The writer of the ITV drama about a scandal that ruined hundreds of Post Office workers’ lives has said she is “completely astounded” by the response over the past week.
Gwyneth Hughes, who spent three years working on the four-part drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office, said the team behind it were gratified and amazed, and “the postmasters are ecstatic”.
The response has included a statement in parliament on Monday and more than 1 million members of the public signing a petition demanding the former Post Office boss Paula Vennells be stripped of her CBE.
Hughes said: “None of us expected this. I thought it was quite a niche story which would get respectable viewing figures but I was completely wrong.”
But, she added, it was not a personal triumph. “I’m thrilled about it on every level, but it’s been a massive team effort, a team that includes hundreds of postmasters.”
Between 1999 and 2015, the Post Office accused about 3,500 operators of theft, fraud and false accounting based on information from its Horizon IT system installed in the late 1990s. More than 700 were prosecuted, despite the Post Office knowing from 2010 that there were faults in the software.
The Skipton-based writer was aware of news stories about the Horizon computer system when ITV asked her to write a drama about it.
“It was really up my street – ordinary people outside London. My early conversations with postmasters were on Zoom because we were still in the pandemic, but as soon as it was possible to get on the road I went trailing all round the country, all sort of out of the way places, to meet these really lovely people, not a single one of whom deserves what’s happened to them.”
She concentrated on the stories of eight operators of 555 who eventually joined civil litigation against the Post Office. As well as powerful human stories, Hughes “crashed into massive complexities of the financial, technical, legal issues”.
She said she was determined to tell a fact-based story. “It says at the beginning [of each episode], this is a true story. And if you make that promise to the audience, you better tell them a true story.”
Making a complex drama spanning more than 20 years accessible and watchable was a challenge, said Hughes. “Luckily I’m an old lady [69] and I’ve been doing this for a long time. If I’d been less experienced, it would have defeated me.
“I had to bring everything I’ve learned as a journalist and documentary film-maker, and for the last 25 years as a dramatist, every single aspect of everything I’ve learned into play to make it work.”
She has become friends with the post office operators whose stories she told. “Alan [Bates, the man who started the campaign] has a tiny house, not like the one in the drama … full of files and boxes and he can find anything. You ask him a question and he doggedly goes off and spends all afternoon looking for the letter or whatever. He was very involved all the way through.
“Jo [Hamilton, who was falsely accused of stealing £36,000], less so – but I bothered her constantly, rang her a lot and went to see her a lot.”
If a decision was made in the coming months to allow all appeals against convictions, it would be “fabulous – but that’s a small number of people. There were 555 in the civil litigation, and the big thing is to get financial redress. That’s not even under discussion at the moment.”
Vennells, who left the Post Office in 2019, declined to meet Hughes when she was writing the drama. Hughes said: “We don’t know who in the Post Office were the individual bad guys but what we do know is that as a result of groupthink and confirmation bias, the institution as a whole is guilty of appalling cruelty and lying.” And the scandal was a “massive collective failure” by all political parties.
Drama had the power of “direct visceral appeal” to audiences, Hughes added. “It’s for reaching out across the stage or through the screen, grabbing you by the throat and saying: care about me. And when it works, it’s incredibly powerful. In this case, it’s been put to the service of this terrible event in our country’s history. If you want to really get people’s attention, tell them a story. And in this case, a true story.”
