Award-winning actor Toby Jones, who plays Alan Bates in ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office, reflects on the drama’s huge public and political impact, alongside its producer Patrick Spence.
Alan and Lionel ask why this screen version has cut through in a way that news reporting of the Post Office Horizon scandal did not, with insights from Professor Rasmus Nielsen, director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford.
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This transcript has been edited for clarity:
Alan Rusbridger:
Hello, and welcome to Media Confidential. Prospect Magazine's weekly exploration of the fascinating and contested world of media. I'm Alan Rusbridger.
Lionel Barber
And I'm Lionel Barber. On this episode, the star and producer of Mr. Bates vs The Post Office, on how TV drama can supercharge a fight for justice.
Toby Jones
People get inside the drama by very clear storytelling.
Patrick Spence
And I think if you read social media, the comments that people are making, we really feel that we've tapped into a rage.
Rusbridger:
Toby Jones plays the titular Mr. Bates in the series, which you can watch now on ITVX. And Toby joins us along with the producer, Patrick Spence, to reflect on its public and political impact.
Barber
And we'll ask why this screen version has cut through in a way that media reporting of the Post Office Horizon scandal did not.
Rusbridger:
Listen and follow us wherever you get your podcasts, to make sure you never miss an episode. And Media Confidential is on X/Twitter. We're @MediaConfPod.
Lionel, I know you are not sitting with me in the studio. You are sitting in a white space somewhere. Let the listeners know where your travels take you this week.
Barber
I'm in Brooklyn, New York, but don't worry, Alan, I'll be back in London on Monday.
Rusbridger:
What have you been tuning into stateside, Lionel?
Barber
Well, it's all about the election. The Iowa caucuses are just days away. Donald Trump is still the firm favourite to win there big in Iowa. Who's going to come second? New Hampshire follows thereafter. Is there a chance of a comeback, Nikki Haley? All the main news organisations are focused on the election.
Rusbridger:
And meanwhile, back in Britain, the subject that we're talking about today is the one that's dominated, though I think we should just reflect on the fact that yet another Al Jazeera journalist was killed in Gaza this week. And that brings the total to, I think around 70 journalists who've been killed in this conflict. And that again, is a subject that we should come back to, I think, on a future episode.
Audio/Video:
The computer system the post office spent an arm and a leg on is faulty.
No one else has ever reported any problems with Horizon. No one.
You are responsible for the loss.
I haven't got that money and I don't know where it's gone.
(Singing) These deficits were most likely caused by you. That is the Post Office case.
All our hopes, all our savings down the pan.
That was a lie, actually.
We're fighting a war against an enemy owned by the British government. While we are just skint little people.
This is about the reputation of the post office.
It's not, it's about people's lives, you moron.
Finally, 555 of us now, ready to tell our stories.
Barber
So, that's the TV trailer for Mr. Bates vs The Post Office, which you can watch now on ITVX. It's about the Post Office Horizon scandal and the fight of the sub-postmasters to clear their names. Hundreds were convicted in what the Criminal Cases Review Commission called the most widespread miscarriage of justice they'd ever seen. Representing, and I quote here, “The biggest single series of wrongful convictions in British legal history.”
Rusbridger:
And I can't really remember a story like this, I don't know if you can, Lionel, where a TV drama, I think you'd have to go back to the 1960s and Cathy Come Home, which is the one that everyone quotes, but where a TV drama has just ignited public fury and political response. Can you think of one, Lionel?
Barber
No, I can't think of anything comparable, Alan, and I can only think that the reason the public anger has erupted in the way it has is that people were dimly aware of what had happened. Hundreds of sub-postmasters accused illegally of scamming from where they worked. And this programme, this series, the drama has just captured the human dimension in a way that all the reporting over the previous years didn't quite capture that sense of injustice.
Rusbridger:
And we're going to hear from Toby Jones in a minute. But I think a lot of it is down to the extraordinary ... The acting, the cast of actors that was assembled, because the story itself is quite a gritty one. And maybe this is why it didn't break through in quite the same way. And it also required a power of concentration.
I was listening to a podcast, Ezra Klein was talking about the attention span ... He had on his podcast somebody who says the attention span of looking at a screen now is 47 seconds. That's how long we're capable of looking at a screen. And yet, you've got whatever it is, you've got millions of people who have followed this drama through four hours and you hear of some people watching it in one sitting. And I think that tells us something about how our viewing and working habits are changing.
