The Guardian view on Mr Bates vs the Post Office: Britain needs more state-of-the-nation TV

‘The most important British TV drama for a generation was made on a relatively shoestring budget, and only after an agreement by Toby Jones and other cast members to accept below market-rate levels of pay.’ Photograph: ITV

The extraordinary success and political impact of ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office – unforeseen even by the dedicated team that spent three years making it – has quickly become a global media story. The New York Times, for example, devoted a long feature to the drama that “achieved more in one week than investigative journalists and politicians in more than a decade”.

Such recognition is of course richly deserved. But in the streaming era, when international appeal has become the supreme criterion for investment in series such as The Crown, it is worth noting that this was a peculiarly and importantly domestic kind of televisual triumph. The four-part series went out on a terrestrial channel in the primetime 9pm slot, and it was aimed specifically at the collective conscience of the British public – more than 10 million of whom were watching by the final episode. Pointing out that she felt “under no pressure to appeal to an international audience”, the show’s writer, Gwyneth Hughes, has suggested: “That’s the crucial thing. This is a really British story, very British people.”

The most important outcome of a landmark TV moment is that, belatedly, justice is now being expedited for hundreds of wronged post office operators. But recent events have also spectacularly underlined the value of a broadcasting environment in which subjects are addressed that will never have the global reach of a Harry & Meghan, or the latest multi-series international thriller. Amid a slump in investment, a downturn in advertising for commercial channels, and an ideologically motivated squeeze on BBC budgets, that environment is severely under threat. The most important British TV drama for a generation was made on a relatively shoestring budget, and only after an agreement by Toby Jones and other cast members to accept below market-rate levels of pay. It might never have happened. Unless there is a sea change in attitudes, and a move away from current globally oriented funding assumptions, it might never happen again.

That would be a grievous loss, not merely in terms of the quality and variety of the entertainment on our screens, but also in relation to our civic wellbeing. Almost overnight, Mr Bates vs the Post Office transcended the siloed, polarised, echo-chamber world bequeathed to us by modern social media. During the course of four hours of television, millions were given emotional access to the anguish of fellow citizens who found themselves bankrupted, slandered and convicted of wrongdoing they had not committed. The speed with which the government acted to offer redress, after 20 years of pusillanimous delay, was a response to a unified nation moved to empathy and outrage. In a way that distinguishes it even from the best documentaries or investigative articles, gripping drama can do this, reflecting the nation back to itself and galvanising what the historian Benedict Anderson described as the power of “imagined community”.

From Ken Loach’s searing portrait of homelessness in Cathy Come Home to Jimmy McGovern’s dramatisation in 1996 of the Hillsborough tragedy, Britain has a long and venerable tradition of making programmes in this vein. But the age of global streaming and the search for mass international audiences has made it much more difficult to do. Mr Bates vs the Post Office was a reminder of what this kind of television can achieve, and a wake-up call for those who wish to see such possibilities preserved.

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