Mr. Bates vs. The Post Office rocked the Government. How do dramas like this make it to TV?

The Bunker – News without the nonsense

Podmasters

News, Government, Politics, Society & Culture

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Few TV dramas have had such an instant seismic effect as ITV’s miniseries on the Horizon scandal, Mr Bates vs The Post Office. How do searing stories of miscarriages of justice make it to screen in a ruthless television environment? And what makes them so effective at concentrating public outrage and forcing change? Simon Heath, CEO and Creative Director of World Productions, was Executive Producer of Line of Duty and the acclaimed Hillsborough drama Anne. He tells Andrew Harrison what makes true-life drama work – and how it does the job that World In Action used to do. • “To be able to launch a drama while a public inquiry is still ongoing is just fantastic because you’re able to point the audience immediately toward a live political issue, and the two things feed on each other.” - Simon Heath • “Some stories do lend themselves more readily to dramatisation, and there was something about the Post Office Scandal that you could essentially distil it down to the little people versus this out of control, faceless bureaucracy that was crushing them.” - Simon Heath Support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/bunkercast Written and Presented by Andrew Harrison. Produced by: Eliza Davis Beard. Audio production: Jade Bailey. Managing Editor: Jacob Jarvis. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Music by Kenny Dickinson. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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1:13.6	It's hard to think of a recent TV drama that's had as much impact as Mr Bates versus the post office,
1:19.1	I TV's dramatization of the Horizon scandal. When it went out from New Year's Day, the four-part series, which has now been seen
1:25.4	among almost 10 million people, lit an unprecedented fire of popular outrage under
1:30.5	a republic inquiry that had been largely ignored since it began in
1:33.3	2022. The documentary forced former post office CEO Paul of venels to hand
1:38.1	back her CBE and led to Horizons creator Fujitsu, admitting that it knew its staff were wrongly reporting system problems
1:45.4	long before prosecutions ended.
1:48.3	Gwyneth Hughes and James Strong's series is not the first docudrama
1:51.6	to put a miscarriage of justice in the spotlight.
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