PATRICK SPENCE: We don’t feel that we as program makers changed the law. We feel that the British people did that. They got so angry that this had happened on their watch, that they stood up as one and demanded action, and the Prime Minister had no choice but to listen to that. So it was very gratifying. It made me feel very proud to be British, to watch the British people unite across political lines and across, you know, national boundaries. And just say, “Put it right. Now.”
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome to, We Disrupt This Broadcast. I’m your host, Gabe González. Okay. Be honest. How often do you check your work when using technology? Maybe when you’re using your phone calculator or clicking on a spell check suggestion. Even following a highlighted route on a map. I’m from a generation that still looks out the car window to make sure we aren’t turning into a river, but maybe that’s just me.
We often trust technology even if we don’t understand how it works. How it’s tested or how it is or isn’t regulated. This might come with minimal consequences on an individual level, but every now and then this blind trust can lead to major repercussions, particularly when our institutions trust tech over people.
In the UK, the British Post Office scandal is one of these cases. Between 1999 and 2015 when the Post Office noticed significant accounting shortfalls, they blamed postal workers in charge of their local offices, wrongfully charging hundreds of them with theft and fraud rather than looking into the actual cause: a new accounting software they’d purchased from a private company abroad, which they insisted worked perfectly.
This led to painful, damaging, and sometimes deadly results for the workers who were not at fault. It’s a scandal that has taken decades to uncover and whose victims are still actively fighting for justice.
Today we’ll be talking about the Peabody Award winning series, Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office, A Moving Dramatization of Real Events that shows how these workers, also known as subpostmasters, came together to take on a corrupt institution that sought to isolate and shame them into compliance. We’ll be talking to executive producer Patrick Spence and writer Gwyneth Hughes to learn how the ITV series came to life and its unexpected impact on the scandal. We’ll also be joined by Nick Wallis, the journalist whose dedicated work to investigate this scandal spanned years and was pivotal to creating public awareness. So don’t go anywhere. When we come back, we are diving headfirst into this tech scandal that has been decades in the making and feels just as relevant today.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. We’re kicking off this episode with Patrick Spence, a BAFTA and Peabody award-winning television producer best known for producing The Eddy, Peaky Blinders, and most recently, Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office, a crime drama telling the true story of the Post Office scandal in the UK where hundreds of Subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted of stealing money from the Post Office. He’ll be joined by Jeffrey Jones, executive producer for We Disrupt This Broadcast and executive director of the Peabody Awards.
JEFFREY JONES: Welcome to We Disrupt This Broadcast. We’re joined today by Patrick Spence, TV producer and executive producer of Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office. Welcome Patrick.
PATRICK SPENCE: Thank you.
JEFFREY JONES:So this is an amazing television show that has started to receive attention here in the United States, though it was a true phenomenon in Britain a year ago. But before we dig into the television show, most people are gonna be unfamiliar with kind of the specifics. So if you would be so kind, let’s just describe the scandal itself, which was called The Horizon Scandal involving Subpostmasters of the British Post Office.
PATRICK SPENCE: Roughly the year 2000, well over a thousand subpostmasters, the people who run the Post Offices scattered around the United Kingdom, ran into problems with their Horizon computer system that had been installed in the year 2000. And when they called for help because their computers were telling them that they were losing money, the Horizon help desk told them that it was their job to replace the money, and that there was little they could do to help.
Not only that, the Horizon help desk put them in touch with their own internal investigators at the Post Office who came after hundreds of them for that lost money, criminalized most of them, bankrupted all of them, imprisoned 260 I think. So this counts as the largest miscarriage of justice in British legal history, simply because so many people had their lives ruined by abhorrent bullying, ghastly and cheating behavior by the Post Office. I’m actually speaking factually here. Their behavior was unspeakable.
JEFFREY JONES: So for Americans, the British Postal System is different. In this instance, the postal service, while part of the British government, it also operates as a corporation that either has to earn a profit or break even. And the subpostmaster system, as I understand it, this is why I’m asking for clarification, is these are folks who are employees of that system, but they’re not employees of the British government.