Barber
I'm going to be the perennial optimist here, Alan. I realise that the attention span, that's the age we live in, but in the end, isn't it up to journalists, and I have to say, editors, to look at a story and say, "What is the essence of the story?"? I always remember when I started out in journalism having ferocious news editors saying, "That's all very well, but what's the headline?" And here, I think just people, and I'll point the finger at myself because this story was going on, bubbling along when I was the editor, that we didn't focus on what's the actual story. And the story is a massive case of injustice. These people didn't scam. They weren't ripping off the Post Office. So, what was going on? What had gone wrong?
As Harry Evans used to say, there's two definitions of an investigative journalism story. One is, we name the guilty man or person, the other is, arrow points to the defective part. And in this case, it was the computer software and the leadership at the Post Office.
Rusbridger:
Before we speak to Toby Jones and Patrick Spence about the impact of their TV drama, let's consider why the scandal hasn't already cut through in the same way. And joining us is Rasmus Nielsen, the director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, a professor of political communication at the University of Oxford.
So, Rasmus, it's not that this story wasn't reported, there are reporters from all kinds of places, from the Times or the Daily Mail to the BBC, but it might be the case readers are not paying attention in the way that they used to. And I know that your surveys have in recent years developed this idea of news avoidance. Do you want to just tell us what that is and how it seems to be growing?
Rasmus Nielsen:
Sure. We've been very interested in how it came to be that in a world where news is arguably more abundant and more easily accessible, at least for those with internet connection, than it has ever been before, that more and more people say that they're actively avoiding the news or even consistently turning it off entirely. So, in most of the countries that we look at, something like a third of adults who might otherwise be habitual news users say that they'll actively try to avoid the news often or sometimes. And in the UK, almost 10% of the adult population say that they use news less often than once a month or never.
So, millions of people are really disengaged from the news and many, many more people have a pretty thin and often episodic connection with a lot of the news. So, we try to understand why is this so? And we have interviewed hundreds of people across the UK, across the US, across Spain, to get a better sense of their experience of news and what informs the relationship that they have and their decision to sometimes quite actively try to avoid it.
The central point really is that a large number of people feel that the news is quite depressing. They feel that the news is quite irrelevant from the point of view of their own lives, and find it quite incomprehensible. So, with that perception of the news and that experience of using it, they don't really feel it's worth their while and instead rely on other sources of information to go about their lives.
Rusbridger:
So, that could explain why a story like this didn't catch on when presented as news but did as a drama. Do you think that's plausible?
Nielsen:
I think that's probably a contributing factor. I also think that part of it is about the quite protracted nature of first, the judicial side of this and then later, the official inquiry. And while it's true that there's been a lot of really good coverage of this from Computer Weekly and Private Eye, and later on from other organisations, as you say, and that that coverage has been very important in documenting what has happened and holding those involved to account and understanding better those who were accused of all sorts of things. At the same time, I do wonder if one were to go back, how prominently was this coverage really featured by those organisations who have a broader public reach?
I mean, of course we have to remember that every month, tens of thousands of news articles are published and the majority of them are read only by a few thousand people. And in that sense there is, I think, a problem here of just the volume of content that's being offered up, that only those who are most engaged and most willing to really read a lot of it and really navigate a lot of it, can really sift through that to identify the big and enduring and important issues. And there a drama can play a different role, it can cut through, it can tell a much more compelling and engaging story for a very different audience.
Rusbridger:
Can you talk a bit about the combination of metrics and budgets? So, metrics tell you how many people are or aren't reading a story, and a story like this might be quite a complicated one to explain. And then budgets, nobody needs to emphasise that the news business is short of money and the dogged legwork that is involved in investigative reporting is often the first to go. What are the trends there?
Nielsen:
I mean, it's clear that the business of news is under tremendous pressure. People's attention is going elsewhere. That means the advertisers are moving elsewhere and spending their money with big tech companies and not with the publishers that they used to spend their money with. And of course, this has direct consequences. We've seen thousands of layoffs in newsrooms across the UK and elsewhere. And of course, sometimes that's also had an impact on a newsroom's ability and willingness to invest in enterprise reporting that doesn't always deliver the kind of return that investors or executives might be looking for.
At the same time, I also think we have to think about the question of editorial priorities. Some of the organisations that have done reporting on this are not large organisations. I mean, Private Eye is not a huge newsroom. So, part of it, I think, is also about when news organisations decide to really dig into a story and perhaps are willing to surrender the ability to provide quite the same breadth of coverage that many of them often like to do, which always comes with the risk of just spreading oneself too thinly and becoming too reliant on what sources have to offer, what you can get from the news agencies, what PR pitches pop up, and leave very little time for any kind of original or active reporting.
