One of many remarkable things about Gwyneth Hughes’s ITV series Mr Bates vs the Post Office is that the drama has become, by default, a show that will run and run. The four-parter itself may have ended on 4 January but subsequent episodes, involving real-life 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 “behaving like a mafia gangster” to provincial sub-postmasters, despite some persuasive evidence to the contrary.
The 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 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 prime-time television drama for the British public to pay proper attention to the unbelievable horrors of this story.
Hughes has had a five-decade 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 can’t quite access?
Her answer comes down to extremes of empathy that only drama can open up. “I still love reading journalism, I still love watching documentaries,” she says. “But I also know that as a documentary filmmaker the best you can do is to ask someone to recollect past events in tranquillity … As a viewer, when you watch even the best documentary, you’re looking at the screen and thinking, ‘Oh, that poor person, that’s terrible’. But when you watch a drama, you’re looking at the screen, and thinking something different. You are thinking ‘Oh, poor me! Poor me! That could be me!’”
Hughes points to that moment in her series in which the sub-postmistress 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. “There’s the invitation to the audience to be there as it happens,” Hughes says. “To be there when the big things happen.”
“When you write true stories into dramatic form, you’re doing something very peculiar,” she says. “In everyday lives we trundle along, we go around in circles, we make the same mistakes over and over again. But in drama there’s a shape. In Hollywood they call it the desire line: ‘What does this character want? And how is he going to go about getting it?’”
In this respect, in Alan Bates, she was gifted a protagonist to set alongside any tragic hero, a real-life Hamlet from Llandudno sensing that age-old hand of fate: “the time is out of joint, O cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right”.
“Alan, is, in some ways, the most motivated man on the planet,” Hughes says. “You 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 films – and 20 years of real life] behaving exactly like a Hollywood hero in his mild-mannered way.”
In terms of the impact of the series, comparisons have been made with Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home, and Jimmy McGovern’s Hillsborough. Were they among her inspirations?
“I’d be very wary of relating what we’ve done to these greats things from the past,” Hughes says. And then, with a laugh, she suggests, “having said that, Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov came out of a story in his provincial paper. And Dickens, of course, is full of stories he’d read in the news.”
One testament to the power of the series, beyond the unprecedented political and legislative response, can be seen in the reaction of Hughes’s 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 us.
Hare, whose many award-winning dramas include Stuff Happens, about the road to the Iraq war, and The Power of Yes, about the 2007-8 financial crisis, tells me that in one sense the explanation of the impact of Mr Bates is “flaming obvious: it’s 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. That’s just sheer brilliant writing.”
Hare was drawn to watch the series by something he read in advance about Hughes. “She said that she felt morally compelled to quote Paula Vennells entirely accurately from what she said on public record, not to make up dialogue,” he recalls. “It is so refreshing to hear a writer say that. Because there is a moral problem in representing living people on screen – 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 be.”
Hare 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 couldn’t do without that. But drama, he suggests, is unique in its ability to mobilise a critical mass of public in such stories.
“The dramas that always make the explosive impact are the ones that push a clear injustice, right? That’s 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 working-class males – and yet it wore its politics so lightly.”
Hare contrasts the clear exposition of Hughes’s series with another drama of the moment. “The fact is,” he says, “that a piece of theatre can’t call itself political if you don’t 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, it’s a politically ineffective film. Because you’re none the wiser about events at the end.”
James Graham has reignited the possibilities of political drama on terrestrial TV in recent years, particularly in last year’s series Sherwood, which examined the long fallout of the miners’ strike in his home village in Nottingham. Among other projects, Graham last year worked with Alan Bleasdale on a stage adaptation of Bleasdale’s era-defining BBC drama Boys from the Blackstuff, which had a comparable effect to Mr Bates in giving a human face to the mass-unemployment of the early Thatcher years.
“Whether it’s from Ancient Greece or whether it’s Shakespeare,” Graham says, “political 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 well.”
Graham has a sense that the series might mark a significant political moment.
“By accident or design, the timing was impeccable. Coming out [at new year], with that sense of a reset – but also the beginning of an election year. It feels like through our news, and through our drama, we’re 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 officials.”
He suggests that for all the attention paid to social media, it is blatantly ill-equipped for this kind of collective reckoning.
“Drama just makes things human doesn’t it?” he says, also spontaneously referencing that scene in which Jo Hamilton watched her debt double on a Horizon screen. “The panic that induces in a whole national audience – it would be hard to find the equivalent in a tweet – or even in a Guardian long read, much as I love them.”
One 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, “because the BBC drama department entirely lost its bottle under [former chairman] Richard Sharp – he made it very clear that he was not interested in this kind of campaigning work. Maybe this will mean that executives rethink that agenda.”
Graham agrees that it makes an unimpeachable case for more of this kind of programming – drama that can change the law. “Without getting on my soapbox, it reminds us of the value and importance of public service broadcasting at a time when it’s under threat on several fronts. When you consume a modern streaming drama it’s quite a private experience, you watch it whenever you want. It doesn’t 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 that’s dying, it really isn’t …”
Hughes has been overwhelmed by the way her drama has taken on so many newsworthy sequels of its own. “It feels like we’ve done our bit,” she says. “There are so many [storylines] to follow, particularly all the stuff with Fujitsu [the maker of Horizon], which was not within out remit.” That snowball effect also helps to salves her writer’s conscience. “I 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 that’s 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 piece.”
If Hughes’s inbox is anything to go by, the drama may indeed be the first of many, as Graham suggests.
“All of us on the team have emails full of people going, ‘I’ve got a story for you – and if anything, it’s worse than the Post Office’,” Hughes says. “I 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 ‘hell line’. They feel unheard.”
