It’s been quite the fortnight hasn’t it? From our sofas on January 1, we listlessly raised the remote to tune in to ITV’s new drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office. I think I’ve read about that story? we said, as we plated up our New Year’s Day Deliveroo. It’s got Toby Jones in it, I like him. You know, that bloke from the metal detector thing. OK, let’s watch that.
Fast, very fast, forward to this week, and at the time of writing the organisation’s former CEO Paula Vennels has agreed to hand back her CBE, 50 more victims of the scandal are reported to have come forward, the Metropolitan Police has announced it is investigating potential fraud offences in relation to “monies recovered from sub-postmasters as a result of prosecutions or civil actions”, and the Prime Minister has announced the fast-tracking of new primary legislation to overturn the remaining 800-odd unsafe convictions of postmasters whose lives have been ruined by what looks a lot like a pathetic exercise in spiralling corporate face-saving (lawyers pls check).
After 15 (!) years of exhausting campaigning on the part of Bates and the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance, and reporting on the faulty Horizon system, especially by Computer Weekly journalists Rebecca Thomson and Karl Flinders, and elsewhere Nick Wallis – as well as a full-length edition of Panorama on the story that aired in 2020 (and which the Covid-obsessed country more or less completely ignored) – it’s a TV drama that has finally incited sufficient public rage for the people in power to pay attention.
This, then, is what drama can do. It can effect change.
The phenomenon has precedent, both historic and recent. Cathy Come Home, Ken Loach and Jeremy Sandford’s devastating 1966 drama about a young couple descending into homelessness, directly inspired the forming of the charity Crisis one year later.
Just one day after the first episode was aired of Russell T. Davies’ It’s a Sin in 2021, the Terrence Higgins Trust saw a 30 per cent rise in calls to its THT Direct helpline, and a record surge in HIV testing. A year later it reported that traffic to its website had doubled. Michaela Coel’s exquisite 2020 comedy-drama I May Destroy You irrevocably changed public discourse around sexual consent.
Why? Because they were stories. And stories are what we feed on. A TV drama, a play, a novel; when well-crafted, they have a direct line to our imaginations, to our hearts. They make us happy, they make us livid, they galvanise, because unlike a documentary, which can only tell you what happened, a drama can show you; it can go into the homes of the people involved, depict seemingly first-hand their bewilderment, their desperation, their shame.
Which is why it’s so alarming to hear from the Mr Bates vs The Post Office programme-makers that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make this kind of show at all.
“These kinds of four-part, very British, thoughtful dramas are massively at threat because distributors worry that it is less likely that they will recoup their investment than they would from an international thriller with lots of episodes,” said producer Patrick Spence this week.
Production costs are rising but budgets are either staying stagnant or dropping as production companies struggle to balance the books. Reliance is growing on sales partners – distributors – which prefer to back projects that can be sold into the maximum number of global markets (there’s a reason why the wordless Mr Bean made Rowan Atkinson a gajillionaire).
“There is a huge possibility that shows like Mr Bates will not be made in the future,” Spence went on. “Not because TV commissioners don’t want them, but because they can’t afford them.”
The show’s writer, Gwyneth Hughes, revealed that as well as having to sacrifice storylines to slim the show down, members of the cast including Jones, who plays Bates, agreed to work for below market rates to ensure that the production came in on its estimated £8m budget.
They knew instinctively how important it could be. But we cannot rely on (mostly) already underpaid creatives to shoulder the cost burden of something that has such a vital fundamental value.
The micro is that ripple-effect shows like Mr Bates vs The Post Office will become even fewer and farther between. The macro is that creative storytelling of all kinds is under threat in this country, due to now-years of chronic, systematic underfunding that continues apace. This week also saw the news that Somerset County Council has voted to cut 100 per cent of its direct grants to arts organisations, despite cogent arguments that every £1 of those grants brings in £15 of investment to the county.
It’s just one of hundreds, thousands, of deeply frustrating, determinedly short-sighted hackings at something that isn’t just proven to improve health and wellbeing outcomes and boost the economy, but is also, as Mary Beard wrote this week in response to the Mr Bates drama, “part of the armory of public conscience and consciousness”.
“Good democracy NEEDS good drama, good fiction and good story telling (not just as an optional extra),” she said. Quite. But where is it going to come from?
£50m a year whipped away by the Arts Council from London’s arts organisations over the next three years. Rishi Sunak’s offensive on “low-value” (WTF does that mean?) degree courses. The 50 per cent funding cut to arts subjects in Higher Education. The massive decline in the number of arts students and teachers – up to a fifth in some subjects – following a decade of underinvestment and reforms that funnel pupils away from arts subjects towards “traditional” academic subjects.
All this is adding up to a near future in which the people equipped to tell these important stories (and those we deem less ‘important’, which have their own undeniable value in, say, making us laugh) are not only much fewer but also nearly all privately educated, because they’re the only people who have either the access or the financial buffer to do it. It is enraging. Maybe someone should make a drama about it.
What the Culture Editor did this week
The Enfield Haunting, Ambassador's Theatre
This limp stage adaptation of the celebrated British poltergeist case fails completely to recognise what's actually interesting about the case, and leaves its actors (with the exception of Catherine Tate, who does an admirable job as a woman just trying to hold everything together when by rights she'd lose both her temper and her mind) high and dry with a flat script and a near-total lack of characterisation.
Listen to the Standard Theatre Podcast from Sunday January 14 to hear my review.
Silent Witness, BBC iPlayer
Why? I haven't watched it in well over a decade, and never without my Mum, but this week, possibly after the overwhelming rage induced by Mr Bates..., I needed something predictable but sufficiently well-crafted to give me a shiver but not disturb my sleep. I've alighted on season 26 and I'm enjoying both the ridiculous exposition (is it real science? Who knows?) and the bonkers storylines. There's value in that.
