Gwyneth Hughes: ‘My Post Office drama got people to sit up and notice – but that’s what TV should do’
“There’s been a lot of comment about how shameful it is that it’s taken a TV drama to get people to sit up and notice this scandal. But that’s what drama was invented to do,” says Gwyneth Hughes, writer of Mr Bates vs the Post Office.
That may be true, but the response to this one has been remarkable. The scandal has dragged on for two decades, yet one ITV drama serial has managed to galvanise opinion and effect change in the space of a few days.
The Government is considering measures to clear the names of all the subpostmasters convicted, with Rishi Sunak saying he will “find every which way we can to try to make this right”. Paula Vennells, former chief executive of the Post Office, has handed back her CBE as a result of the backlash – a petition calling for her to be stripped of the honour was signed by more than one million people.
“Here is what I think is most interesting,” Hughes says of Vennells, who received her honour in 2019. “Paula was offered and accepted her CBE at a point when it was already clear to anyone paying attention that something had gone badly wrong in the organisation she led.
“So what on earth was going on? Were the honours people asleep at the wheel when they made the offer? Even more intriguingly, when Paula accepted it, what was she thinking? I’m wondering, was she in denial?”
Conveying the complexities of the case in four hour-long episodes was not easy. “It is of course appalling that successive governments have failed to get a grip,” Hughes says. “But governments respond to pressure, and there hasn’t been enough so far, partly because the story is fiendishly technical and complex. That complexity defeated me, to begin with.
“It’s a source of huge pride to me that our team managed to tame the complexity and produce something people can understand as well as care about.”
The response to the series has been “completely extraordinary” but she thinks that drama can do something that news reports cannot. “Draw an audience in through great performances, and suspense, and catharsis, so that they identify with the characters and care about them and, yes, take notice.”
At first, Hughes found it difficult to get to grips with the story herself. “I’d seen the odd bit in the paper, heard a bit on the radio. I didn’t understand what was going on. I said yes to it having slightly not twigged how big it is – I don’t mean how important it is, but how many people, how many years.”
When she mentioned the words “Post Office scandal” to others, they looked blank. “The girl who cuts my hair, who is very bright and interested in the world: she had no idea. I was going in to have an eye operation, surrounded by lovely doctors who knew what I did for a living, and they asked what I was working on at the moment. I said, ‘the Post Office scandal,’ and the consultant said, ‘There’s a Post Office scandal?’”
This is my second chat with Hughes. The first took place on the eve of the drama’s launch, when she identified another reason for the lack of interest in the story over the last 20 years. Of the people involved, she said:
“They’re not a fashionable population. They’re not metropolitan, they’re not young. They’re from a range of ethnic backgrounds. Even the Asians and Africans involved are as British as they come, and they all bought into an idea of Britain, an ideal of England, of being small shopkeepers.
“They’re really deeply small ‘c’ conservative people, and they’re not fashionable.”
And of course they are not fashionable in TV terms either: Hughes has said that executives warned her that the drama would likely be “flattened” in the ratings by BBC One’s modishly twisty thriller The Tourist, although even the first episode was watched by 1.4 million more people than the Jamie Dornan show.
She tells me now that the cast, “although starry, is old and unglamorous. The casting director [Jill Trevellick] said to me that they’d never had to cast anything with so many older actors. And that’s not a draw these days.” There were “limited funds” for the project, she acknowledges.
But that cast, including Toby Jones and Monica Dolan playing real-life subpostmasters Alan Bates and Jo Hamilton, has struck a chord with viewers. The sight of these ordinary people being trampled by a corporate giant has appalled the nation. One of the most arresting scenes occurs in the opening minutes, when a bunch of besuited heavies step out of their cars outside Bates’s seaside Post Office and order him to close it down. Hughes says: “The first time I spoke to Alan Bates, he told me what happened on the day they came to Llandudno. That opening scene was in my head from the beginning.”
Some of those involved had their names changed for the drama, but the stories are real. One such character is Saman Kaur, a subpostmistress from the Midlands whose mental health collapsed under the stress of being accused of theft, as she and her husband battled to clear her name.
Hughes visited the family at their home to give them an early screening. The couple’s three adult children wept as they watched it. “She had never told them. Obviously, you protect your children, and she had never told them the full extent of what happened,” she recalls.
“They are lovely people. They all are. Do you know, I didn’t meet anybody I didn’t like.” Then she adds: “Of course, I didn’t meet anybody from the Post Office.”
Mr Bates vs the Post Office is available to watch on ITVX