Barber
Rasmus, we know that investigative journalism is really resource intensive, but have you picked up with your researchers, a decline in the amount of investigative journalism in media in Britain?
Nielsen:
I mean, like everybody else, we can see a real decline in news from employment. I mean, there's been very brutal layoffs at many titles, probably most dramatically at the local and regional newspapers that have been very important in their own communities, but are sometimes discussed less than national media. And of course, in those titles where even as colleagues are laid off, left, right and centre, the ambition is still to provide people a little bit of news about everything. That leaves very little for investigative reporting and there is a real question about how many news organisations are still able to invest in that. So, it's a very real challenge.
At the same time, I think we also should recognise that we have the Bureau of Investigative Journalism providing a very important nonprofit supplement to what the commercial press provides. There are still parts of the public service media that can also invest in this even as their resources are under pressure as well. And more globally, even though much of the press is under tremendous pressure, we've also seen the growth of subscription-based business models where very respected news organisations, though sadly mostly those who serve rich and privileged people, like myself, are able to invest more and more in their journalism. I mean, The New York Times newsroom is more than twice the size of what it was 10 or 20 years ago.
Barber
And what about new forms of collaboration which help offset some of the resources? I mean, there are pros and there are obviously some practical difficulties in getting journalists to work together.
Nielsen:
It takes nothing away from the real losses that we see in many newsrooms, to recognise at the same time that there are also some encouraging developments. Some rather snarky scholars have called journalism a profession that was almost pathologically competitive in the past. I mean, scholars should know what that looks like. And of course, in that sense, collaborations that we see at the local level in the UK but also internationally, through the International Consortium for Investigative Journalists, and others, are very encouraging.
I think it's also very encouraging to see what relatively small teams of people are doing with open source intelligence. Bellingcat, of course, is the most famous example of this. Or more broadly, the use of public data and evidence, whether that's Forensic Architecture or Our World in Data, or other sites. I mean, there are new ways of storytelling, new ways of reporting that bring in-depth reporting to a significant part of the public, even as we are also seeing some very real losses in more traditional parts of the press.
Barber
Just like to put it on the record that being a little bit pathological is not bad, if you want to be a really good reporter.
Rusbridger:
Some of my best friends are. Well, Rasmus, thank you for joining us and that was a semi-encouraging note on which to end.
Barber
Thanks, Rasmus.
Rasmus Nielsen:
Thank you very much.
Barber
Well, I thought Rasmus made some very useful points here about the state of investigative journalism in the country. Obviously, it takes a lot of money, but it also takes a lot of patience and you've got to be able to realise that it's a bit like oil drilling. You're not going to hit a gusher every time you set out to uncover a big story.
Rusbridger:
Yeah. I think you have to have very understanding and enlightened managements, because the easy thing to do is to cut the investigative journalists who are often expensive and as you say, they're not always the most productive of journalists, but I think it's what the readers really care about. That's what they want journalists to be doing.
And I think it's a false economy to be cutting back on that kind of reporting, despite what the metrics say, because as we know, sometimes these stories rely on the slow accumulation of evidence. It's not necessarily one big bang. Each individual piece in an investigative narrative may not be getting the huge numbers. And again, you have to have enlightened managements who are not so obsessed with metrics that they want every story to be reaching the maximum number of clicks.
Barber
And when you really have a big story like thalidomide, it can define the newspaper or the news organisation for decades.
Rusbridger:
Completely. Or, Watergate. It's interesting, if you go back through Watergate, quite often the stories are little 10-inch stories in column five or down the bottom of page five. We get the impression this was a big bang that Nixon resigned, but actually it was a long dogged pursuit of evidence.
Barber
This is Media Confidential and coming up, actor Toby Jones and producer Patrick Spence on the impact of Mr. Bates vs The Post Office.
Rusbridger:
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This is Media Confidential with Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber, and today we're examining the media side of the Post Office Horizon scandal, and more particularly the impact of the ITV drama, Mr. Bates vs The Post Office. And from that, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast, the award-winning actor Toby Jones, who heads the ensemble cast playing the titular Alan Bates, and the drama's producer Patrick Spence. Welcome, gentlemen. And we speak literally as the news breaks that Rishi Sunak has announced ... Patrick, do you want to tell us what he's announced?