PATRICK SPENCE: That is correct. And you are right. It is a curiously British setup. In some ways, I suppose similar to the BBC, that it is overseen by and owned by the government. They ask them to operate like a self-run company. They are required to stop losing money. They were required to stop losing money. And that was part of the problem that Paula Vennells who came in in 2010, I think, was under huge pressure, there’s no doubt about it, to turn the Post Office around and to make them profitable.
So wherever they could find money, they were looking for it. Wherever they could cut losses, they were looking for it because the government funded the Post Office, a loss making business, for decades and was getting fed up a bit.
JEFFREY JONES: So let’s turn to the television show itself. Talk to us about how this show appeared on ITV and why as a dramatization as opposed to say, a documentary?
PATRICK SPENCE: So the most important thing to say is that for at least 10 years before we came along a series of newspapers and documentary makers had been telling this story in public. Private Eye, a famous magazine over here, Computer Weekly, a trade mag obviously, and the BBC themselves, and a brilliant podcaster and journalist called Nick Wallis, who I believe you’re also talking to, had all tried brilliantly and valiantly to get the British nation to understand the sheer horror of what had been going on. They told the same story that we told and no one seemed to care.
I think part of the reason that I approached this with such energy is that I was one of those people who, without quite realizing it, had kept turning the pages of the newspaper when it had appeared in front of me because the words “Horizon Subpostmasters accounting system errors” just don’t feel exciting enough to keep reading on, and we all missed it. None of us engaged with the story and gave it the public support it needed to force change.
So a documentary maker called Natasha Bondy came to me. I’m a, I have a background in making factual dramas, and said, I think this should be made as a drama. I think this is the only way to get people to understand what’s been going on. And she was right. Because what drama can do, a true story kind of drama, is it can get inside the hearts and minds and the homes of the people who were suffering and allow an audience to viscerally feel what it’s like to be treated like a criminal when you’ve done nothing wrong and to be accused of stealing tens of thousands of pounds and sent to prison for it when actually, all you’ve been trying to do is serve your community in a meaningful way.
And that’s what as drama producers we realized we could do if we did our jobs well is get people to feel the pain and suffering that they had endured.
CLIP: Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office
I don’t know.
So how did the Post Office money get lost? What is it you’ve been doing wrong?
I don’t know either. I have no idea. Oh, I don’t wanna cry. I kept thinking one day some kind of electronic wizardry would kick in and it would just sort itself out, but it never has. And now the computer says my shortfall’s gone up to 9,000 pounds. So.
Remortgaging the house though…
I know what I’m suggesting is really awful. But David, there’s the 40 year lease on the shop, and if they sack me, we’ll lose everything.
This house, our home.
I have to make good on my shortfalls. It says so in my contract. I have to find the money to pay them back.
JEFFREY JONES: Viewers are greeted immediately on our screen, it says, “This is a true story.” Not “based on a true story,” but it says “this is a true story.” Talk to us about that designation of “this is a true story.”
PATRICK SPENCE: The compliance laws in the UK for network television for the BBC ITV Channel 4 dictate that you have to present your work in a factual drama to them and to their lawyers and prove that you are either telling a version of a true story as close as you can make it, or you are actually telling the true story, and they will then decide at the end of that process, what wording best describes the level of accuracy of your show.
And so if it says, if a British network show begins with “inspired by,” you essentially know it’s been mostly made up, but it’s probably the same name and the same city. If it’s “based on,” and that is the vast majority of factual dramas in the UK, then it means it has performed to the highest levels of compliance kind of analysis.
To get to be called on British network television “a true story” in the way that we were is the gold standard, if you will, and it means that you are being told as an audience, you are essentially watching a documentary. An example of that is that every time Paula Vennells, the chief executive of the Post Office speaks, she is speaking words that she herself wrote in emails to her staff. It really, really is.
And if ever you needed a piece of evidence that the actress Leah Williams is superb at her craft, you need to know that every line of dialogue she spoke as Paula Vennells was written by Paula Vennells as an email, and yet she managed to make it sound natural and real. We were bound by a determination to honor the subpostmasters’ suffering by showing exactly as it happened.
