I wrote ITV’s Post Office drama – I found staff who had been bullied, shamed & faced years of bankruptcies & prison
IT’S New Year’s Eve. The night before our drama about the Post Office scandal is due to start on ITV. I’m in my pyjamas, too tired to party, feeling anxious.
What if the sub-postmasters who trusted us with their tragic stories don’t like the way we’ve told them?
What if, even after three years of work, I’ve failed to wrangle this complex tale clearly enough?
And what if nobody watches?
Before it goes out, the show’s executive producer Patrick Spence sends a comforting email telling us not to worry if the ratings aren’t that strong.
Well, a few days later, 9.2million people have been glued to this highly technical story, with its huge cast, covering the length and breadth of Britain, and spreading over 25 years.
The entire nation is raging about the decades of injustice and cruelty endured by our characters.
We are on every front page, the Government is running around like headless chickens, and former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells has handed back her CBE.
And all around, people are saying that this has happened as a result of one television drama.
People — including the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak — are seen sitting up, taking notice and making promises. (Which is marvellous, as long as he follows through with some long overdue action.)
It’s astonishing and humbling. Our drama kickstarted this whole extraordinary explosion.
Courage and doggedness
It is maybe not so surprising that it took a TV drama to bombshell this story on to the Prime Minister’s desk.
The best journalism asks us to use our heads. But the best drama goes straight to the heart.
A brilliant actor can transport you into another life, where you identify on a very personal level with a character’s suffering.
It’s what drama was designed to do, and it’s been fulfilling that purpose now for thousands of years.
I’m feeling quite uncomfortable about all the credit and praise being thrown at us.
We are not the heroes of this terrible story. The heroes are the hundreds of sub-postmasters who came together to form Alan Bates’ mighty army of “skint little people”.
Toby Jones has joked about the challenges of playing a man who declares himself to have no emotional life and, certainly if I ever needed to ask personal questions, I learned to ask Suzanne rather than watch Alan wriggle and squirm.
But as a British woman of a certain age myself, I’m completely used to reticent men like Alan, and find this trait charming.
And his detachment is part of a formidable arsenal which also includes courage, doggedness, forward planning and mischief. All of which is why he’s been able to stick at this for 25 unpaid years.
When I started this work, three years ago, Covid was still running our lives. Travel restrictions forced all my earliest conversations with Alan and the other victims on to Zoom. Which was horrible.
Who wants to talk about the worst days of their lives over Zoom?
As soon as movement was possible, I set off on more motorways than I care to remember.
I found innocent shopkeepers bullied, shamed, and persecuted. A cuddly old national institution turned out to be a hotbed of prejudice and injustice.
I faced a quarter of a century of suicides, bankruptcies, prison sentences. In Britain. My country. Unbelievable, like all the best true stories.
I have never got over that initial shock of disbelief.
To this day, every victimised sub-postmaster I meet, every appalling story I hear, makes me squeal with astonishment and rage.
I know it hurt some of the victims to be asked to drag up their terrible memories.
In living rooms, kitchens and cafes throughout the land I heard stories of terrible loss.
I remember Martin Griffiths’ widow, Gina, in Chester, recalling in horror how he was driven to such despair he took his own life.
Father-of-two Lee Castleton, in Scarborough, in tears at the memory of his little daughter spat upon and bullied on the school bus.
Beautiful, gentle Jess Kaur in Walsall, West Mids, shunned in her community, enduring the loss of all her childhood memories as a result of ECT [Electroconvulsive therapy].
And Karen Wilson in Redditch, Worcs, still mourning her beloved husband Julian, who died a convicted criminal before he could hear himself declared innocent by the Court of Appeal.
Families spat upon and shunned in their communities.
I shared some weepy boxes of tissues with these lovely people, as well as a lot of cups of tea.
It took so much courage for them to speak to me. I felt, and still feel, an enormous responsibility to tell their stories truthfully.
So was this a depressing and miserable drama to write? No, not at all. Because in spite of everything they’ve been through, the victims of the Post Office scandal are not a depressing bunch.
Humans not victims
They all manage to be funny and warm and welcoming, even after 25 years of their ordeal.
Funny, dry, dogged Mr Bates didn’t ask to spend 25 years of his life in a war against halfwits, expensive lawyers and the British Government.
I wanted to reflect that in the drama, to portray him and his friends as full human beings, not just as victims.
And I’m very glad to report that every character who took part in the series is thrilled with how it turned out.
victims are ecstatic with this sudden explosion of passionate support they never expected.
On the Post Office side, perhaps unsurprisingly, fewer doors have opened. I have not met Paula Vennells, though I did get a good look at her astonishingly glamorous legal team on the first day of the Public Inquiry.
So I have never got to ask: “What did she know, and when?”
Or “Why did she accept the CBE in 2019 when it was already clear something terrible had gone wrong in the organisation she led?”
Did she think the whole problem was just going to go away? Is that what it’s like when you reach the top of the slippery pole?
These are the questions I am asked most often: What on Earth was going on inside the management of the Post Office? What were they on, these people? Was it groupthink? Lack of imagination? A belief that as public servants they were somehow too virtuous to do wrong? Poor training, plain stupidity, or rank villainy?
I’ve got more theories than I’ve had hot dinners over these last mad, busy weeks. But that’s all they can ever be, just theories, until the Public Inquiry starts to interview the top people and, with luck, we finally get to hear how it all looked from their point of view.
I look forward to being able to understand more clearly what sort of human beings they are.
Because unless we listen hard to what they say, and start to understand how they lost their way, there’s every danger something like this could happen all over again.
We can still dream of a Britain where fair play and decency rule. But Mr Bates and his friends have shown us how fragile that is.
- Mr Bates vs The Post Office is available to stream on ITVX