Spence
He says the government will bring in a new law to swiftly exonerate and compensate victims of the Post Office scandal. As part of this, there will be a new upfront payment of 75 grand for the 555 who brought the original lawsuit.
Rusbridger:
So, this is the amazing reaction to this drama. Toby, when you first saw the script, did you have any idea that it would have this kind of impact?
Jones
Absolutely not. As with any script, my first concern, I suppose, is to work out whether it works as drama, primarily, as a dramatic text, whether that's a three-act structure or a four-part TV play. And the subject matter, I was not familiar with, but I knew about the Post Office scandal.
The thing that struck me first was that Gwyneth Hughes, the extraordinary writer of this drama, had done an amazing job at just compressing this information into something that functioned as drama. At that point, that was my main concern really, is whether it was going to be compelling enough to watch the drama as a piece of drama. In terms of it fueling a campaign, I don't think we ever even had that conversation. I think it was more that we were all shocked by what had happened. And I was shocked at my own ignorance, which to a certain extent was alleviated by reading the drama. The drama was so clear, it made everything so clear, that I suddenly felt educated by it. And I suppose, in that sense, I was made optimistic by what I read. But no, I don't think anyone could have predicted this response and how swift this response has been, just like no one could have predicted the ratings that we've had.
Rusbridger:
Patrick, do you want to give us some idea of how many people have seen this? And same question to you really, did you have any idea and do you have a theory as to why this has cut through in a way that nothing else has?
Spence:
Three different questions then. Can I do the, did I have an idea first? Of course not, to the extent that on the morning of transmission, I sent an email to my team warning them that we would be killed in the ratings by The Tourist on the Monday and the Tuesday, and Traitors on the Wednesday and the Thursday. The BBC brought out two of their biggest hits across the year from last year to fire against us. And what I said to them was, "Look, when I call you with the overnight ratings tomorrow morning, they're going to be low. But just remember that this is a good show we've made, that is important and meaningful and hugely emotional, and I believe passionately that we will find some kind of an audience over the coming days and weeks." So, what did I know?
And to answer your second question, what were the ratings? The overnights were, I think, 3.7, certainly well over 3.5. And in a world in which between a half and one third of people watch live television, that allows you when you hear the overnights, to immediately go, "Well, if it's 3.5 to 3.7, we should therefore consolidate at 7 million." Possibly more, depends on how word of mouth spreads. And actually after only seven days, we have consolidated at 9.2 million.
Now to put that in perspective, the most watched drama of last year by a long way was Happy Valley with 10 million and that was its consolidated ratings after several months. So, we've done in a week, very nearly what Happy Valley did in three months. So, it's extraordinary. And the news from ITVX, the streaming platform where you can catch up on it, is that they are still watching it in their droves. So, I think that number will go significantly higher.
Why has it been a success? God, I think time will tell, but I'm going to offer three thoughts. One is that the thing that a drama does that a documentary can't do and a newspaper article can't do is it goes inside the hearts and minds of the characters themselves and in a way that you can't in other forms. And that allows, in the case of this story, for an audience to experience the emotional upheaval, those words aren't big enough, but the emotional horror of what they suffered and the abuse of power that they suffered and to feel it vicariously with them. And that's the beauty of drama is it can bring to life and allow you to experience those emotions of ordinary people going through hell.
The second thing that we've been talking about more recently as we've been trying to work out over and above the reason why a drama can bring it to life, why this particular story and this effect, which is obviously huge, is we wonder whether we are not, without intending to, whether we're not tapping into some kind of national rage that people feel unheard by their politicians and by their corporate leaders. And that the very people that are supposed to have our backs clearly don't and we don't feel that we can trust them and we feel that they're sometimes, maybe even often, liars and cheats. And that's a horrible discovery to make. And even if we haven't experienced the horrors that the sub-postmasters experienced, we can relate to the feeling of feeling unheard and feel anger on their behalf. And I think if you read social media, the comments that people are making, we really feel that we've tapped into a rage that we weren't intending to, but we have.
And then, I think the third reason is that the difference between this drama and other factual dramas that I've made in the past is that at the end it appears at first glance to be a happy ending, but of course, it's not. Because the fact is that there are still horrors out there that are still happening and the redress has not been made in any way, legally, financially, et cetera. And so, there is a call to arms at the end of the drama that feels urgent. And that's not normal with factual dramas. Normally, it's happened in the past and there's an endpoint that you've chosen for a reason. And in this case we were able to say, "Actually, guys, it's not good enough, not by far. So, we're not even leaving you with a happy ending." And people have responded to that in ways that we all know.