JEFFREY JONES: So this show airs in January 1st of 2024 and becomes a major sensation in British society as I understand it. And I think this show probably even exceeded your own expectations. Is that correct?
PATRICK SPENCE: Oh, it smashed through the ceiling of any of our dreams. I think it’s fair to say it is the largest drama launch in 25 years.
We played it four nights in a row. It’s a four episode run. And in the first week of January, it played Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and by the end of the week, 9 million people had already watched every episode of the show. But more important than that, on social media, what we experienced after only the first night when it became clear that a lot of people had watched all four episodes, is that people had gotten angry in a way that we dreamt of, but you couldn’t expect.
And we were front page of two national newspapers by the Thursday, and various things happened. There was a petition started to strip Paula Vennells of the honor that she’d been given by the Queen the year before, and 1 million people had signed it within nine days to say we’re disgusted that she’s got an honor for the work that she’s been presented as doing in this drama.
And within nine days of transmission, the Prime Minister stood up in government and announced an immediate change in law without reference to the judiciary, to immediately pardon every subpostmaster affected. And to put that in perspective, the last time the British Prime Minister stood up in Parliament and changed the law without reference to the Judiciary, the law courts was 460 years ago.
So the effect of this program, and actually I think we should say the effect of the nation’s response to this program, was unprecedented. It’s never happened in British history before. We don’t feel that we as program makers changed the law. We feel that the British people did that. They got so angry that this had happened on their watch, that they stood up as one and demanded action, and the Prime Minister had no choice but to listen to that.
And so it was very gratifying, very, it made me feel very proud to be British, to watch the British people unite across political lines and across, you know, national boundaries. And just say, “Put it right. Now.
JEFFREY JONES: I wanna come back to that, but you know this podcast is called We Disrupt This Broadcast, and it’s precisely focused on the way that entertainment television can disrupt traditional narratives or patterns or industrial patterns of doing things. And it’s really extraordinary for an entertainment show, if you will, that it had such an extraordinary effect politically. It just doesn’t happen much. So we definitely feel that this is a disruption of the way that entertainment is viewed.
Let’s talk about the effects. I mean, why do you think the British public responded with such emotional outrage and desire for justice to be done?
PATRICK SPENCE: I think the British hate bullies. And the Post Office revealed themselves to be genuinely bullies. I mean, they treated those subpostmasters from the first interview in every single case. We got record after record of this, they treated them as criminals, as they sat them down saying things like, “where’s the money” and “why did you steal it?” rather than, “Can you explain to us what’s going on here?”
If you met most of the subpostmasters and they were obviously featured in the drama, if you met them in real life, you would immediately sense that these were not criminals, that these were people that were entirely the opposite in fact. You don’t become a subpostmaster to make money. You become a subpostmaster to serve your community.
Those Post Offices exist at the heart of every village in the country, and they are seen as very important and loving members of our community.
CLIP: Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office
It’s called a plea bargain. The deal is the Post Office will drop the theft charge if you agree to plead guilty to false accounting instead.
And the plea bargain keeps me outta prison.
Well,
Sorry. How is 14 charges of false accounting better than one charge of theft?
Theft is much bigger. And if you fight it and the jury is not on your side, then you will go to prison. Also, there are two conditions to the plea bargain. The Post Office say you have to pay back all the money.
36,000 pounds. How am I gonna do that?
And you must undertake not to blame the Horizon system.
Well, I am guilty. I am because I did sign all those accounts when I knew they were wrong. But I never stole that money. I never saw a penny of it. I still dunno where it went.
PATRICK SPENCE: So when the country saw the way that these people had been treated, I think that was bad enough. What also I think was going on at the same time, which was larger even than the subpostmasters story, was a sense in the UK that the people that run our governments and our larger corporations didn’t have our backs.
We felt cheated and betrayed on a national level, I think, and we didn’t quite know how to articulate it or put our finger on it. And the story of the Post Office was the first time where the country felt, they sort of coalesced around this story saying, we suspected this sort of behavior everywhere and now we’ve got evidence of it. So in that sense, the Post Office were unlucky enough to be the first kind of baddie, if you will, that got caught.
