Mr Bates vs. the Post Office is ITV’s Biggest New Drama in Over a Decade Beating Downton Abbey Launch. It has sparked outrage and has got parliament talking. And all on traditional television when we’re all told no one is watching.

It would take a great deal of effort to have failed to notice the impact that ITV’s true life drama Mr Bates Versus the Post Office has had in the past few weeks. The quintessentially British drama tells the true, harrowing and ongoing Post office scandal which saw hundreds of subpostmasters wrongly accused of theft, due to the Post Office’s faulty computer system, Horizon. Following the airing of this drama, the subject has been brought to public scrutiny and dominated our news headlines for much of 2024 thus far.

In a TV landscape of box sets, watch-on-demand and streaming services, it’s ever harder for  a show to make any kind of televisual impact, let alone a cultural one. Yet Mr Bates has the nation in a choke hold, and has dragged the Post Office, Fujitsu (the company behind Horizon) and the government into the spotlight to answer for the heartbreaking crimes and injustices which the story detailed over its 4 episodes.

With an average of 9.8 million viewers per episode, the four-part drama has become ITV’s most successful new drama in a decade, and its momentum is such that ITV are already planning a prime-time repeat. It’s been a national talking point, created a wave of outrage and activism, and with the real life characters becoming regular faces and voices on TV and radio, the nation has demanded answers for a scandal that had so far largely passed the national consciousness by. 

The victims of this scandal had been telling the story of their suffering to the media for years (the story had been regularly covered by several major outlets, including Private Eye), and though most people may have heard of the situation, it seemed as though very few people cared or fully understood the gravity and widespread nature of it. It is only due to the power of television drama that the story has had widespread exposure and understanding, in a way that no newspaper, or even documentary, has managed to do. And it is not the first time this has happened. 

Since the invention of theatre, writers have known that the easiest way to get a message to the masses is to have characters act out the important points they want to get across. Shakespeare asked the audience to question racism in Othello and colonialism in The Tempest, and Dickens not only wrote a drama about poverty and socialism, but even had the central character only wake up to those concepts when the results of his behaviour are played out before his eyes. Scrooge wasn’t watching a TV drama about his life, but the results are the same. Even for the sharpest of us, visually acting out a story is the quickest and easiest path to our understanding, permeating our hearts in a way that relaying facts in documentaries simply can’t do.

In the case of Mr Bates Versus the Post Office, the drama allowed the facts of the extensive scandal to unfold in a contextual way that dry figures never could. But more than that, it allowed us into the lives of the victims in the exact moments when the horrors were hitting them. That immediacy puts the audience into the room with the victim, removing the distance that comes when the story is recounted, even by the victim themselves. 

The moment Monica Dolan’s Jo Hamilton is on the phone to the Horizon helpline and sees her debt double before her eyes is visceral and we can fully appreciate the despair and helplessness she feels in that moment. Its impact is even greater because we have seen Jo’s life prior to that moment, seen her care for those around her, and her trusted position in the community. The dramatisation has allowed us time to sit with these characters before the life-changing incident hits, so that we understand who they are and are able to contextualise the situation they find themselves in, through no fault of their own. Someone can say their life in the community was destroyed, but it’s a different story to actually see their children bullied and ostracised. 

It is in essence the same principle that we will care about an issue only when it affects someone we know. By watching a drama, we go right into these people’s lives and feel we do know them, and thus can truly feel the ramifications of what unfolds. This is a vitally important tool in evoking sympathy for all victims of crime, but it’s especially important in social justice topics, such as the Post Office scandal.

For many, out of sight is out of mind is a truism, and dramas which lead the audience by the hand into the lives of people they are unaware of, or chose to ignore, is the secret weapon of writers who want to provoke change. Cathy Come Home, a BBC play from 1966 highlighted the issues of homelessness and families in poverty, It shone a light on a situation that many people ignored, and put a face to the kind of people many would turn from on the street. Such was its impact, that for years the actress who played Cathy (Carol White) would have money thrust at her from strangers who believed she was really a homeless mother of 3. 

That blurring of the line between fact and fiction; the way that even for a moment the audience believes this person is real and alive and suffering right now; is the chisel that breaks through the veil of indifference. It waters down the demonisation of minorities and the misunderstood, and amplifies the voice of the unheard.

In the cases of Three Girls (detailing the failure of authorities to act on the grooming of vulnerable girls in Rochdale), Stephen (telling the story of Stephen Lawrence’s family’s fight for justice) and Damilola, Our Beloved Boy (focusing on the 6-year battle by Damilola Taylor’s family to bring his murder to court) drama is a way to lift up these victims, and speak to the nation about community, racism, and the struggle for justice for people already deemed “victims” by an uncaring society. It is the medium of drama that allows these victims to breathe and expand their lives in the eyes of the public, making them fully-formed people behind the prurient headlines. Only then are people often stirred to care and ask questions. By taking an issue to the wider public – the vast swathes of public who will sit down to watch an ITV prime-time drama over a documentary – it creates a wall of support for the victims of crime, and turns the spotlight onto the people in power. A small grassroots campaign trying to take on a global company, the police, or a government agency, has neither the volume or finance to create the unrelenting pounding of these powerful bodies that is often required to get results. But a drama that puts the issue into 10 million homes, also creates 10 million voices asking how could this happen and why hasn’t justice been handed out?

And it works. We have seen in the past how dramas such as Hillsborough can change public perception and force governments to look at things they want to ignore. Television drama has a power of familiarity, taking its central characters into our living rooms and spilling out their traumas for our entertainment. It places their problems in our laps and evokes an emotional reaction that is hard to ignore.

Thus it’s important that while our appetite for dramatisations of the lives of criminals is understandable, and has its place (it’s important to understand these crimes in order to prevent them), Mr Bates Versus The Post Office has shown us that writers should be looking for the victims’ stories, rather than the perpetrators. It is the ordinary people whose lives are changed or destroyed through no fault of their own, who deserve this powerful tool yielded on their behalf.

And while social media asks, “which scandal should become an ITV drama next?”, surely the answer is the one we haven’t heard of… yet.  

Mr Bates Vs the Post Office is available now on ITVX.