On paper, it would be easy to dismiss the Horizon IT scandal as a dull bureaucratic nightmare. The wrongdoing centres around a clunky, bug ridden computer program created by a multinational corporation. Dramatically, the story might be challenging to translate – never mind a difficult sell in terms of expected audience appeal.
Mr Bates vs The Post Office sidesteps this by emphasising the emotional, physical and financial toll of the scandal on more than 700 ordinary working people. In the show, longstanding branch managers who are shown to be important members of their local communities become social pariahs overnight. Their children are bullied at school, their shops are graffitied with abuse, and due to criminal convictions many of them struggle to secure other work. The stress causes the postmasters to struggle with their mental health after being forced to pay out thousands of pounds of their own money to make up for shortfalls declared by Horizon. As a result, several attempt to take their own lives. Over four consecutive nights, an audience that grew from 3.9 million to an eventual 15 million watched on in horror as these characters’ life savings were depleted and their houses repossessed.
These regional stories of indignity and injustice moved over a million people to sign a petition requesting that Paula Vennells, the former head of the Post Office, hand back her CBE. This happened within days of Mr Bates vs The Post Office airing. The show’s impact has led to legal change, too. Following the show’s broadcast, then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak discussed the Horizon IT scandal in parliament, describing it as “one of the great miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history.” He introduced legislation to ensure the victims would be “swiftly exonerated and compensated.”
Television with this level of impact is not unprecedented, but it is rare. When Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home, about a young mother who becomes homeless and ends up being torn away from her children, was broadcast on BBC One in 1966, it brought the harsh reality of Britain’s housing crisis to a much wider audience. It was watched by 12 million people, and brought awareness to the newly launched charity for the homeless, Shelter. Public outrage led to political change, with local councils revising their policies on separating families.
More recently, Channel 4’s It’s a Sin, which revisited the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, resulted in a rise in HIV testing kits being ordered, as reported by the Terrence Higgins Trust. And earlier this year, Netflix’s Adolescence, a four part series about a teenage boy arrested on suspicion of murdering a female classmate, has sparked widespread debate about the misogynistic content young people are accessing online. Its co-creator Jack Thorne has called for legislation to restrict social media access.
TV is not journalism. It doesn’t have to be. This year, BAFTA is honouring ITV’s brave, British broadcasting, and celebrating the kind of terrestrial television with the power to drive change. As entertainment choices have exploded, British public service television has faced pressure to compete among the crowd. And yet it’s in championing ‘provincial’ stories like this one – specific, domestic and with a political point of view – that showmakers can reach further beyond their own locality than ever.