And I think the other reason is that the writer, Gwen and the director, did such an extraordinary job of wooing you into a story as if it was almost a comedy and then punching you in the gut and beating you around the head with the pain that these people suffered without ever stripping them of their dignity or their humanity. So as a piece of program making, you know, the response that we got was that it was a show that had made them angry like they hadn’t felt in years.
JEFFREY JONES: Drama here does such an amazing job of bringing forth the goodness, if you will, of these people. And it seems to me as a viewer that the innate goodness of these people is what people could identify with and the injustices done to them, in essence, is injustice done to all of us. Do you agree with that?
PATRICK SPENCE: Yes, I do. And I think now is probably the time to introduce into the podcast a sad note, which is to say that for all of the power of the drama and for all of the power of the way in which the country stood up as one to fight on their behalf, the fact is that the vast majority of the postmasters remain uncompensated. Their convictions have been overturned because that was relatively easy. Now the government, because the government has to pay the Post Office’s bill out of the public purse, the government is trying to shortchange all of the subpostmasters in a way that is almost as much a miscarriage of justice as the first thing that had happened to them.
Alan Bates, for instance, whose own claim for compensation, he insisted, be done by an independent accountant, has been rejected recently and they’ve offered to pay less than one third of his claim. And that’s quite a common thing happening. Even when you think that these people have been treated badly enough and the country has made their feelings clear about that, there is a second kind of trauma that they’re being subjected to, which is that the government seems to be waiting for them to die, to avoid paying a bill of 2 or 3 billion pounds to make up for the damage that’s been done.
It really is, I mean, it is that bad. It is a hideous story. And these are people, as you say, who– I mean the Post Office was somewhere you went to get your pension paid and your allowances paid. It was a small bank for many old people. It was a place that you just felt was safe, and kind, and loving. And incidentally, it was a very well trusted brand up until this point. So one of the reasons that the story didn’t catch on earlier on is that when newspapers started writing about subpostmasters being accused by the Post Office of being thieves very often people believed them because the Post Office was such a trusted brand, and that was because of the work that their subpostmasters were doing, ironically.
JEFFREY JONES: Patrick Spence, thank you so much for joining us. Congratulations. I will say, as just citizens who hate to see injustice done, for artists such as yourself to bring to the public’s attention such an amazing story, this is what art does well; and you’ve done a magnificent job, so thank you so much for doing that.
PATRICK SPENCE: It’s a real privilege and a pleasure. Thank you very much.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Thank you again to Patrick Spence for joining us and Jeff Jones for sitting down to chat with him. Don’t go anywhere though. We’ll be right back with Nick Wallis, the journalist who covered this scandal on TV, online and on his own podcast for years. He is living proof you don’t want to piss off a dedicated journalist. We’ll learn why after the break.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Welcome back. Our next guest is a journalist, broadcaster, and a podcast host. He first started covering the Post Office scandal in 2011 while working for the BBC. And since then, he has created a widely successful blog on the subject as well as a podcast that became one of the greatest sources for the team that developed Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office, which he also consulted on.
We are here today with Nick Wallis. Welcome, Nick. How are you?
NICK WALLIS: I’m Okay. Thanks for having me.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Nick, you started covering the Post Office scandal as a journalist at the BBC in 2011, and you made it a personal cause to keep this story in the public eye. I’m curious, what was it about this scandal in particular that moved you to action?
NICK WALLIS: Now miscarriage of justice stories, in my view, are huge. I’ve subsequently discovered that innocent people seem to go to prison all the time. But when I was a, a younger journalist, I thought it was an anathema that an arm of the state could even be remotely, potentially responsible for putting one innocent person in prison, let alone the numbers that were starting to make themselves known to us through the Post Office scandal.
