Mr Bates vs The Post Office: How a TV Drama Shook up Britain – In Just a Week
The impact of a hit TV show has always been difficult to define. Should it be judged on viewership? The critics’ response to it, or how many awards it wins? What about how often it’s been memed, or the themes that resonated with social media users? This month, a UK TV show went far beyond all of this, when a dramatisation of a real-life British scandal was so effective in portraying a lesser-known miscarriage of justice to the public, that in just a week it moved more than a million people to sign a petition calling for justice for the accused, and prompted the British government to announce a new law.
That TV show is Mr Bates vs The Post Office, a four-part drama that was broadcast for four consecutive nights from 1 January. As the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason put it on Wednesday, “Just a week ago the ITV drama … was still on. Here we are, seven days later, and the prime minister stands in front of a packed House of Commons, and says the government will put forward a new law… How extraordinary. The power of drama. The momentum it has generated, the public opinion it has shifted, the government it has galvanised.”
The series is a semi-fictionalised account of the Post Office Horizon scandal, in which post office branch managers across the UK were wrongly accused of theft and false accounting for almost 20 years from 1999, with more than 700 being prosecuted. The issue was actually the result of faulty software in the Post Office’s centralised computer accounting system, called Horizon, which wrongly made it look like money was missing from their branches.
When those accused pointed out that it was an issue with the software, rather than any illegal activity on their part, they were sacked, forced to repay the often huge “losses” and even sent to jail, which included the incarceration of one pregnant woman. The results have since been called the “most widespread miscarriage of justice in UK history” and the true, devastating toll was on the thousands of innocent people involved and their families: they went bankrupt, they lost their homes, marriages split up, and their mental health was destroyed.
For 25 years, a group of these workers – led by Alan Bates (played stoically by Toby Jones in the series) – has fought to clear their names. By 2020, a few of them slowly began to have their convictions quashed, and an inquiry was announced in 2021, but it appeared to be stalling. Then, on the first day of the new year in 2024, British TV viewers switched on a new primetime drama in their millions – 9.2 million, ITV confirms, have now watched – where the decades-long tormented lives of the Post Office workers were taken from the headlines and translated into a shocking yet moving retelling of the true story.
The drama itself was pitched perfectly, tonally and emotionally, by the writer Gwyneth Hughes, which was a key factor in drawing in such a large audience. And while eyes might usually glaze over at the words “computer system errors” or “false accounting”, for the first time for a sizeable amount of the British population, the David-and-Goliath-esque scandal was humanised. The emotional toll was played out on screen by some of the UK’s well-loved faces, like Jones, Monica Dolan and Julie Hesmondhalgh, as they portrayed so precisely just how the events had the power to ruin so many lives.
Hughes said that she created this “direct visceral appeal” to run throughout her drama: “It’s for reaching out across the stage or through the screen, grabbing you by the throat and saying: care about me. And when it works, it’s incredibly powerful. In this case, it’s been put to the service of this terrible event in our country’s history. If you want to really get people’s attention, tell them a story. And in this case, a true story.”
Hughes’ story did more than just attract attention; it galvanised action. The Post Office CEO at the time of the scandal, Paula Vennells, was played so convincingly in the show by Lia Williams, that within days of the finale on 4 January, more than a million people signed a petition demanding she hand back her CBE, given to her by Queen Elizabeth II in 2019. On 9 January, she did just that. And a day later, the Government stepped in. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said he would bring in a new law to “swiftly exonerate and compensate victims”.