Barber
I think this is true, Patrick, but apart from the brilliant drama, there has also been an accounting. So, you've actually drawn a reaction from the government within a matter of weeks, which as a newspaper editor, we always look at our investigative stories and say, "Well, okay, is there some kind of accounting?" You've done that.
I had a slightly different point. I'd be fascinated what you or Toby think. Do you also think you've got such a tremendous reaction because this story really offends the British sense of fairness? It's so obviously unjust what's happened to people. That's why it's also tapped a nerve?
Jones
Yes. Again, I go to Gwyneth's screenplay, where you see very quickly, in the first 20 minutes you see me resisting what appeared to be gangsters trying to get at my computer terminal. And the fact that even if I'd wanted to, I can't give them the terminal because I'm locked into my booth, as it were. And then you see Monica Dolan playing Jo Hamilton and you see her flummoxed in a way that we've all been flummoxed by our computer software, that we can't operate a computer to do the thing that we are told should be very simple. And very quickly you see that in the drama and very quickly you understand something is up. Yes. But you also can relate very clearly to these two people.
And I think that's just very good storytelling, very clear storytelling straight up front, before you get into any of the legal ramifications, of the computer ... Of the investigation. Of, in a way, Alan's huge achievement to group together this disparate constituency of postmasters, which in itself is an extraordinary achievement. I think that the storytelling is very, very clear, and I think that is really ... As Patrick said, people get inside the drama by very clear storytelling. Fair play, yes, but I mean that's true in any drama, I think.
Barber
What were the conversations like about the Post Office bureaucracy, implacable, and any thoughts on Ms. Vennells?
Spence
So firstly, it's worth saying that every single word that Paula Vennells says in the drama is a matter of fact. There are other things that we were told by insiders that we wanted to use but weren't allowed to. I'm obviously therefore not allowed to say them on this podcast, but I think it's notable that Tom Witherow has written about the existence of secret tapes that are, in his words, damning, that have been handed to the inquiry, and I think more will be revealed.
But what we used in the drama was enough, we felt, and they were her real words. So, Lia Williams showed, as if she hasn't shown it before, what an extraordinary actor she is, because she was given dialogue that was written in email form by Paula Vennells and she had to make sense of it in terms of actual dialogue. Quite hard to act stuff that was written by somebody else, not even by a screenwriter. So, it's all true what you say in the drama. And beyond that, we can't say a lot because we don't know for sure what she knew and what she did. We have very strong instincts about it, but ultimately we have to wait, like everyone else, to see.
But this is my view, okay? What I would say is at some point, somewhere, either she or maybe her predecessor who went on to run ITV, somebody somewhere must have come into the office of one of those two executives, I'm assuming it was Paula, because that's when it really started to build, and say, "Just to let you know, we are arresting hundreds of sub-postmasters on the basis that they have stolen tens of thousands of pounds." And for whatever reason, Paula either didn't think to say, "That's odd. That doesn't feel quite right." Or, she chose to ignore it. And that lack of, at best, inquisitiveness, feels abhorrent to me. I think it's also worth saying something that Nick Wallis taught us. He was our consultant. And by the way, shout out to Nick Wallis, who, this drama wouldn't have happened without him.
Rusbridger:
He's the reporter who did so much of the work on this. Yeah.
Spence
Yeah. And for years and years and years, he was writing about this story and that's why we're all here today. Let's just give him that credit, please. And also, by the way, Marina Hyde was hugely influential for us tonally as well.
But it's worth pointing out what Nick Wallis ... When we said to Nick, "What do you think they were thinking?" He said, "What you need to understand, Patrick, is baked into the DNA of the Post Office, is the deeply held belief that, and this dates back to the days of highway robbery, is that their staff were thieving from them. And one of the many reasons why they were so keen to instal an electronic process into their post offices was they were so convinced that theft was happening on a grand scale. And so, therefore, the computer system confirmed their bias and made them feel self-righteous about it, which explains the menacing way in which they went about prosecuting these sub-postmasters because their attitude was, 'Got you. We've known about it for so long and we didn't have the proof, so now we get to go after you.'"
So, there's a kind of psyche within the Post Office that their staff are stealing from them, which in itself is abhorrent, I think. And they didn't seek to question ... When you meet Jo Hamilton, you sit opposite her, you can see that she's not the sort of person that would steal 10,000 pounds or tens of thousands of pounds. The lack of human instinct and the lack of understanding and the lack of compassion in the way that they went after these people and they abused, let's not forget, their ability to prosecute and convict outside of the Crown Prosecution Service. Again, dating back to the days of highway robbery, when they were the nation's police force, they abused that power. And one of the many things that needs to happen is they need to be stripped of that power once and for all.