So I just kept plugging away at this. I kept thinking, “No, this is serious, this is potentially a very, very big story.” Either all these people are wrong, and there were more and more of them in every investigation that I did or something has gone catastrophically wrong. And that was what sort of kept me going.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: You tackled the story from multiple angles, not just your reporting through the BBC, but through a dedicated website and a podcast– some of which was crowdfunded– in the time since you started covering this, I’m wondering if you can offer your opinion on why you feel this story required so much time and so many different avenues, including a TV show to capture the public attention it needed to spark that outrage?
NICK WALLIS: By the time the drama had gone out, I’d done a number of BBC investigations. And what it had the effect of doing was essentially pump priming some well-informed members of society, politicians and journalists, so that when it came to the point that the drama was broadcast, everyone was ready to respond to the public outrage that the drama created. The Monday after the first week of the drama had gone out, the BBC held a three hour special broadcast dedicated to the Post Office scandal where they invited nine subpostmasters into the studio to talk about their stories.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Absolutely, and it’s so interesting to hear you say, right, that this decade’s worth of work is what pushed this moment from awareness to action, right? A series can come out and you can be very aware of the story and talking about it, but having politicians, advocates, folks who are working to make a change, ready to seize that moment of national attention feels like it was so important and so pivotal.
NICK WALLIS: Actually, it is astounding how lucky the postmasters have been in terms of the way that there are so many scandals in public life that theirs broke through at just the right time, because just the right people were doing their bit with the right resources and capabilities.
But what the truth of this story actually is, is that the government and the Post Office completely underestimated the resourcefulness, and the grit, and the determination of the subpostmasters themselves. This is an extraordinary class of victim you would not want to take them on. If you look to what they had, which was they had justice on their side, they were right, but they are also incredible public facing entrepreneurial public servants in a way, and they are not easily cowed. They have a sense of what is right. They have a huge amount of energy, even though it was beaten out of them, and although their money had been essentially stolen from them– so they didn’t have much in the way of financial resource– they did have this indefatigable ability to keep writing letters, to keep plowing on, to keep articulately explaining their cause, to keep writing to their MPs, and they were led by a strategic genius. I mean, Alan Bates in any other generation would’ve been an exceptionally successful general.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I am curious from your perspective, what movement has happened since, and maybe because of the series?
NICK WALLIS: Well, I’d say now that we’re in the third phase of the scandal. The first phase was when the Post Office was on its prosecution spree sending innocent people to prison. The second phase was the coverup, which was when it was brought to the Post Office’s attention that they might have been responsible for miscarriages of justice, they did everything they could to bury that. And the third phase is once it all got blown out into the open by the high court case, by the court of appeal case where all the convictions were quashed and by the drama, the sclerotic response from the authorities in terms of compensating the subpostmasters and holding the villains in this piece to account has been nothing short of a scandal in itself.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: So it sounds like there is work left to do on this case. Is that something that you are still focused on?
NICK WALLIS: Yes. I’m currently writing and have been writing for the last seven months, another book about the scandal using the documentation that’s come out of the court cases and the inquiry. Now we have the contemporaneous emails from the lawyers, basically talking about how they are going to be obstructive as possible to anyone who wants to investigate this scandal using every single trick at their disposal to obfuscate and deflect the likes of the MPs, the Criminal Cases Review Commission, who set up a statutory investigation, and even in some cases, the courts. And this is appalling behavior, but we’ve now got the documentation thanks to the inquiry. So I’m writing a book, I’m characterizing it as from being like, imagine like being inside the Death Star and, and, and hearing, you know, seeing the communications between the baddies in real time whilst the scandal is playing out in public life.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Now, this next question might be top of mind for you, given the subject of your next book, but the series also shows something unsettling from a different angle: the depths that Post Office employees went to protect the brand. And I’m wondering, in your years covering this, why do you feel individuals will go so far to protect their employer, their company, even when they know it is hurting their fellow citizens?
NICK WALLIS: It’s all to do with identity. They’d started off as postman or as counter clerks, and they’d work their way up through the ranks. Now, the Post Office saw itself as a benign organization. They saw themselves as keepers of the Queen’s Shilling, protectors of the public purse, whose job it was to make a very important element of the state function effectively.
