Governments have always been terrified of television. Since the medium began in the UK in 1936, numerous laws have dictated how many hours of programming can be broadcast when and what they should contain. Officially, this strict regulation protected viewers from brain-rot, moral corruption or distraction from professional and family duties. But there has always been much concern, too, that TV might illuminate the more shadowy and embarrassing actions of the state.
In the way that had always been feared, the small screen swept a blinding light through Westminster this week, ITV’s drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office leaving ministers scrambling to introduce rapid legislation to exonerate and pay compensation to more than 700 UK sub-postmasters. They were wrongly accused of fraud and theft between 1999 and 2015, due to faulty accounting software imposed by the Post Office that led to multiple bankruptcies, divorces, breakdowns and contributed to deaths.
Such a vast reversal would usually result only from a court verdict and, even then, with delays for appeals and ministerial quibbling. In this case, justice seems likely to come within weeks of transmission. That would make Mr Bates vs the Post Office the most socially effective programme in British TV’s 88-year history.
Gwyneth Hughes’ four-part drama – starring Toby Jones and Monica Dolan as accused Post Office employees – drew around 3.5 million viewers overnight (very high by current prime-time levels and with catch-up still to come), even beating the return of much-loved BBC One gameshow The Traitors; and more than one million signatures to a petition calling for former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells to lose her CBE (which she now says she will hand back immediately).
Due to the TV awards calendar, Mr Bates vs the Post Office cannot win Baftas until spring 2025, but there must be a case for giving it a holding trophy – say, Special Award for Outstanding Contribution to Public Knowledge – at this May’s ceremony. At the very least, the courage of ITV and independent producers Little Gem should be acknowledged – especially in dramatising a story that is not yet completed. If anyone had been charged with an offence, ITV would have been unable to run the series until all trials were completed – potentially years. But they timed it perfectly, with the start of a criminal investigation following transmission.
Mr Bates vs the Post Office seems set to be remembered as a show that changed society more than most politicians and lawyers could ever imagine. But what are the other contenders?
Cathy Come Home (BBC, 1966)
Ken Loach and Jeremy Sandford’s drama about a young couple forced into homelessness by poverty, unemployment and grasping landlords has sometimes been credited with the launch of the housing charity Shelter, although that had always coincidentally been scheduled for soon after broadcast. However, the play did provoke Commons questions and newspaper coverage, which encouraged the launch of Shelter the following year. But while Mr Bates has a chance of eradicating Post Office digital persecution for ever, Loach has always pointed out that although Cathy Come Home raised awareness about the housing crisis, there was little reform. The problem remains at least as serious 58 years on.
The War Game (BBC, 1966)
Unusually among the most influential TV shows, Peter Watkins’ simulation of a nuclear attack on the UK – made at the peak of the cold war – was not shown for 19 years. BBC bosses feared it would show viewers the futility of preparations for armageddon and its physical reality: evaporating eyeballs, rats outnumbering people in the streets. Counterintuitively, the show’s banning – supposed to reduce mass panic – led Britons to suspect that atomic war must be even worse than they had thought.
Spotlight: Giuseppe Conlon and the Bomb Factory (BBC Northern Ireland, 1980)
This report by Gavin Esler – later a Newsnight anchor and Change UK European parliamentary candidate – was crucial in building doubt about the convictions of the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven, groups of mainly Northern Irish men imprisoned for involvement in 1970s London pub bombings or possession of terrorist materials. By interviewing someone released after a shorter sentence, Esler was able to question the case against those still jailed. All 11 were subsequently cleared and received apologies and recompense.
Police: A Complaint of Rape (BBC Two, 1982)
Campaigning documentarian Roger Graef embodied soft cop and hard cop in one man. His charm won access to prisons and police stations, but in the editing room, he ruthlessly followed the evidence. For good reasons of anonymity and due process, few, except the poor victims, had much idea of the brutal, prurient, sceptical, even “humorous” way male police officers questioned female rape victims. With subtle use of blurring and cutaways, this episode of Graef and Charles Stewart’s masterpiece Police showed what women went through. No act of parliament resulted, but there was certainly an impact. Looking back late in his life, Graef recalled: “The film came after three very controversial rape cases the week before and the police quietly changed the way they handled rape.” These reforms – which have extended, though with little impact on the conviction of rape – included sensitive forensic evidence collection, more officers and more objective questioning.