Rusbridger:
Toby, I'd like to ask you about how you approach your responsibility to the truth. You're speaking to two journalists and we believe that we try and operate with the truth and somehow drama is not a word that is synonymous with truth. And yet, you as an actor, are representing someone who's not a historical figure, who is still alive. And I'm sure you met him and the real Alan Bates. How do you, as an actor, think about your responsibility to representing the truth of what happened, the real life character?
Jones
Well, I have to view it, as I said before, as a piece of drama. And in a sense, it's a character, like a fictional character that the dramatist, they've made certain choices about which features of that character are going to be shown. Above and beyond that, I suppose there's a philosophy that I have that everyone is capable of everything. And so, you are trying to find space as an actor beyond the script. Once you've satisfied the demands of the script and the logic of the script and the rationale of the choices and you understand all of that, there will be some additional space which is usually in physical behaviour, which isn't scripted, which you can also suggest other aspects of a character.
I never really understand when people say, "I'm trying to avoid imitation." Because I don't really understand what imitation is on one level, because I don't know at what point an imitation becomes something other than an imitation or the other way around. But in the past when I've played characters, either dead characters or still alive characters, it's interesting that we may know Alfred Hitchcock, but why we're having the drama is because we don't know certain aspects about Alfred Hitchcock's life. That's why we're seeing the drama. So, you're having to creatively imagine, the dramatist is having to do that.
And usually, these are informal situations in which the actor will have to make decisions as to, "In this shot, how does he reach for the door handle and open the door? How does he pick up his cutlery? How does he comb his hair? How does he leave the room?" All of those questions which are ideal opportunities to suggest additional information which you may not know about the character. And it struck me that despite his protestations, Alan Bates must be an emotional man and must be a man who was intensely frustrated and under intense pressure. And while I have to honour his statement that he doesn't manifest rage, I felt that it was important to show frustration, as it were, in the in-between moments, even if he doesn't say the stuff. That somehow in the way that I move and in my physical language, I can suggest something that he's trying to deny. And in the specific case of Alan Bates, that would be how I would do it.
Rusbridger:
And how much time did you spend with him before playing him?
Jones
Very little. I was in America, actually, in Brooklyn, and I was working on a project and Patrick gave me his number and I rang him up. And he made it very clear, very quickly, that he was slightly cautious about the idea of a drama, because I think he's had his hopes deferred so many times. And I think there is a modesty about him and the idea of being dramatised seemed surreal at worst and possibly inappropriate in some way, because he's so focused on the action he's doing.
Nonetheless, he talked to me and he was charming and he said, "Unfortunately, I don't express emotions, which I think might make your job a little harder." Which obviously as I've already said to you, I didn't believe, but I then spoke to James Arbuthnot and in a way I got a much better picture of Alan from James Arbuthnot, who wasn't-
Rusbridger:
Who was the Tory MP, who was the champion of them.
Jones
Yeah. Who wasn't held back by admirable feelings of modesty. It's a very strange thing to have someone talk to you about yourself and be dramatised.
Rusbridger:
And has Alan been in touch since seeing you and has he commented on your role?
Jones
He has. No, he hasn't commented on my role. He definitely hasn't done that. And I think I heard him say in some capacity, I can't remember where it was, I heard him say, "I'm the last person who is qualified to comment on..." I think it was on Newsnight, "comment on how Toby Jones did my role." And I totally understand that because I often feel I'm the last person to comment on my own acting. I have no sense of what I do. I can't look at it objectively. I can't see myself as others see me.
Spence
I can contribute to this by saying it is fair to say that throughout this process, Alan Bates has been very, very nervous about the way in which we would portray his character, for a number of different reasons. Because he represents a whole community, he's a private individual, and also because he sees himself as an unemotional man, when we were telling a story in which we were presenting some of those emotions closer to the surface than he would wish to see them dramatised.
It was not always easy for either side to find common ground in how we would represent his character on screen. And I think it's also ... I hope he would be happy with me saying that he's thrilled with the end result.
Barber
Patrick, let me pick up something you alluded to earlier, which is pressures pre-screening. It's the kind of pressures that editors have pre-publication when setting into print online, a big investigation. What kind of pressures did you have? Did you get a lot of legal threats or, "You need to be careful about this."?