So they saw the Post Office as a good organization. And because the Post Office paid them, and the Post Office’s ways became embedded in their consciousness, their identity was bound up with the Post Office. And they, no one likes to think of themselves as a bad person, so they saw themselves as good people working for a good organization. So an attack on the Post Office was an attack on their own concept of themselves as righteous or good people or moral people.
And you do see this in other organizations, especially nowadays as people want to align themselves with a company that matches their values. And so companies go out their way to present themselves as being moral, as being good, and I think that is disastrous. I think businesses should sell stuff and forget about the rest.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: It’s the insidiousness of the work family. Right? This idea that you are not just an employee working to sell something or provide a good or service, that you’re part of a family. Right? It seems so warm and tender on the outside, but scandals like this sort of unearth the very dark underbelly behind that terminology.
NICK WALLIS: Yeah. And companies will tell you that they’re there to make the world a better place until the moment they are threatened.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Of course.
NICK WALLIS: And then companies exist to look after themselves.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: It’s just so rare to see incredible journalistic work and incredible TV writing work in unison and get their timing right to move people, not just to feel something and talk about something, but to do something and push their governments to do something. So thanks for talking to us today, Nick.
NICK WALLIS: Well thanks Gabe. Thank you also to the Peabody organization for recognizing this drama. It is wonderful to have this kind of recognition outside the UK ’cause we didn’t think it would travel. So we are deeply, deeply grateful and I’m personally very grateful that you wanted me to come on your podcast.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: I had so much fun talking to Nick. I am sure journalists like him keep corrupt institutions up at night and I am grateful for it. Before ending this episode, we absolutely had to talk to one more person– the writer that worked directly with dozens of subpostmasters, interviewing them through a pandemic and beyond to get the story right.
Our next guest is a screenwriter, director, producer, and documentarian. She’s best known for the drama series Five Days, the film Doing Money, and most recently for writing the series we’re talking about today.
We are here with Gwyneth Hughes, the writer of Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office. Thank you for joining us today. How are you?
GWYNETH HUGHES: I’m fine, thank you.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: When did you first learn about this story, and how did you get pulled in to working on Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office?
GWYNETH HUGHES: I’d seen some reports on the BBC news website actually written by a journalist called Nick Wallis, who was the first person across this story years and years ago. And I’d seen these stories, but it didn’t seem to me to make sense. I said, “surely that can’t be right. Surely this can’t be true. That doesn’t make any sense at all”.
And then the phone went, and it was ITV asking me if I would like to write the drama based on this thing. And I sort of really said yes, because I sort of felt I, we ought to understand it a bit better and maybe this was a good way to find out. And, you know, it’s such a universally appealing thing, isn’t it? The little guy who stands up against the massive corporation or the government, the unfair government.
So yeah, I mean, I didn’t think twice about it. If I’d understood at the beginning quite how complicated the technicalities were, I might have thought twice about it. But yeah, I jumped into it with both feet. And the more you found out, the more unbelievable it got.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Now, I think one of the greatest feats I think Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office accomplishes, is taking this overwhelmingly complex issue and rooting it in very human stories. Given your background in both documentary and scripted work, when ITV calls you, what’s next? Right? What was it like sort of fusing this real life information that you had to pour through and start to understand, and turning it into a scripted project?
GWYNETH HUGHES: I have to meet the people. I have to go and bang on doors, and I have to sit around kitchen tables with, you know, cups of tea and packets of hankies and go through it. And not just learn what happened, but learn about them, learn who they are, and learn what their relationships within their families were like.
And because, they’re gonna get played by some actor. I mean, imagine that’s just so awful, isn’t it? Kind of imagine someone playing you, I mean, oh yeah, it’s gonna be Brad Pitt, right? That’s what everybody says. So I feel this enormous responsibility to them as individual humans.
So it’s not just about the story that they were involved in, but really, really moving actually. And often very funny because you know, these are complete humans. They’re not just victims. I really wanted to get across their sense of humor and their kind of humanity as well.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: But I think another thing in this series that really clicked with me watching was this sort of deep emotional core that centers on shame. The shame the postmasters feel about the losses, what it drove them to do, and how it was only in solidarity with each other that that shame began to ease. Right?
