Page 94, the Private Eye Podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94, my name is Andrew Hunter Murray,

and I'm here in the Private Eye Office with Helen Lewis, Adam McQueen and Richard Brooks.

We are here to discuss a brand new year of news, which happens to feature

lots of things that happened an enormously long time ago, but have now burst back into

the National Consciousness, starting with the post office because the news series

Mr Bates versus the post office has gone out and has attracted an enormous amount of

attention Richard you obviously have been writing about the post office for many, many years.

I did have a look, we did a post office special on this podcast in 2020 where we started off

by saying, well this is a very, very long running an old story,

because that at that point was two decades old,

from the first rash of people being, you know, investigated,

sub-postmasters and mistresses.

It was, I think Private Eye and Computers Computer Weekly who were the first publications to write about this?

Yeah, Computer Weekly was the first one in 2009.

Alan Bates went to them and a couple of other people came forward and then Nick Wallace who was working for a BBC regional news program

He picked up a couple of cases including Joe Hamilton who was one of the lead characters in the drama

Monica Dolan played her because there was a bit of a cluster in the southeast, Surrey, Hampshire,

James R. Butthnot, the MP was Joe Hamilton's MP. So that sort of got

the ball rolling a bit. And Nick said to us, surely this is, looks like something private

I ought to be interested in it, certainly was because for years as you say

would have been writing about these dodgy computer programs including the precursor to

...