I had a second thought, which is there is another villain in this piece of course, which is Fujitsu, the software manufacturer, big Japanese powerful company. Do you have any thoughts on what their role?
Spence
Yeah. So I think, again, let me go through those questions one by one. The first question is, did we feel nervous in the lead up to transmission? No, because we have a compliance team. I've made a lot of factual dramas and dealt with stories that are every bit as complicated as this. We're about to embark on another one, which is far more complicated from a compliance perspective than this.
We were, however, dealing with a foe, an antagonist in the story who is highly litigious, and we knew that, but our hands were held, as they always are on terrestrial television, by a compliance team, who at ITV studios, I have to say are astonishing. And they are, I know because I've worked at the BBC too, they are astonishing there too. So, actually, every single fact that we presented as fact had been fact checked so many times that we felt absolutely sure and ready that whatever they tried to throw at us, we were able to rebuff. And the Post Office did indeed try to rebuff.
You have to talk them through in detail the way in which you're going to represent the individuals and the story. We didn't show them scripts, but we effectively talked them through every beat of the story. And there were many, many things that they wanted to question and we said, "Yeah, thank you. We'll take our chances. Thank you." But that was because of the confidence we had in Claire Posner and her team in compliance who had just made sure that we were bang on. And you can't put a story like this on national television without having that confidence.
Barber
Fujitsu?
Spence
Okay. So, the Post Office are a chaotic and menacing and bullying and lying organisation, and therefore, it was too easy, in a way, to go after them. Fujitsu are cleverer and quieter and they've been preparing for this kind of onslaught. They didn't know it would come from a TV show, but they've been preparing for this, I suspect, for some time.
And their PR teams and their crisis management teams and their corporate affairs teams, I'm assuming are very, very buttoned down and strong, because we can't touch them. Somebody else is going to have to do that. And we named what we could in the drama, you've seen it, but essentially somebody else is going to have to go after Fujitsu because we couldn't get near them. As a screenwriting team, we didn't have the resources to take down Fujitsu in a way that we're hoping the inquiry will. I think it's fair to say this is Toby's last interview, and it's fair to say that we are going to quietly withdraw very soon as programme makers and leave the story to everyone else.
Rusbridger:
Have either of you had approaches already from other people burning for you to tell their story? Because people must look at this and think, "I've got my cause, my injustice."
Jones
I'm sure Patrick has, but it's rather strange as an actor, because you're the public face of a project, that you are seen as some sort of a portal into the industry. So, people have come up to me in the past and do come up to me and say, "Look, I've got this injustice and I think it would make a really good TV series." And obviously, I point them immediately in the direction of people like Patrick, because there's not a lot ... I mean, I could try and produce it if I wanted to, if I had the time, but it's not necessarily the way I want to spend my time.
But I think there is a serious point, which is that this has also revealed an appetite in the viewing public for stories that aren't about crimes being solved and about hospitals dealing with casualty patients, and trouble in the market. There is a need for serious sustained drama, not necessarily based on fact, it could also be a fiction that is based on fact, which operates in a different context, which is a state of the nation piece. It's something that we seem to have forgotten the way to do, or if we haven't forgotten the way to do, that commissioners lack the dynamism and ambition.
Spence
Funnily enough, I don't think they do. The fault lies not with the commissioners. I think they're really keen to do these. And ITV, Polly Hill, they do two or three of these a year, but it's very hard to finance them. That's part of the problem, because they're limited short run series. And there was a point, it's worth saying, on this, where weeks before filming where this show nearly fell apart because the financing didn't make sense. And everyone had to pull together and do it for less and that was the only way we got it off the ground. That's the more frightening thing. It's not that the appetite of the commissioners, it's how do we finance these shows?
And to answer it, from my perspective, I'm a little obsessed with investigative journalism, so we're going on to do two dramas after this. One I can't talk about, but is very much about great investigative journalism and wanting to shine a light on that and show respect to it, it's a contemporary story. And the other, that I can talk about, is we're working with Michael Fassbender to tell the story of Harry Evans and his time at The Sunday Times, and to shine a light on that investigative journalism as a love letter to the great days of investigative journalism, not that they don't still exist, at a time when we need it more than ever.
So, one of the reasons that I wanted to do this podcast was to say, I think it's time that television drama showed respect to all the journalists out there who are doing the work they're doing.
Rusbridger:
They sound like great shows, and congratulations and thank you, both of you, for coming along to talk today about this great drama.
