Mr Bates vs The Post Office: Yorkshire screenwriter reveals years of research, painful choices and personal rage that went into creating acclaimed drama

Gwyneth Hughes, who lives near Skipton, trained as a journalist on the Sheffield Morning Telegraph, before moving to the newsdesk at Yorkshire Television in Leeds, and then became a TV documentary director, specialising in history and true crime.

After moving into drama via work on the likes of The Bill and Silent Witness, she has become an acclaimed scriptwriter on shows such as Tom Jones, Honour and Vanity Fair and spent three years working on the creation of Mr Bates vs The Post Office. It has become the most watched programme on any channel this year and has led the national conversation since airing and led to plans for new blanket legislation to clear the names of wrongly convicted subpostmasters.

She said: “When I first started a few years ago, I remember that my main thing was (thinking) ‘I cannot believe this is happening in my country, mother of Parliaments where we get to vote and we care about fair play and decency…’

“Well, three years later, after everything that’s happened, not so surprising really.

“And I think that’s why people have taken to it so passionately, that they feel an identification, that what these sub-postmasters went through stands for all the ways in which everybody feels unheard.

“That their votes don’t count, that nobody’s listening, and nobody pays any attention and that’s what’s happened to these people in really violent and big terms but we all feel it.

“And that’s the only way I can understand how enormous the outrage is because everybody feels it.”

She said working through the cases and turning them into a drama was a “big challenge” but that she was spurred on by the desire to share “what’s been happening on our watch, what’s been happening while we were sleeping, what institutions have been getting away with”.

Within the series, it follows Alan Bates, portrayed by actor Toby Jones, who challenged the faulty accounting system Horizon and led the campaign group Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance to its High Court victory in 2019.

In December 2019, a High Court judge ruled that Horizon contained a number of “bugs, errors and defects” and there was a “material risk” that shortfalls in Post Office branch accounts were caused by the system.

A total of 93 subpostmasters have had their convictions overturned to date but hundreds more have not yet come forward.

Around £138m has been paid out to around 2,700 subpostmasters across three compensation schemes, the Post Office recently said.

Hundreds of others are still waiting for compensation.

The Post Office is wholly owned by the Government and a public inquiry into Horizon is ongoing.

Reflecting on what actions she wants the Government to take, Hughes said: “I would say try and get this one sorted out, don’t let them hang on any longer because they’re dying, they’re all older people and every couple of weeks we hear that somebody’s died, so get on with it.

“But also, further than that, could we all have a think about whether there are other examples of this? Other British institutions who are failing and oppressing the people who vote for them and pay for them?”

She added: “If we all just watch out for if this is happening anywhere else… Say what you like, ask the right questions. Don’t take it lying down. That’s the great Alan Bates lesson.”

The writer also said she was keen for it to be told through a British broadcaster as she felt it was a “very British story” and did not want a streaming giant to “Hollywoodise it” or “move it away from the truth”.

Before the programme was aired, executive producer Natasha Bondy revealed it had been inspired by a Sunday Times article profiling some of the victims of the scandal.

She said: “Early in 2020 there was a really good article about the whole scandal in the Sunday Times magazine, written by Katie Glass. It was just so shocking to hear what happened to these people.

“Our company, Little Gem, makes factual programmes. But I took the magazine into work the next day and said I think this should be a drama because it just felt much more than a documentary.

“The story felt too big and too complex and it had happened over such a long period of time.”

Her fellow executive producer Joe Williams created a 130,000-word research document about the scandal which was then provided to Gwyneth Hughes. Patrick Spence, another executive producer, said: “Gwyn then took the material and conducted her own research and developed close relationships with the subpostmasters – all of which brought the series together as a dramatic story.”

Writing before the drama was broadcast, Hughes said: “To this day, every victimised subpostmaster I meet, every appalling story I hear, makes me squeal with astonishment and rage.

“Was this a depressing and miserable drama to write? Not at all. Because in spite of everything they’ve been through, the victims of the Post Office scandal are not a depressing bunch. They manage to be funny and warm and welcoming even after 25 years of their ordeal.

“These were ordinary British people, living ordinary British lives, until suddenly they weren’t. Suddenly they were dubbed thieves and villains, trapped in a nightmare of false accusation and public humiliation.

“Innocent people, pillars of their communities, and the worst of it is that each of them was told they were the only one having problems with the Horizon computer system.”

She added it was hard to choose which stories of the subpostmasters to feature in the four-part show. “Every storyteller has to make choices, and anchoring our narrative with Alan Bates was an easy one. But how to choose our supporting cast, among the thousands of lives ruined, over a quarter of a century…

“As we started work, the country was in lockdown, so we got on the phone. Lockdown ended, I got on the road. Drank a lot of tea and made new friends. These were painful choices; in the end we had time to tell eight stories.

“But every bruised and battered subpostmaster has a jaw-dropping story to tell. Every one of them deserves to be heard.”

Hughes said gaining an insight into the Post Office management’s perspective was trickier.

“"I have not met Paula Vennells, though I did get a good look at her astonishingly glamorous legal team on the first day of the public inquiry. What was the chief executive thinking? What did she know, and when? Will we ever find out? I spoke to people who worked with her, and I tried to navigate fairly between their multiple insights into her conduct and personality.

“It’s the question I am asked most often: what on earth was going on inside the management of the Post Office? What were they on, these people? Was it groupthink? Lack of imagination? Confirmation bias? A belief that as public servants they were somehow too virtuous to do wrong? Poor training, plain stupidity, or rank villainy?

“It is of course for the inquiry to find definitive answers. But every subpostmaster has a view, and so does every member of our production team!

“As played by Toby Jones, our hero Alan Bates faces this question in the final episode of our series. Asked to say if the Post Office is evil or incompetent, Alan replies: ‘It amounts to to the same thing.’”