Alan Bates’s campaign against the Post Office over the Horizon scandal might never have got off the ground without a few moments of luck and the availability of Fenny Compton village hall in Warwickshire.
But the journey to bring the story on to ITV for New Year as Mr Bates vs the Post Office was equally precarious and relied on a webinar, a bike rack and plenty more village halls.
Nick Wallis had started covering the issue as a local BBC reporter after a Computer Weekly investigation broke the story in 2009, and had worked closely with Bates to get the news out to a wider audience.
As the campaign gathered momentum, he began working with David Godwin, a leading literary agent, to detail the scandal in a book. Yet after three years of trying to raise some interest from the large publishing houses, they were at a loss.
By this point, the story had been seeping into the public consciousness for some time. In 2015, Wallis had already helped prove the subpostmasters were telling the truth with the BBC’s Panorama team, and had detailed the high court battle in 2019 where the campaigners forced the Post Office to admit the Horizon IT system was not, in fact, robust.
The first turning point came when another campaigning journalist, Louise Tickle, invited Wallis to take part in a webinar about law and justice during a Covid lockdown in 2021. It was chaired by Bath Publishing’s co-founder, David Chaplin.
He said: “Nick was only on for a couple of minutes but the next day he rings up and he says, ‘I’ve got a book idea – you’re a publisher. I haven’t been able to get anybody else interested – do you fancy it?’”
Chaplin, whose company specialised in legal publishing, had read about the scandal in Private Eye, and immediately grasped the story’s importance. “Despite being a tiny legal publisher, we knew we had to take it on. It was just such an injustice,” he said.
The manuscript was delivered a few months later, after the court of appeal had overturned 47 convictions, but there was another hitch. “We had a barrage of legal letters from the people involved, both still working [at the Post Office] and some who weren’t,” Chaplin said. “From all of the key characters.
“Our libel lawyer, who’s brilliant, said that when the letters get shorter you know you’re winning, and they got shorter and shorter.”
Wallis said Bath Publishing had been “crucial”. “They have been marvellous,” he said.
Publication of The Great Post Office Scandal was merely the first step – bookshops stocked the book in modest numbers, but Wallis had built up an army of subscribers to his newsletter about the scandal, and 5% of book sales go to a fund that supports victims and their families in hardship.
Chaplin said: “We started doing book-reading events around the country – renting village halls and theatres. Nick would start talking about it with a subpostmaster, and by the end the whole audience was enraged.
“That’s the sort of rage that I think is now writ large across the country. “But now, instead of 100 people in a room, there’s 9 million people watching on telly.”
By this point, Wallis and the accused subpostmasters had had some more luck. Natasha Bondy, the co-owner of a small independent TV production company called Little Gem, had read a magazine article about the scandal and got in touch with Wallis and Bates. Little Gem is better known for documentaries such as Paul Merson: Football, Gambling and Me. “But the first thing I said [to co-owner Ben Gale] was, ‘This should be a drama.’”
Wallis met Little Gem just before lockdown, and Gale said the detail he gave and the impact it had on people’s lives “confirmed Natasha’s initial instinct that it should be a drama”. As a production company specialising in factual programmes, Bondy and Gale felt it was unlikely they would be commissioned to make a primetime drama. So Gale suggested that they contact the then ITV Studios creative director, Patrick Spence, whom the pair had admired for his football film Marvellous (which had starred Toby Jones). Gale did not really know Spence, but had “shared a bike rack” and cycling small talk with him at the offices where Spence used to work.
“I sent him a two-line email saying, “Patrick, I know we previously chatted bikes, but we’ve got an idea we think could be a fantastic factual drama; can we give you a call and talk you through it?’”
Spence responded and ITV Studios came on board during lockdown as co-producer, and then ITV commissioned the show and an accompanying documentary.
One of their most important decisions was to allow script editor Imogen Greenberg and one of the executive producers, Joe Williams, to create a 130,000-word “bible” on the saga for the team and writer to work from.
Bondy explained that it was colour-coded, with one colour for Bates, another for IT, and so on, and was “the most astonishing piece of work”, with every meeting, select committee and email documented.
The pair are humble about the part they played. Bondy says: “This story is about people whose lives have been heartbreakingly destroyed. It’s amazing what has happened [with the drama] but it will be even more amazing when those people in that group get the money they are owed – that was their money. And we’re not there yet.”