Spence
We're really thrilled to be asked. Thank you.
Jones
Thank you. Thank you.
Rusbridger:
Well, I don't know about you, Lionel, but I found it inspiring and a bit depressing. The inspiring bit is obviously these great artists who have produced an extraordinary, I think, a masterpiece of drama and the impact that it's had.
I suppose the depressing bit is I think of all our journalistic colleagues on Computer Weekly, The Times, Private Eye, Daily Mail, Panorama, BBC, The Sun, who have dogged away at this story for nearly 20 years now. And I don't know, does that tell us something about the diminishing power of journalism, the way that journalism can't punch through in the way that a drama can? What did you feel?
Barber
Alan, let's start with the positive. As Toby and Patrick made very clear, eloquently so, drama has that ability to get inside the character and provide the real human dimension, the emotional dimension. It's much harder to do that in prose. And obviously drama, if it works, they really have got a mass audience.
I think the lesson for some of the journalists ... And obviously this story was bubbling along when both of us were editors. I think the mainstream media nibbled at the story. The difference with this is you've got sustained drama over several episodes. If you have one story and you don't keep coming back to it in a sustained way and develop the story, it's harder to make impact.
Rusbridger:
Yeah. I was thinking of something that Harry Evans once said. So, Harry Evans, one of the great campaigning editors of our lifetime, perhaps of all time. He used to say that the point when a newspaper begins to tire of a campaign is the point where readers just begin to notice it. You think of the campaigns he did for which he's famous, the Timothy Evans case, the thalidomide case, the DC-10 case. Really, you have to have faith in the audience that they're going to stick with the story, even when you, yourself, are beginning to get bored of it. You must have had stories like that yourself, Lionel.
Barber
Well, I remember the Wirecard scandal, this German FinTech company that eventually we did bring down. It was a gigantic fraud, as big as Enron, 2 billion euros went missing. It was the darling of the German stock market, and we had all the same threats and everything else. But I remember discussing with the reporters, Paul Murphy, and particularly, Dan McCrum, the lead financial reporter, and they kept thinking that this particular story when they'd written it, would just kill the company, would knock them out. And you'd have 24 hours of share price going down and then just back to normal. I think a lot of people thought, "Well, okay, what next?"
And the point to make is you're not going to knock out something in one shot. It needs sustained journalism. And when people begin to get bored, that's when the editor has to say, "Look, let's just focus on the big thing." And in Wirecard it was, there is a gigantic fraud here. It is a fraudulent company. And in the Post Office scandal, the thing to say is, "Look, keep going, because there's a gigantic injustice here. These people cannot be all scamming."
Rusbridger:
In this month's ProspectMagazine, Avi Shlaim, the professor of international relations at the University of Oxford, has written an article highlighting his fears about Israel's war in Gaza. He's concerned that ethnic cleansing could end up being the aim of the offensive in response to the horrific events of October the 7th carried out by Hamas terrorists.
For this week's Prospect Podcast, Deputy Editor Ellen Halliday meets with Avi to delve deeper into his life and experiences and to find out how they have formed his current view of the conflict.
Avi Shlaim:
The June, 1967 war was a landmark in the history of the Middle East, but it was also for me, personally. I had served loyally and proudly in the IDF in the mid-60s, because in my time it was true to its name. It was the Israel Defence Forces. It was there to defend the country against regular armies of the neighbouring Arab states. And I really believed in the justice of our cause. I believed that we were a small, liberal, democratic, peace-loving country surrounded by predatory Arabs, and we had no choice but to stand up and fight.
But everything changed after that war. Israel became a colonial power. My army became the brutal police force of a brutal colonial power. Its mission had been to defend the country, but after the colonial rule was established over the Palestinian occupied territories, the main mission of the army became to police the occupation. So, that's when my disenchantment with Israel began.
Rusbridger:
Avi's article is a brilliant read and the podcast is a compelling listen. So, follow and subscribe to the ProspectPodcast wherever you get your podcasts.
If you've got any questions for us about the media, email them to mediaconfidential@prospectmagazine.co.uk and we'll answer a few of them in a future episode.
Barber
Thank you for listening to Media Confidential, brought to you by ProspectMagazine and Fresh Air. The producer is Danny Garlick.
Rusbridger:
And remember to listen and follow us wherever you get your podcasts.
Barber
We're on Twitter/X too, @MediaConfPod.
Rusbridger:
There's another episode along next Thursday when we may even be discussing the US media and the coming election. Join us there.
