Mr Bates v the Post Office is a wonderful piece of political drama, exquisitely acted and directed. More than anything, it is superbly written by Gwyneth Hughes. As for its remarkable impact, there’s always a question about why and how a scandal makes the transition from “news story of moderate interest” to “massive political priority”. Take the phone-hacking scandal. After months of reporting, it exploded beyond the pages of the Guardian and into the media at large only after one particular revelation: that Milly Dowler’s phone had been hacked by the News of the World while she was missing. The turning point was the recognition that phone hacking could affect ordinary people, not only celebrities.
Or consider the Windrush scandal: though Amelia Gentleman had reported for six months on those affected by the Home Office’s injustices, it became a cause celebre pursued by the wider media only after she published one specific story on the refusal of the then prime minister, Theresa May, to meet Caribbean heads of state to discuss the affair. Such moments in the life of a story are essentially unpredictable. May’s snub, at such a high political level, dramatically reinforced her reputation for being robotic and unempathetic, like the very Home Office over which she had presided.
The difference with Mr Bates v the Post Office is that the change in public consciousness has not come from journalism as such, but from a TV drama based on earlier reporting. It is a semi-fictionalised version of events but one, crucially, with its central truth conveyed intact: that “skint little people”, to quote the drama, were betrayed and destroyed by supposedly trustworthy institutions. Why did this story not spark mass outrage through reporting alone? Computer Weekly had pursued it since 2009, and Private Eye since 2011. Other media organisations, including the Guardian, came to the story later. The BBC broadcast a Panorama on it in 2015, and five years later put out a terrific podcast series on the story. By 2021, when the court of appeal began to “quash” postmasters’ convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting, the story had become really widely reported. And yet, even so, it was a drama that made politicians fall over themselves to try to fix the scandal’s longstanding wrongs. It was a drama that this week led to Fujitsu executives finally admitting that they had a moral obligation to contribute to compensation paid to postmasters who had effectively been punished for the company’s faulty computer system. It was a drama that led to a widely supported petition calling for the former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells to be stripped of her CBE.
What is it about the particular qualities of this scandal that only drama seemed able to fully capture? There was one early scene that exemplifies the answer for me. A sweatily panicked Monica Dolan, playing Jo Hamilton, a real post office operator in a Hampshire village, tries to balance her accounts on the dreaded Horizon system. It is late. In the darkness, the hard drive, “the thing under the desk” as she calls it, lurks – monstrous, blinking and alien, a character in its own right. Dolan embodies, with such recognisable rightness, the utter terror that perhaps most of us have at one time or another felt in the face of mysterious forces represented by “the computer”. That human fleshiness, that seemingly alive and menacing machine: these are things that journalism alone cannot achieve. Embodiment, metaphor: these are the territory of drama.
There is something else to it, too. With a tremendously light touch, Mr Bates v the Post Office explores something greater than the particular scandal it anatomises so humanely. It fixes its gaze on a much wider paradox: the feeling that all-powerful institutions, faceless, indifferent and unreachable by any human means, have the ability to control and, perhaps, ruin our lives. It shows us something else that we also instinctively know: increasingly, these all-powerful institutions are, in fact, faulty and utterly lacking in efficacy. Horizon dominated human lives. At the same time it was menacing, capricious, and malfunctioning – like the terrifying computer Hal in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The fear, the mistrust, the anger that something as supposedly reassuring as the Post Office and the British justice system might in fact turn out to be unfair and untrustworthy – the show captures a wider fear that might lurk in many of us.
Humans caught in the web of higher powers who may arbitrarily push a life of happiness and prosperity overnight into one of anguish and misery – this is the stuff of Greek tragedy, of Shakespeare: “As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods: They kill us for their sport.” The post office operators of Mr Bates v the Post Office are not the kings and princes of classic tragedy; they are “skint little people”. We are, after all, in the world of ITV, not Aeschylus. And yet there is a connection. Our current tragedy is that in the 21st century we have replaced the idea of cruel, unpredictable and all-powerful deities with our very own human-made institutions that are just as terrifying as, and rather more real than, any vengeful Greek god. There is scene in Hughes’s drama of Julie Hesmondhalgh’s character shouting at the telly as Vennells appears on the news. “It’s about the reputation of the Post Office,” says Vennells on the TV. “No it’s not” yells Hesmondhalgh, “It’s about people’s lives, you moron!” It’s both truthful (haven’t we all shouted at the telly at some point in our lives?) and metaphorically revealing. They will never answer back, and never even see you, those bright distant creatures, safe on the Mount Olympus of their disregard.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
