âThe timing was impeccableâ why it took a TV series to bring the Post Office scandal to light Post Office Horizon scandal The Guardian

pDespite a twoyear inquiry and years of campaigning it was the fourhour drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office that enabled the British public to pay proper attention to the unbelievable horrors of this storyppOne of many remarkable things about Gwyneth Hughesâs ITV series Mr Bates vs the Post Office is that the drama has become by default a show that will run and run The fourparter itself may have ended on 4 January but subsequent episodes involving reallife characters have appeared on our screens daily ever since There was for example the one where former home secretary Priti Patel made embarrassing attempts to take political centre stage or the one where a million petitioners appeared overnight and former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells gave back her CBE or the one where PO investigator Stephen Bradshaw denied âbehaving like a mafia gangsterâ to provincial subpostmasters despite some persuasive evidence to the contraryppThe greatest political dramas have the power to do this They present a reality that is so emotionally honest that it gives a moral framework not only to the events portrayed but also to everything that comes after The Horizon inquiry into the Post Office scandal which saw hundreds of subpostmasters unjustly prosecuted for fraud and theft has been in session for nearly two years there have been many years of painstaking journalistic work and nearly two decades of obdurate campaigning from those affected but still it has taken four hours of primetime television drama for the British public to pay proper attention to the unbelievable horrors of this storyppHughes has had a fivedecade career as a journalist and documentary maker as well as a creator of screen drama I asked her at the end of this tumultuous week a question that went beyond the scope of these particular events why can drama still reach the emotional places that other media canât quite accessppHer answer comes down to extremes of empathy that only drama can open up âI still love reading journalism I still love watching documentariesâ she says âBut I also know that as a documentary filmmaker the best you can do is to ask someone to recollect past events in tranquillity â As a viewer when you watch even the best documentary youâre looking at the screen and thinking âOh that poor person thatâs terribleâ But when you watch a drama youâre looking at the screen and thinking something different You are thinking âOh poor me Poor me That could be meââppHughes points to that moment in her series in which the subpostmistress Jo Hamilton played by Monica Dolan is up in the middle of the night weeping into her phone as she tries to get some answers about her account on the Horizon helpline and she sees the thousands of pounds owing double on her screen in front of her eyes âThereâs the invitation to the audience to be there as it happensâ Hughes says âTo be there when the big things happenâppâWhen you write true stories into dramatic form youâre doing something very peculiarâ she says âIn everyday lives we trundle along we go around in circles we make the same mistakes over and over again But in drama thereâs a shape In Hollywood they call it the desire line âWhat does this character want And how is he going to go about getting itââppIn this respect in Alan Bates she was gifted a protagonist to set alongside any tragic hero a reallife Hamlet from Llandudno sensing that ageold hand of fate âthe time is out of joint O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it rightâppâAlan is in some ways the most motivated man on the planetâ Hughes says âYou see him at the beginning undergo something terrible and then he makes a decision to put it right and he sticks to that for four hours in the series â and 20 years of real life behaving exactly like a Hollywood hero in his mildmannered wayâppIn terms of the impact of the series comparisons have been made with Ken Loachâs Cathy Come Home and Jimmy McGovernâs Hillsborough Were they among her inspirationsppâIâd be very wary of relating what weâve done to these greats things from the pastâ Hughes says And then with a laugh she suggests âhaving said that Dostoyevskyâs Brothers Karamazov came out of a story in his provincial paper And Dickens of course is full of stories heâd read in the newsâppOne testament to the power of the series beyond the unprecedented political and legislative response can be seen in the reaction of Hughesâs fellow political dramatists I spoke to a couple of formidable writers from different generations at the end of last week David Hare and James Graham and asked them to explain why they were on the edge of their sofas along with the rest of usppHare whose many awardwinning dramas include Stuff Happens about the road to the Iraq war and The Power of Yes about the 200708 financial crisis tells me that in one sense the explanation of the impact of Mr Bates is âflaming obvious itâs so unbelievably well written The purpose of political drama is to convey complex information painlessly There were years of research in this and it let you absorb all of it without seeming to be lectured or having anything explained in text Thatâs just sheer brilliant writingâppHare was drawn to watch the series by something he read in advance about Hughes âShe said that she felt morally compelled to quote Paula Vennells entirely accurately from what she said on public record not to make up dialogueâ he recalls âIt is so