falsely accused of theft, and the prosecutions continued amid growing evidence that the software was to blame.

Many lives were ruined and four suicides have been linked to the scandal. Others died before their names were cleared. And yet the story always flew under the radar, never generating the kind of coverage – and public outcry – that might help the campaigners get what they had so long sought: exonerations, proper compensation, an explanation of what went wrong, and executives being held to account. But then something came along that many believed to be extinct in the age of streamers, YouTube and social media: a traditional TV show that got the nation talking – and extremely angry.

It struck me straight away that it should be a TV drama. I started making calls to all the key people” — Natasha Bondy

When writer Gwyneth Hughes was hired to create the screenplay she was handed an 830,000-word document, the product of that year of research. “It was a record of everything you needed to know about the scandal,” says Spence. Condensing nearly 25 years of struggle into four hours of TV required tough choices over what to include. “We spent a lot of time in front of whiteboards, working out the structure of each episode and the bare bones of the story. It was to Alan’s genuine frustration that we had to leave so much out,” Spence says.

It seemed logical that the drama would centre around its indefatigable titular hero [played by Toby Jones], who founded the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance in 2009 and has been locked in battle with the Post Office ever since. Although his cause had largely failed to capture the public imagination he’d had some significant gains – in 2019 Bates and 554 other former subpostmasters were victorious in the High Court, which ruled that Horizon was faulty (most of the subsequent compensation package went on legal fees). Around 40 former subpostmasters later had convictions overturned, including Jo Hamilton, whose story was also featured in the drama. She was prosecuted for a shortfall of £36,000 and encouraged to plead guilty to false accounting.

Despite the launch of a major public inquiry in 2022, the scandal generated little public interest – until Mr Bates vs the Post Office became a ratings smash, watched by around 14 million people to date. “Twelve hours before its broadcast I was wondering if anyone would watch it,” says Spence. He emailed his team to urge them not to be disheartened if the initial viewing figures were poor. “I told them that I believed the show was moving, important and entertaining enough to find an audience, but it might take a few weeks for word of mouth to spread.”

The impact was immediate, however, leading to the Post Office scandal dominating UK front pages for several days. Five days after broadcast the Metropolitan Police said that it was investigating the Post Office over possible fraud offences, the first time it had said anything publicly about the scandal. A few days later the government committed to overturning the convictions of over 900 former subpostmasters, with prime minister Rishi Sunak promising swift exonerations and compensation. “It was a surreal period,” says Bondy. “There’s no other word for it.”

We knew we could put that suffering on screen in a way that viewers could empathise with and feel” – Patrick Spence

“The volume of activity was intense,” says Spence. “It’s a career high-point for any drama producer to be a front page story on any newspaper anywhere… but I found it quite overwhelming and frightening. There was a fear that in an interview I might say something wrong, somehow turn the story the wrong way.”

The show’s success had a particularly big impact on Paula Vennells, the former managing director of the Post Office who has denied accusations that she knew about the wrongful convictions and orchestrated efforts to cover them up. Before the broadcast, an online petition calling for her to be stripped of her CBE had around 1,000 signatures. By the time she agreed to hand back her honour on 9th January, 1.2 million people had signed it. Spence says that it was never the team’s intention to create a “witch-hunt” against Vennells, portrayed in the drama by actor Lia Williams, and that the story was also about government failure. “Don’t get us wrong, we think she’s got to be held to account, but we never imagined that the focus [of public anger] would become so much on her,” he says. Yet the show had taken on a momentum of its own. “You can’t control a wave that big,” he adds.

Vennells faced public questioning for the first time on 22nd May 2024. At the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry she apologised to the victims but denied that she knew the Fujitsu software was faulty while the prosecutions were racking up.

Some journalists found it bittersweet that a TV show had achieved what 15 years of reporting had failed to do – move the scandal to the top of the political agenda. “It’s because it took you inside the sub-postmasters’ homes,” replies Spence when asked why the drama succeeded. “You can read an article in which Jo Hamilton talks about how frightening it was seeing the figures on the Horizon screen double in front of her eyes and maybe those words on a page connect with a reader or maybe they don’t. But when you see [actor] Monica Dolan staring at the screen, you see the suffering.  There’s been massive amounts of brilliant journalism on the scandal… and that’s been our guiding light, but we knew we could put that suffering on screen in a way that viewers could empathise with and feel.” Did he ever think that the show might change the course of the subpostmasters’ campaign for justice? “We knew we had a shot at it. We didn’t know that it would work quite so well.”

One repercussion of the show Bondy and Spence about which are particularly proud is that it emboldened many former subpostmasters who had never spoken publicly about their traumatic experiences to come forward for the first time – more than 50 in the first week of January alone.

They included Betty Brown, 91, who lost her life savings, around £100,000, trying to plug the gaps in her Post Office accounts caused by the flawed Horizon software. “She spent 21 years never speaking about it, not even to her own family,” says Bondy. “She shouldered such a sense of shame that she kept quiet… There are others we spoke to who, despite having their convictions overturned, said that people in their villages and towns still gave them the ‘There’s no smoke without fire’ kind of talk. But they said that since the broadcast of Mr Bates vs the Post Office that this has vanished forever. It’s been such a wonderful thing for us to hear.”

Posted on Monday, June 24th, 2024 - Categories: #54 - Jan-Mar 2024, App Issues.