GWYNETH HUGHES: Yeah. Shame is such a powerful force, isn’t it? It’s a hugely powerful force, which in Western countries, I think we don’t pay enough attention to. We tend to think we’re we do sort of guilt and the East does shame. And obviously we all do everything. We’re all humans. Yeah. Shame was huge. Shame silenced people. It terrified people. Shame took the life of Martin, the suicide, whose story we covered. It was shame that, you know, people were spat at in the street by folk who’d been their neighbors.
You know, they have fallen a long way from a position of total trust. You know, they’re looking after, they’re paying out people’s old ladies’ pensions. They’re looking after people’s savings accounts. They will be accused in the street of stealing money from old ladies. It was appalling and people found it impossible to deal with.
I think one of the reasons, there are many reasons why Alan Bates sort of shown, is that he didn’t have that right from the beginning.
And I admire so much for this. Alan never thought it was his fault. Everybody else thought it was their fault. I mean, I completely get that. If it had been me, I would’ve been weeping in a corner going “Oh Mommy, I’m so stupid. I’m so rubbish with accounts, it must be my fault.” Alan never thought that. He’s a real man and he just thought, “no, it’s them not me”. So he never went through the shame thing. He was embarrassed a lot, but he never went through shame. Whereas Jo, the woman character who you see her apparent deficit double in front of her eyes. She thought that was her fault, even though she was only doing what they told her to do.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Now, I do wanna dive into the characters, and the character I wanna start with obviously is Mr. Bates, who, Tony, the actor portraying him called “mysterious,” and who the judge in the series calls “unreasonable in his tenacious drive for the truth.” What appealed to you as a writer about Mr. Bates when you sat down to put pen to paper, what was it about his journey in particular and his very unique mode of expressing and walking through the world that excited you about writing him?
GWYNETH HUGHES: Alan jumped off the page as the hero, really, because he was at the center of everything. He was the one who refused to take it lying down. He was the one who found a way to gather them all together. He was the one who had all the big ideas about how they could make progress over 20 years. He never gave up. He just can’t give up. He’s still at it. You know, Sir Alan Bates, you know, but he’s still at it.
He’d love not to be. He’d really love just to go around the world, but he feels an enormous, to this day, an enormous responsibility to the group that he formed. And so Alan was a very attractive character in many ways. He was extremely helpful to me about all this stuff I don’t understand. He’s a very funny guy. The driest bone dry sense of humor. Sometimes he’ll say something to you and think. Is he for real? But it’s a gag. I mean, he’d hate me to say this, but he is very, underneath it all. He is very warm, warm-hearted.
CLIP: Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office
I I, I’ve told you, uh, all the things the law’s not going to do for us, but I want you to think about what brought us together. All those things that we’ve been fighting for ever since
Compensation?
Bigger than that.
Justice?
Bigger.
The truth?
Exactly. Yes. Compensation, yes, justice. But. Without the truth, we can’t do either of those. Going to law will force the Post Office to open their files. So finally, we’ll get to know everything. The Post Office knows. The truth. The whole truth. All those in favor. Motion carried.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: When the scandal first came out and folks didn’t know that Horizon’s technology was behind it, a lot of people were being blamed for stealing old ladies’ pensions and being spat out on the streets, as you said. But the story of Jo Hamilton is quite the opposite. And I’m curious, having met these folks and dug into the story, could you tell us why you think her community went through such lengths to defend her?
GWYNETH HUGHES: The thing about Jo Hamilton is that that is exactly what she’s like. She’s absolutely adorable. She’s the nicest person you could meet. I over identified with Jo because she was rubbish at computers and accountancy and she thought it was all her fault. And if, if I’d have been in her position, I’d have been just like her. I wouldn’t have been like Alan at all. I’d have been just like, Jo, “I am an idiot. It’s all my fault.” And she suffered so much and they were so poor, you know, right up until very recently. But she’s just irrepressible. Sweet natured. She’s very small. She’s very pretty. She’s very kind. She’s just, oh, she bakes. You know, she’s a great cook.
