This month there have been a few reminders of the power of culture. One of the starkest has been watching former Post Office boss Paula Vennells giving evidence to the Post Office inquiry.
Subpostmasters have been fighting for years to right the wrongs of more than 900 prosecutions because of the faulty Horizon IT system. But it was an ITV drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, that supercharged the campaign and ignited the righteous anger of the whole country.
The brilliantly scripted series humanised the victims beyond the shocking numbers and made people ask — what if it happened to me?
It is little surprise that a drama into the infected blood scandal between the Seventies and Nineties is in the works, in the week that the inquiry reported its damning verdict. Double Bafta winner Peter Moffat is writing the show for ITV about the health scandal and it will be no surprise if that has a similar effect.
It is not just TV. In the theatre, Grenfell: In the Words of Survivors devastated audiences at the National Theatre and then transferred to New York where it was given an extraordinary reception.
Then this month, a judge said that “people need to watch” award-winning playwright James Graham’s new play Punch while sentencing a man for knocking someone unconscious. Punch is based on Jacob Dunne’s memoir of killing trainee paramedic James Hodgkinson with a single punch while he was drunk in Nottingham.
The story provided a salutary lesson in the unintended consequences of random acts of violence, but also it offered hope. Dunne had a “restorative justice” meeting with Hodgkinson’s parents, and he went on to campaign against violence.
Adam Penford, the artistic director of Nottingham Playhouse, contacted Dunne because, he wrote in The Stage, he thought “theatre could play a role in his campaigning against violence and for education and prison reform”.
Graham added that the play was galvanising the local community, the stage, courts, MPs and local authorities. One MP, Labour’s Lilian Greenwood, told her fellow members to see it and asked the room about restorative justice’s role in the prison system.
Another theatre company, called Lung Theatre, specialises in campaigning work including about the prison system. In Woodhill, it looked at the true story of a number of prisoners who had killed themselves in the Milton Keynes prison and the systemic failures that had led to it.
As well as a wrenching, gut punch of a show that has the audience thinking differently about the prison system, Lung backed a campaign with the families called #NoMoreDeaths and asked viewers to sign a petition and letters to the Justice Secretary.
It is determined to do more than just put on an affecting show.
It is not their only campaigning work, and another that sticks in my mind is Who Cares? which focused on hidden young carers (there are estimated 700,000 aged 17 or younger looking after family members, often under the radar of school or other professionals) and telling their story.
They toured the country and even performed in the House of Lords, leaving a lasting legacy for the audiences and the carers — including helping nearly 200 unidentified carers get support — and making a change for the better.
It is hugely important that these works continue to go to places news stories and statistics cannot, and they continue to show that the power of art can manifest itself in all sorts of ways, some of them life-changing.
