This script has been lightly edited for clarity.

Jace Lacob: I’m Jace Lacob, and you’re listening to MASTERPIECE Studio.

The British Post Office scandal is a byzantine story that raises more questions than answers. It has claimed millions of pounds and ruined countless lives. The guilty have not atoned and the innocent continue to suffer while they wait for justice to be fully served. But they don’t wait idly. Alan Bates and the hundreds of sub-postmasters accused of theft or faulty accounting have been fighting the Post Office for redress and compensation for over 20 years. But by Episode Four of our drama, they’re beginning to make some headway. 

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Patrick: Well, that was brilliant. They chose him and he smashed them. Just a pile of ash where the Post Office used to be.

Alan: Well, they’ve got Angela van den Bogerd in the witness box tomorrow.

Patrick: Yup.

Alan: You get to ask the questions.

Patrick: I do. And I’ve got plenty.

Alan: We get to see if we picked the right man for the job.

Patrick: Chuckles.

The reality of the situation is that the British Post Office — a company whose sole shareholder is the British government itself — has far more resources than the sub-postmasters. And they’re not afraid to pull out all of the stops. 

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Lord Justice Fraser: I just saw this five minutes ago. It’s an application for me to recuse myself as being the managing judge in these proceedings. Mr. Wentworth, would you care to elaborate?

James Hartley: The Post Office has asked the judge to sack himself on the grounds that he’s clearly biased against the Post Office.

By the end of Mr Bates vs The Post Office, Alan and his team managed to get significant financial compensation from the Post Office, but the majority of the settlement went to pay legal fees, leaving the sub-postmasters with little to split amongst themselves. But not all hope was lost.   

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Lord Justice Holroyde: Josephine Hamilton pleaded guilty to 14 counts of false accounting. There was no examination of the data for bugs, errors or defects. There was no proof of an actual loss as opposed to a Horizon-generated shortage. Even more alarming, Post Office Limited’s own investigator had reported there was no evidence of theft. We conclude that Mrs. Hamilton’s prosecution was unfair and an affront to justice. We allow her appeal. We quash her convictions.

Jo Hamilton, Noel Thomas, Susan Rudkin and many of the hundreds of men and women prosecuted by the Post Office received appeals and had their convictions overturned. Compounding this scandal is the sense that many of its victims trusted in the British legal system to exonerate them, a legal system which failed at every turn. The erosion of that sense of trust in the legal system and in public institutions like the Post Office itself, amplifies the sense of dread and horror, making the betrayal that much worse.

 The story of the Post Office scandal is far from over. New developments emerge everyday as Alan and the sub-postmasters continue their fight for justice and compensation. And their quest for reparations — stoked by public outcry after the broadcast of Mr Bates vs The Post Office — has led to Parliament and the Prime Minister’s office.

Mr Bates vs The Post Office writer Gwyneth Hughes joins us once again to dig into the real-life story of this scandal, and what we can all take away from one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history. 

Jace Lacob: The Post Office scandal story continues to unfold in real time. MP Rishi Sunak made a promise to enact a law to compensate and exonerate the victims after Mr Bates aired in Britain. What is the role of drama, of art here? Does drama have the unique opportunity to enact real life change in a way that perhaps traditional journalism can’t?

Gwyneth Hughes: Well, it seems that it does on rare occasions like this. I mean, that’s not something we ever set out to do. We had no ambition to do that. We just wanted to help them be heard. But I think the thing about drama that is important and special and not like journalism or documentaries is that the level of connection that the audience feels with it, the level of emotional commitment that is possible to evoke in an audience, is enormous with drama.

I mean, it’s not really surprising because it is why drama was invented. You know, it’s why the ancient Greeks did it, to reach out from the stage, reach out from the television or film screen and grab the audience and say, care about this, worry about this, laugh at this, be scared of this. That’s what drama does. It’s designed to do that. So I don’t know why really we were all so surprised when it did in this case. We didn’t expect to change the world and we haven’t really because people are still waiting for their compensation and it’s still going on extremely slowly. But yeah, I think it has to do with the quality and depth of the connection that you make.

You know, when I was making documentaries, my sort of ambition and goal was that people would watch the film and feel for the people in it and go, oh, look at what’s happening to that poor person, that’s awful. But with drama, it’s much deeper than that. You look at the person on screen and you don’t say, oh, poor you, you say, poor me. You feel that human connection with someone whose life is being portrayed by a brilliant actor. You’re right in there with the things going wrong as opposed to being told about them later. Do you know what I mean? In a documentary, you’re told about them later and in a drama, you see it unfold right in front of your eyes. And I think that’s the power of it.