For Jo meeting, Alan just transformed everything. And what’s really important about that is that Jo and Alan are the perfect pair. Because he’s the head, she’s the heart. You know, you couldn’t write it better. He could never cope with all the weeping women, you know? They’d have these meetings. Women would be weeping in corners and he’d be going, “ah”, and Jo would be dispatched. And be kind and all that. Yeah, she’s just great. She’s a great woman.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: It’s so funny. This story feels like it’s something on paper that could feel like it’s very in the weeds, right? There’s too many details. There’s too much stuff. And it’s the people. It’s their experiences. It’s the way they grapple with it and the way they come together, I think, that really links this story in a compelling way. And it seems like focusing on that humanity through Nick’s work, through your work on this series is what helped the public in the UK better understand what was happening.
And I’m curious, ’cause you mentioned that Jo and Alan meeting each other as sort of a major catalyst, right? A big moment of two forces coming together to complement each other to get this job done. And when it came to the Horizon IT error, the Post Office helpline kept repeating a phrase that you are the only one telling each subpostmaster that they were the only one whose numbers were off when that was not the case. But this served to isolate them from each other. And when these subpostmasters start to team up, when the Alan’s and the Jo’s show up, they repeat the phrase, “you are not alone”. And I’m wondering why is it so important for us as an audience to hear this refrain throughout this series?
GWYNETH HUGHES: I think it’s the only way you can get any hope in a situation like this isn’t it? The idea that there was actually someone, else that you weren’t alone, would’ve been the only thing that gave them hope that they could get through to the other end. And it still took another 15 years, but it was another 15 years during which they marched, you know, largely as an army. They had that sense that they were together and against the forces of darkness.
So yeah, I think it’s a great story of how even the littlest people, or the most powerless people, if you all join together, you make something bigger than, you know, just yourself, and that’s the key to achieving anything.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Well, Gwyneth Hughes, thank you so much for joining us in a vastly different time zone to talk about this amazing series, Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office. Congratulations to you all. We’re so happy to honor it at the Peabodys and talk to you more about this incredible and impactful series. So thank you again.
GWYNETH HUGHES: Thank you.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: Thank you again to all our guests and to Jeff Jones for joining us this episode. One of the most shocking, but maybe unsurprising things you learn diving into the British Post Office scandal is how consistently the Post Office tried to isolate its subpostmasters while blaming them for something that wasn’t their fault.
It speaks to how fearful big institutions can be of collective action. It’s the shame and fear as a result of that isolation, which so many subpostmasters felt that kept them silent, and it’s wild how it took one person, one individual, willing to reach out and say, “we’re in this together” to form a force strong enough to pursue justice.
As we know, the compensation many received isn’t close to fair enough, and the harm inflicted upon so many people as a result of this scandal can’t be undone. But by pushing the story into the front of public consciousness, by insisting people pay attention– folks like Alan Bates, like Nick Wallis, like Patrick Spence and Gwyneth Hughes provide us not only with a cautionary tale, they provide us with a model for what’s possible when people come together and refuse to remain compliant in the face of injustice.
The Peabody Awards are decided unanimously. So to close out our episode, I bring you, We Disrupt this Broadcast’s “unanimous decision” where we unanimously pick the most disruptive line of the day.
NICK WALLIS: Companies will tell you that they’re there to make the world a better place until the moment they are threatened.
GABE GONZÁLEZ: We Disrupt This Broadcast is a Peabody and Center for Media and Social Impact production hosted by me, Gabe González, with on air contributions from Caty Borum and Jeffrey Jones. The show is brought to you by executive producers, Caty Borum, Jeffrey Jones, and Bethany Hall. Producer Jordana Jason. Writers: Sasha Stewart, Jordana Jason, Bethany Hall, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, and myself, Gabe González. Consulting producer: Jennifer Keishin Armstrong. Associate producer, Bella Green. Graphic designer: Olivia Klaus. Operations producer: Varsha Ramani. The marketing and communications team: Christine Dreyer and Tunishia Singleton. From PRX: the team is Terrence Bernardo, Jennie Cataldo, Edwin Ochoa and Amber Walker. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.