No-one else is having any issues

Continuing my trip down The Guardian's Top 50 TV Shows of 2024

#13 : Mr Bates Vs The Post Office 

This year, the head of ITV said that Mr Bates vs the Post Office had such limited international appeal that it left the channel with a million pound loss. But finances be damned, because you’re unlikely to ever find a show able to leave such a large footprint. Despite diligent reporting, the Post Office scandal never managed to catch fire in the public eye. Mr Bates vs the Post Office changed that, taking an unmanageably complex issue and turning it into the David and Goliath story it always was. Nothing less than a testament to the power of television drama.

Skipping over Ripley (#12 here, #11 in Empire's list) brings us to this which you might possibly have heard of. I was actually previously aware of the scandal (Private Eye did a good job of reporting it and I used to read it quite often back in the day) and it seemed like nothing was going to shift the needle on it - until this came along. And it seemed like pretty much everyone in the country watched it and was outraged - except for me, that is. Part of that was already knowing the story but I also find that when everyone goes on about something, I tend to develop an allergic reaction to it (and no, I've not watched Adolescence yet). But that's going to be resolved now...

...oh - do you know what? It's not going to be resolved at all because I only made it twenty minutes into the first episode before I gave up on it. What could possibly have been so bad about it?

To be fair, it's not that it was bad - it was just too good at what it did. There are a few buttons I have which I absolutely don't like being pushed and one of them is injustice - and boy was that brought to the fore here early on. All the sub postmasters had technical issues and were told by the faceless IT support that "no-one else is having any issues" and they suffered financially as a result. Grrr - it made my blood boil.  And another thing I don't like is any sense of foreboding - and you absolutely knew that things were going to get considerably worse for people before they were going to get better. It also felt a bit weird that I now knew that the series didn't tell the whole story because of how things had moved on as a result of the programme itself - maybe there will be a follow-up series whereby someone will dramatise the dramatisation...

From what I saw, it's well acted but I would suggest that the "playing your average person" thing isn't exactly a stretch for Toby Jones, Monica Dolan (she's been popping up quite a lot recently), Julie Hesmondhalgh or Will Mellor - the first two were nominated for BAFTAs (but lost out to Lennie James and Marisa Abela who are two people we have to experience) and ITV won a special BAFTA award for the public interest nature of the series.

It was all adequately filmed - it wasn't a thing of beauty but that wasn't what it was supposed to be. I do have to take issue with The Guardian saying it was "an unmanageably complex issue" though - basically the Post Office and Fujitsu were utter bastards at every turn. To its credit, there's no danger of this series not making that perfectly clear - from the little I saw I felt it possibly could have been slightly less sledgehammer in its approach, but maybe things were slightly more nuanced in the 90% I didn't see.

Yes, I do feel I should have watched it all but it just wouldn't have done my blood pressure any good or actually taught me anything. But that's not to take anything away from it - it's impressive how something that had been rumbling on since '99 without much traction suddenly seemed to get all sorted out in a couple of months. And yes, I realised I'm massively simplifying an unmanageably complex issue here (if you've got some spare time then the Wikipedia entry is quite an interesting read). However, unlike me, you've probably already seen this so I'm merely telling you what you already know.

#11 - You've heard of this, right?