Jace Lacob: I think too, the fact that this says to anyone watching, this could have been you. This could be you. It could be you tomorrow.

Gwyneth Hughes: Yeah, absolutely because they’re such ordinary people. They’re just completely ordinary, and we had great actors who can play those kinds of parts, which loads of actors are great, but can’t play ordinary people for the life of them. But we managed to get this fantastic bunch of actors, all of whom were our first choices. Everybody wanted to be involved. And they all just did a great job. I’m very proud of all of them.

Jace Lacob: How do you approach constructing stories that have the potential to enact change or stir such a reaction? Does it change your perspective at all as a writer, having a responsibility or a duty to do right by the people whose stories you’re telling?

Gwyneth Hughes: You do have to do right by those people. And sometimes, the parts of the stories we were telling were shaming for them or very upsetting for them, and you have to guide and hold hands throughout that. But it’s very important that the true horror of their situation is put across. People were very nervous, but also very generous about that. And they did trust us to tell their story, which was fantastic because if you have to pull your punches because your contributors are shy or scared of letting you in, then you’re not going to have much of a drama.

So I’m really aware that all of these people have given a massive amount of trust into my hands. And when you’re making a show, you worry about how the audience will feel about it, how your boss will feel about it, how you’ll feel about it yourself as the writer. But with this kind of story, overriding all of that is the anxiety about how the contributors will feel. And thank God they felt good.

Jace Lacob: Mr Bates functions as a condition of England narrative. That is, a story that reveals contemporary social and political issues that play within Britain. And it does shine a light on corruption and scandal within one of the most cherished British institutions. Do you see Mr Bates as telling a larger condition-of-England story?

Gwyneth Hughes: Yes, but we didn’t set out to do that, again, it’s very interesting. Three years ago when we were in the middle of COVID and we set out to give these people a chance finally to get their story across after 20 years of nobody showing any interest. And we were amazed that we got commissioned with the story which was unwieldy and difficult and small and ordinary. Three years go by and so much has changed.

We’ve had a lot of scandals in this country around COVID, a lot of scandals about what the government got up to during COVID, telling us all that we couldn’t go out and going out themselves, Partygate, all this kind of thing. And somehow everything seems to, and this is across the Western world, it’s not just here, I think, everything got worse. Everything got grimmer during those three years and the show that we set out just to give these people their voice ended up standing for the voice of an entire population somehow. Because everybody feels on some level in the same boat as the sub-postmasters; not listened to, no money, not able to make a life for themselves, at the mercy of forces they can’t control and didn’t vote for.

So it did become a State of the Nation, kind of crept up on us in a way that we didn’t intend. And I think maybe that’s why it worked so well, because if we’d intended it, we might have been much more heavy handed about it, but because it crept up on us, we watched it go out and thought, oh wow, actually we’re doing State of the Nation. This is how everybody feels about their lives, not just the sub-postmasters. So yeah, you think you know what you’re doing, but you don’t really.

Jace Lacob: Is the cover up in this case worse than the crime? Or, had the post office moved to actually rectify the damage they caused, would this have been as explosive a scandal as it’s become?

Gwyneth Hughes: No, I’m sure if they’d gotten their act together earlier and paid attention, it would have just sat there being something nobody really understood that was important, but nobody cared enough. But they didn’t do that. They really came out fighting. There was a huge court case. Alan Bates and his colleagues took the Post Office to court in the end. 555 of them sued in a group litigation, what you would call a class action in the high court. It costs millions. And the Post Office lawyers just came out fighting. They tried to sack the judge! What? They tried to sack the judge on the grounds that they thought he was biased against them. They were absolutely horrible. And even at that point they could have said, oh yeah, we’ve clearly got a problem, let’s talk. But they didn’t.

And I just… yeah, the cover up or the failure in curiosity, the failure to work out that something was going wrong and pin their colors, pin the management’s colors to the mast of sorting it out, they could have done that. Paula Vennells and her colleagues could have gone, in 2013 when they had that internal report, they could have said to themselves, okay, let’s sort it out. Let’s be the managers who sort it out, as opposed to the managers who run around screaming and hide and don’t sort it out. She could have been the knight on a white charger, couldn’t she? But she wasn’t. I don’t know. Mystifying.

Jace Lacob: Each of these sub-postmasters were told over and over that they were the only one having any issue with Horizon, that they were alone in their horror, their grief, and loss. We are living in perhaps one of, if not the most isolationist eras in recent times; social media, COVID, lockdowns. What they experienced, is it endemic of what COVID and technology have led to, or no, because their isolation was specifically caused by the Post Office itself?

