There is a moment in “Mr Bates vs. the Post Office” that makes you as a viewer go “it cannot be real” —only for you then to remind yourself that what you are watching is a true story.
Subpostmaster Jo Hamilton (Monica Dolan) — a small business owner who deals with the services and finances of their Post Office — finds that there is an accounting financial discrepancy in her computer of around £2,000 ($2,523). She cannot make sense of how the system came up with such a figure, so she rings a work helpline in a state of alarm. She follows the helpline’s instructions, thinking that the figure will go down to zero, but then, unexpectedly, the apparent discrepancy doubles to £4,100 right in front of her eyes.
Unconscionably, even though it is clear to viewers that this error is caused by the IT Horizon system running her Post Office account, the helpline caller doesn’t help her solve the problem. And then, she is told by the helpline that she is liable to cover any shortfall because of her self-employment contract, and will need to pay the outstanding balance herself.
In total, Hamilton was falsely accused by the Post Office of stealing £36,000.
“When I heard that for the first time, I thought ‘this cannot be true,'” says screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes, who spoke to Hamilton and used her story for “Mr Bates vs The Post Office,” a four-part series premiering on PBS’ Masterpiece on April 7. Yet her story is only one example of the injustice thousands of self-employed subpostmasters, who helped run Post Office services across communities all across the country, faced. Whilst the series follows the stories of eight people whose lives were turned upside down, viewers are then told in the final moments of the show’s final episode that over a 15-year period, at least 3,500 subpostmasters were falsely accused by the Post Office for financial losses that never actually happened. Around 700 people were prosecuted and more than 200 were sent to prison. And four subpostmasters took their own lives.
“I still can’t believe that this kind of thing could happen here in Britain, where we pride ourselves on decency and fair play,” Hughes tells PvNew. As well as the overwhelming hardships the subpostmasters had in trying to clear their names, a particular aspect of the story that feels particularly cruel is that these people are frequently at the heart of their community, right down to small villages, often helping older people receive their pensions.
When asked for a comment about the series and its revelations, a Post Office spokesperson wrote: “We have consistently welcomed the ITV ‘Mr Bates vs The Post Office’ drama and have publicly praised it for encouraging an additional 1,000 people to come forward to seek redress.”
The Post Office scandal has been reported in the British press for well over a decade. In 2019, a High Court case ruled that a group of Post Office subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted, and ruled that the Horizon system, which was software provided by Fujitsu, had bugs and errors. But “Mr Bates,” which aired on ITV in the U.K. at the start of January, resulted in the issue dominating the British news agenda for days after its original transmission. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a new law that would exonerate all those who had been convicted and announced compensation.
Paula Vennells, a former CEO of the Post Office who is a character in the drama, was stripped of her CBE award by King Charles for “bringing the honors system into disrepute.” And Alan Bates, a former subpostmaster who spearheaded a campaign for justice and is the primary focus of the series, portrayed by Toby Jones, became an immediate household name.
“There is absolutely no doubt that drama has changed lives,” says Nick Wallis, a journalist and author who has reported on the scandal for over a decade, and was a consultant on the show. “They have created something which so infuriated the public, it rose up their political priorities, and the government was forced to respond. Everything that you have seen has spun out since over the last three months, I would say 90% of that is due to the public anger generated by the drama.”
“The people who made that drama can go to their graves knowing that they have changed history,” continues Wallis. “The mass exoneration of more than 900 people in one act of legislation will be taught in history books in a hundred, two hundred years’ time. It’s that big a deal.”
“Mr Bates” resonated with the public so much that it has also remained the most-watched show of 2024 so far, with 14 million viewers so far having watched the series, according to broadcaster ITV — which is roughly 20% of the U.K. population. Yet, despite being given a primetime billing, internal expectations of ratings beforehand were not that high. “We thought we made something rather little,” says Hughes. “And our boss Patrick Spence, the executive producer, sent us an email the day before transmission saying ‘Look, now let’s not get our hopes up.’
“He said this classic TV thing of, ‘It will find an audience,’ which is TV-speak for nobody’s going to watch it. The next day, he took the call about the ratings, and couldn’t believe it. He thought he misheard.”
“Mr Bates” is an emotional and often rage-inducing watch, but what also stands out from watching it is how it succinctly unpacks a complex decade long story with a factual underpinning not too dissimilar to documentary. Hughes, a documentary director and former news journalist, was in close, frequent contact with those affected to capture the nuances of the legal case and the arduous efforts to clear victim’s names, whilst making the series accessible to those who had not followed the scandal beforehand. “It was really quite a journalistic exercise,” says Hughes. “I’m very committed to say that if you say it’s a true story, it better be. That’s the contract you’re making with the audience.”
Yet a limit of journalism and documentary making is that it can be a challenge for the viewer to know what it was truly like for the victim at the time when it occurred. As it was a drama, the emotional toll on the victims was something that “Mr Bates” could explore. “The reason why it resonated was because it took cameras into people’s homes, into the courtrooms and into the Post Offices,” says Wallis. “It pointed it at their faces when they were going through the very worst times of their lives.”
In the U.K., “Mr Bates” was also well-timed. The original plan was to air the drama this May, but Hughes pushed for an earlier broadcast, worried that a later one might mean that an ongoing public inquiry into the scandal could unearth more details that the drama itself hadn’t explored, or that an attempted criminal prosecution would derail the show if a Post Office manager were charged (currently, no current or former manager of the Post Office has faced a criminal charge).
As a result, “Mr Bates” feels like an incomplete story, but in a way that galvanizes the viewer to the issue at hand. The series shined a light on what remains unresolved at a time, such as at that time only just over 90 wrongful convictions had been overturned, as well as concerns surrounding the bureaucracy of compensation for victims, with a recent report that said only 20% of the budget set aside for compensation had so far paid out. The Times of London reported that 26 subpostmasters have died without seeing justice.
“I think we’re in the third phase of the scandal,” Wallis says. “The first phase is the actual prosecutions of innocent people. The second phase is the cover up, and the third phase is the compensation debacle. It’s appalling how little money has been offered to so many subpostmasters.”
“The overall amount of damages which had been offered to subpostmasters, and which some subpostmasters are settling for because they’ve just had enough, is simply nowhere near putting them close to the situation they’ve been in,” he continues. “It is scandalous the way that this adversarial approach to compensation is being propagated, through the various difficult-to-understand compensation schemes. And there are finally signs that the government is getting a grip on this, but it’s four years too late.”
In regards to the compensation schemes, a Post Office spokesperson said: “We’re acutely aware of the impact of the scandal on people’s lives and we are working closely with the U.K. Government to provide full and fair financial redress as swiftly as possible. Offers of more than over £179 million have been made to around 2,800 Postmasters, the majority of which have been agreed and paid. Each scheme incorporates assessments by independent experts with reasonable legal costs covered for claimants who are, rightly, able to challenge their offers if they wish.”
Whilst being a British story, there’s something about “Mr Bates” that feels surprisingly universal. “These things are happening everywhere,” Hughes says. “People are at the mercy of soulless bureaucracies and bunker mentalities in big corporations and government departments that end up victimizing the little guys.
“It seems clear now that we weren’t doing this little story. We were doing, rather, a big one.”
