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, which saw hundreds of subpostmasters unjustly prosecuted for fraud and theft, 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 primetime television drama for the British public to pay proper attention to the unbelievable horrors of this story.