Gwyneth Hughes: Well, you’re right, they were all told, you’re the only one. And that to me is the most upsetting and awful part of the whole saga. To be told it’s just you, you’re an idiot, you’re doing everything wrong and nobody else is in the same boat, nobody else is as big an idiot as you, is so awful and cruel, and they knew it wasn’t true. It’s just beyond belief. And all of that began 20 years ago, before pretty much social media really took hold, certainly before the pandemic.

And again, in the time that’s elapsed since then, we can see that they were ahead of the game. They were experiencing this terrible isolation, atomized, awful, scared lives that have begun to circulate around all of us. Because I agree with you that the social media thing, the lockdowns, we’re all in this very odd, isolated state now. We’re not communicating properly with each other. And people aren’t managing even to meet partners. It’s just a very weird and unpleasant era we’re in, isn’t it? And they were kind of there first.

Of course, they’re all great mates, so they’ve got a connection now, as we have with them. But yeah, you make a good point about that, that something has come over all of us. And I think that when you watch the show and when you hear them being told repeatedly, “You’re the only one”, it really grasps your heart. It really hurts to watch that. And that’s possibly because we are experiencing more of that than we did.

Jace Lacob: The pace of any sort of government action for the victims of the scandal has been glacial at best. Mr Bates, by shining a light on this inactivity and stoking public outrage should spur the British government into action. What do you hope that Mr Bates can achieve finally for these sub-postmasters?

Gwyneth Hughes: Well, I hope the same thing that Alan Bates hopes. Alan is very, very practical and sensible about this. He just says, give us our money back. They talk about compensation and it’s not compensation because it’s actually money that was stolen from them by the Post Office and they want it back so that they can move on and actually have a house and a home to live in and maybe go on holiday and just have a life and draw a line under it.

And that’s all Alan actually wants; is just to be put back to where they were before and to have their lives back. Which after 21 years is not that big a request, I think. The government and the Post Office are all saying, we’re working as hard as we can, as fast as we can. And maybe they are, I don’t know. It doesn’t look that way, does it?

MIDROLL

Jace Lacob: You mentioned Alan. At the heart of the story is the indomitable will of Alan Bates and also his wife, Suzanne Sercombe. What did you make of Alan both as a person and as a subject or the main perspective, as it were, for this narrative?

Gwyneth Hughes: Alan is an extraordinary person. He’s very, very English. He’s quite buttoned up. He’s quite cool. He’s very funny. He’s got a sense of humor that’s dry as a bone. And he is also just unbelievably determined. It’s like steel, the determination in him. And he is the man who turned up when he was needed. It’s almost a mythical thing. You needed someone who never had any self-doubt, who always thought that it was their fault not his, who was simply never going to take it lying down. He was never, ever going to let them get away with it.

He has been doing this, campaigning, for 21 years, unpaid. Lives in a tiny house with his lovely, lovely partner, Suzanne, who he’s had for years and years, and they’re just funny, English, cute. Their company is really enjoyable. He is a very entertaining fellow. He’s also someone you never want to get on the wrong side of. That would be awful. He’s the man whose time came.

Jace Lacob: Alan, in many ways, becomes the ideal narrative anchor for the story. But with so many thousands of victims, how did you decide on which eight people of the 555 to profile here? Were Jo Hamilton or Lee Castleton early or obvious selections as counterpoints to Alan’s rather steely nature?

Gwyneth Hughes: Well, they were really actually, it wasn’t as hard to choose them as you might think. Obviously, there are thousands of these people and every single one has a story who is worth listening to. Some of them had much worse things happen than happened to our characters. But, when you’re doing a drama, you can’t just have a good example of something. Here’s a good example of someone who lost their mind. Here’s a good example of someone who lost their entire life savings. You’ve got to have people who can fit into the story and make the story progress.

So, once we decided that we were going to center it on Alan, which was not a difficult decision, it then became clear that we needed the other characters to be people he met and worked with, people who fed into his story, who fed into the campaign that he launched. And Jo Hamilton was just a very obvious candidate because, we always said, it’s like Alan is the head, the brain of this operation, and Jo is the heart. She’s the warmest, most motherly, grandmotherly now, kind, the nicest person you can imagine. There is no nicer person on the planet. She’s also very funny. In contrast to Alan, who never thought it was his fault, Jo always thought it was her fault. Jo was hopeless at computers, terrible with money. Honestly, I over-identified with her so much because if any of this had happened to me, I would have been just like her. Not like Alan at all.

What happens to Jo is just appalling because she just is defeated by it. And it’s terrible to watch her suffering and to watch her collapse, told she’s the only one who’s suffering these problems. And so, she spoke to Alan on the phone, and she became his sort of right hand woman. And their relationship is genuine, their friendship is genuine. They worked together all those years.

