BBC “Furious” It Didn’t Seize Post Office Story First

The British Post Office scandal has affected thousands of lives for more than 20 years but has only just become a major public talking point. This is really only because of a television docudrama which aired earlier this month, and which the BBC is furious that it can’t call its own.

The fact an election is around the corner and the Conservatives and Labour are scrambling to assume any moral high ground certainly helps. But without ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office telling the story of a determined group of Post Office branch managers (‘sub-postmasters’) fighting against the government-owned institution which used faulty software data to convict them of false accounting, theft and fraud, politicians would have remained relatively silent on the issue.

As the story this week continued to dominate the headlines, former Times columnist David Aaronovitch wrote on his Substack:

I am told that the Director General of the BBC was furious at his own drama department for not getting there first.

Who can blame him? The four-parter quickly became the most-watched programme on any British television channel this year, and will likely remain as such. It is also now ITV’s biggest drama in more than a decade and the biggest new drama across all British channels since 2018.

But much more than this, Mr Bates has gained a great deal of respect for blowing the lid off the Post Office’s horrific behaviour, which resulted in normal, hardworking locals being imprisoned and/or made bankrupt, and has been linked to at least four suicides. Attention drawn by this drama has prompted the prime minister to speed up the quashing of wrongful convictions and has led to reports that the Post Office’s at best questionable practices could eventually render it insolvent.

So why didn’t the BBC get there first? The question is especially worth asking since supporters say it is the corporation’s unrivalled ability to produce hard-hitting dramas that justifies the continuation of the licence fee, a levy which must, in effect, be paid by all British households that own television sets and which goes to the BBC. However, given the BBC’s aggressively politically ‘woke’ agenda, pervasive across almost all of its broadcast programmes, perhaps the answer is as simple as this: the BBC is not interested in the lives of the ‘little people’ who pay its licence fee—such as those very sub-postmasters whose stories ITV told—unless it can give them a lecture. In fact, BBC has since tried to catch up through its news items about how the scandal really shows the Post Office is “racist.” 

Television critic Gerard Gilbert suggests that it is because of its desire to keep the licence fee in place that the BBC “would never have been brave enough” to make this drama. He writes in the i:

The BBC … faces political pressure to avoid live political issues as the broadcaster perennially battles to retain the licence fee.

Gilbert said that for the departments at the BBC, revisiting a past affair “is one thing, embroiling itself in a very live, ongoing subject like the Post Office scandal quite another.”

The broadcaster certainly has form on this front. It is just over a decade since a BBC Newsnight investigation into paedophile Jimmy Savile, who had strong links with the BBC, was shelved, forcing journalist Mark Williams-Thomas, who had worked on the project, to push on with an ITV Exposure documentary on Savile instead. The BBC did televise a drama on the story last year, long after the scandal had peaked.

Once the likely arguments within BBC offices have abated, the broadcaster may well decide to work on its own drama series. It will, again, be too late.

The European Conservative approached the BBC for comment on why, having reported on the Post Office scandal for some years, the corporation never saw it through to produce its own drama series on the story which is now making national headlines daily.