refreshing to hear a writer say that Because there is a moral problem in representing living people on screen â particularly those we are being invited to judge And the minute I read that I thought I bet her work is fantastic Which it turned out to beâppHare makes the point that we should not forget the independent journalism in Computer Weekly and Private Eye that first exposed the miscarriages of justice You couldnât do without that But drama he suggests is unique in its ability to mobilise a critical mass of public in such storiesppâThe dramas that always make the explosive impact are the ones that push a clear injustice right Thatâs not quite the kind I write but it is absolutely clear that the ones that really make an impact are the ones that right a terrible wrong Cathy Come Home would be an example I think Billy Elliot is another one which said something incredibly important about white workingclass males â and yet it wore its politics so lightlyâppHare contrasts the clear exposition of Hughesâs series with another drama of the moment âThe fact isâ he says âthat a piece of theatre canât call itself political if you donât come out understanding more than you did when you went in I came out of Oppenheimer without really understanding what Oppenheimer had done So to me itâs a politically ineffective film Because youâre none the wiser about events at the endâppJames Graham has reignited the possibilities of political drama on terrestrial TV in recent years particularly in last yearâs series Sherwood which examined the long fallout of the minersâ strike in his home village in Nottingham Among other projects Graham last year worked with Alan Bleasdale on a stage adaptation of Bleasdaleâs eradefining BBC drama Boys from the Blackstuff which had a comparable effect to Mr Bates in giving a human face to the massunemployment of the early Thatcher yearsppâWhether itâs from Ancient Greece or whether itâs Shakespeareâ Graham says âpolitical drama is about putting the individual at the forefront against a backdrop of national or social or economic forces That is as powerful now as it has been for thousands of years because you identify the human within the context of the turmoil around them On paper Mr Bates is the story of a piece of software malfunctioning The writing lets you experience the real human cost and tragedy of that wonderfully wellâppGraham has a sense that the series might mark a significant political momentppâBy accident or design the timing was impeccable Coming out at new year with that sense of a reset â but also the beginning of an election year It feels like through our news and through our drama weâre finally beginning to reconcile the many injustices of the decade of austerity of the pandemic and of the loss of faith in public institutions and public officialsâppHe suggests that for all the attention paid to social media it is blatantly illequipped for this kind of collective reckoningppâDrama just makes things human doesnât itâ he says also spontaneously referencing that scene in which Jo Hamilton watched her debt double on a Horizon screen âThe panic that induces in a whole national audience â it would be hard to find the equivalent in a tweet â or even in a Guardian long read much as I love themâppOne other positive outcome of Mr Bates is that it makes the commissioning of such dramas much more likely Hare suggests that it was telling that the series was on ITV and not the BBC âbecause the BBC drama department entirely lost its bottle under former chairman Richard Sharp â he made it very clear that he was not interested in this kind of campaigning work Maybe this will mean that executives rethink that agendaâppGraham agrees that it makes an unimpeachable case for more of this kind of programming â drama that can change the law âWithout getting on my soapbox it reminds us of the value and importance of public service broadcasting at a time when itâs under threat on several fronts When you consume a modern streaming drama itâs quite a private experience you watch it whenever you want It doesnât therefore generate these moments where millions of people watch the same thing and come into work the next day and talk about it and create this national conversation People keep telling us thatâs dying it really isnât ââppHughes has been overwhelmed by the way her drama has taken on so many newsworthy sequels of its own âIt feels like weâve done our bitâ she says âThere are so many storylines to follow particularly all the stuff with Fujitsu the maker of Horizon which was not within out remitâ That snowball effect also helps to salves her writerâs conscience âI managed to get eight individual stories into the four hours but there were hundreds more This week journalists have been starting to interview more of those people And thatâs so fantastic because all the stories need to be heard equally I always felt terrible about people I had to leave out to fit the structure of the pieceâppIf Hughesâs inbox is anything to go by the drama may indeed be the first of many as Graham suggestsppâAll of us on the team have emails full of people going âIâve got a story for you â and if anything itâs worse than the Post Officeââ Hughes says âI think a key reason it has been a runaway success is that an awful lot of people in this country feel in their own small way as though they have been going through something similar They feel like those people hanging onto the wretched Horizon helpline which they used to call the âhell lineâ They feel unheardâppThis is the archive of 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