Lee Castleton, again, from the moment I heard about his story, I wanted to have Lee in the show because Lee was taken to the cleaners by the Post Office. They took him to court. They took him to the high court in London. He had no money, so he had no lawyer. He literally represented himself in the Royal Courts of Justice and did so badly, unsurprisingly, that they awarded Post Office costs against him. Lee was bankrupted for £325,000 that he had to pay the Post Office back because they were making an example of him to frighten everybody else off.

Right back in 2003, these were appalling pieces of behavior from the Post Office, from three people who were among that tiny group who went to the first meeting that Alan called. Six years into the story, because it was so hard for them to find each other, they had this meeting in a little English village called Fenny Compton. You couldn’t make it up. And those three people were there, and they had begun their journey together. So, they were absolutely the obvious choices.

And thereafter, it was never a problem to choose them because they just sort of chose themselves. You’d expect it to be really difficult, and it was a bit difficult, there were lots of stories I’d love to have included, but we only had four hours. And everybody I didn’t include was very, very grown up and kind about it. Nobody gave me a hard time. I’m very grateful to them for that because I’d love to have told all their stories.

Jace Lacob: This is a story of scrappy underdogs taking on a true juggernaut, “A war in which the enemy is owned by the British government.” Alan says at one point. It’s David versus Goliath. We innately understand that narrative, but Mr Bates moves beyond that archetype. How important was it to you to inject not just humanity, but also, in some cases, humor, into what could be a grim story?

Gwyneth Hughes: Yeah, that was very important to me for two reasons. One, that’s what they’re like. They’ve all got a great sense of humor. They’re very British people with this very British sense of humor, which I hope your viewers will also find funny. But also, because their lives have been defined by this terrible thing and they are genuinely victims of something absolutely terrible, but that’s not all they are. They’re still there. They’re still here. They’re still unextinguished. They still have a life force. They haven’t been destroyed. And I really wanted to offer them that dignity, to find that dignity in their characters saying that you can do what you like to us. You haven’t destroyed us not yet. And humor was one way of achieving that.

Jace Lacob: And to quote Sir Bernard Williams, “Man never made any material as resilient as the human spirit.” What do you feel Mr Bates says about the condition of the human spirit or of perseverance in the face of extreme adversity?

Gwyneth Hughes: Well, I think one of the reasons it’s been so successful is just that people really responded to the positive parts of the story and to Alan’s absolute dogged refusal to give in. He’s a role model to use a sort of terrible modern phrase. You think, well, when something terrible happens to me, what would Alan Bates do? Just not give up. Find some friends, stick together, fight them. Just keep fighting because what are you going to do, let them win?

And I find that really encouraging. And I find him an inspiring figure and he’s a great friend and such funny company. It’s wonderful to see him now as this national figure, you know, what would Mr. Bates do? Mr. Bates should be Sir Alan Bates. Everybody wants Paula Vennells to lose her CBE and Alan Bates to become a knight of the realm, which would be very funny if it happened.

So yeah, I think everybody has felt encouraged that one’s powerless and miserable little life that we all feel we have, can sometimes… you can grasp the nettle and you can turn those corners and you can win. Alan won. How amazing is that?

Jace Lacob: So, this might be a British story, but it is not a uniquely British problem presented here. What do you hope that American viewers come away with after watching Mr Bates?

Gwyneth Hughes: Oh, I hope American viewers, Australian viewers, everywhere that the thing is being shown, will see that it is possible to make like Mr. Bates, you know, don’t take it lying down. They don’t have to win. We can win. If we stick together and we find friends and we fight in as wily and inventive and exciting way as Alan and his friends did, then we can affect change and we can make our own lives better. I’m sure that American viewers will find so much to identify with in it with the same problems everywhere all over the world aren’t there, of not feeling listened to and not feeling like you voted for the changes that are happening.

Jace Lacob: When I interviewed you last year for Tom Jones, you positioned Mr Bates as being fairly niche. You said, “It’s a very big domestic story for us in the UK. I don’t know how much international traction it’ll get, but it’s a very good story.” And I, for one, cannot wait for this to explode around the world. Gwyneth Hughes, thank you so very much.

Gwyneth Hughes: Thank you.

While our drama has reached its conclusion, the real story of Alan Bates and the thousands of victims seeking justice marches on.

CLIP

Jo Hamilton: I didn’t know what was ahead of me.

Jess Uppal: I went through hell.

Alan Bates: It was diabolical. Something had to be done about it.

We urge you to watch the documentary, The Real Story of Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Hear from the real-life sub-postmasters affected by this scandal, on Sunday, May 5th at 7 pm Eastern on MASTERPIECE on PBS.