Crimewatch UK (BBC One, 1984-2017)
As exposing police corruption became an important role of TV documentary and drama, there was queasiness over a show that became a broadcast partner to the constabularies. Controversies included making vulnerable viewers think Britain was more crime-ridden than in reality – despite presenter Nick Ross’s smiley sign-off “Don’t have nightmares!” – and the ease of naming a friend or enemy as a suspect for a prank. But for the victims of several killers and rapists, this was TV that brought justice, perhaps more quickly than the police would have done unaided.
That’s Life! (BBC One, 1988)
Those who took a child to a public playground over the holidays – watching intrepid toddlers rise smiling and intact from falls on the springy surfaces – may be unaware of their debt to Esther Rantzen. A 1988 investigation by her magazine show attributed five recent deaths, multiple fractured skulls, broken limbs and hundreds of serious injuries to the concrete or asphalt surfaces that were standard in playgrounds back then. Read in parliament soon after transmission, these stats eventually led to new guidance to councils, popularising the wood-chip and bounce-back floors, now mandatory. Because of this, incalculable numbers of children have left parks not in an ambulance or worse but in the family car, where – a second legislative coup for Rantzen – rear seatbelts, mandatory since 1987, reflect another of her TV campaigns.
Who Bombed Birmingham? (ITV, 1990)
Soon after six men were given life sentences in 1975 for alleged involvement in two IRA pub bombings in the Midlands the previous year, ITV’s World in Action began to transmit documentaries – led by politician-writer Chris Mullin and producer Ian McBride – questioning the verdicts and citing the desperation of police and courts to claim victories in the “war against terror”.
By 1990, McBride thought the audience might be suffering story fatigue. He persuaded Granada and ITV to make a primetime docu-drama about the case, with John Hurt as Mullin and Martin Shaw as McBride. All six convictions were overturned a year later, due to the greater visibility and emotive power of drama. (Although Mr Bates vs the Post Office was followed by a one-hour ITV documentary, it seems improbable that the doc alone would have made the same impact.)
In terms of quashing – as now seems likely – hundreds of wrongful convictions, Mr Bates vs the Post Office may set the record for the number of people whose lives were directly and demonstrably transformed by a TV show, and still more so when compensation is paid. However, the 17 men involved in the cases of the Birmingham Six plus the Guildford Four and Maguire Seven (see above) received wrongful sentences of around 242 years. This makes the miscarriage of justice – and TV’s role in exposing it – the closest equivalent to this month’s ITV triumph.
Queer As Folk (Channel 4, 1999-2000)
This is one of the more tentative what-ifs, but would civil partnership for gay couples from 2004 or gay marriage from 2014 in UK have happened without Russell T Davies’ landmark two series about the Mancunian queer scene? Although this was not the first series about gay men, it was striking in treating their experiences as lives rather than crises and the ratings helped to reassure potentially nervous newspapers and advertisers that this was now a mainstream and even profitable subject.
Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die (BBC Two, 2011)
A major debate of the next few years will surely be the right to elective death for the terminally ill. Celebrities recently joining this campaign – Esther Rantzen, Susan Hampshire – would acknowledge that they follow the brave trail of Terry Pratchett, the great fantasy novelist, who faced the harsh reality of death in an impeccable documentary in which he travelled to meet people intending to manage their exits and, with a terminal diagnosis of his own, examined the options. Because of Pratchett, this film will be seen as moving the dial on the question of self-determination.
Care (BBC One, 2018)
Written by Jimmy McGovern, long a leader of the political opposition among British TV dramatists, this was a gripping, raging drama. It followed a young woman (Sheridan Smith) descending through the hell of the welfare system when her mother (Alison Steadman) has a stroke – and analysed the collapse of social care in a way that seemed astonishingly prophetic when this became a national crisis two years later.
A statement by the Prime Minister (all channels, 2020)
On Monday 23 March 2020, the then Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, ordered most of the population – more than 27 million of whom were watching – to stay at home for the foreseeable future at the start of the first Covid-19 pandemic lockdown.
Delivered from 10 Downing Street with a Union flag at his left shoulder and a background of open internal doors – presumably to subliminally spread a message of increased ventilation – this brief speech prevented millions from going to work or school the next day. Depending on whether they chose/could afford to take the advice, unquantifiable numbers of people may have accordingly lived or died, making this – measured by the maximum impact on the greatest number of Britons – the most transformative broadcast ever.
Although the government does not seem to have prepared well for a viral crisis, this part at least was well planned. Ministers and civil servants had feared for decades that a PM would have to give a stay at home order on TV. They had expected the circumstances to be a nuclear war or collapse of civil order. But the general concept of a curfew address had been war-gamed at least since, well, The War Game six decades earlier.
• This article was amended on 11 January 2024 to also credit Charles Stewart for the Police documentary.
