ITV’s Post Office scandal drama shows power of terrestrial TV

Were ITV to produce a show about a drama that ignited public rage and spurred new legislation, then Polly Hill and Kevin Lygo would take starring roles.

The ITV executives were responsible for bringing to the screen Mr Bates vs The Post Office, a four-part series showing the real-life impact of a Post Office accounting scandal that led to one of the worst miscarriages in British judicial history. 

For both — whose careers span decades across ITV, BBC, Channel 4 and Channel 5 — the show has had an impact like none before.

“This is the proudest any of us can ever be on any show we’ve ever made . . . no disrespect to any other shows,” said Hill, head of drama at ITV.

“I’ve cried so many times. It’s a very proud moment for everybody to see what this drama can do, to remind ourselves that drama can be important in this way and make a real difference.”

Neither expected anything like the sort of reaction that it has received. It became ITV’s most-watched new drama in more than a decade, beating the launch of Downton Abbey in 2010. The series has averaged 9.8m viewers per episode.

“These days more than ever, you put something out there, hold your breath, and see who is going to turn up,” said Lygo, ITV’s director of television.

The show has sparked blanket media coverage of the long running scandal, leading Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to rush through legislation to quash the convictions of more than 700 people. Millions signed a petition for former Post Office chief executive Paula Vennells to hand back her CBE.

Hill said: “It wouldn’t have looked on paper that ours was going to be the biggest show even this week, that everybody would react in the same way, get incredibly angry and demand change — and changes happen in a week. That’s incredible.”

But she was always confident that there would be an audience for the drama when approached to commission the show. “It was just so clear how important that story was. The moment you are actually told all those details, you’re just overwhelmed and angry. It was a really simple decision on our part that the story needed to be told and that we needed to get it out.”

Initially there was talk about whether to produce a more straightforward documentary. But for Hill, the power of telling the story through showing, rather than just telling, was the key. 

In this way, the drama managed to cut through to the public, in contrast to countless news reports and documentaries about the scandal over the past decade.

“What we can do in drama is put the audience in the shoes of those characters and actually feel every moment. It’s an emotional retelling of the story because you’re watching it happen rather than having it reported.”

For ITV, the success of the show has had a crucial secondary impact in demonstrating the power and importance of the UK’s free-to-air public service broadcasting sector. 

Broadcasters such as the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 have faced questions over their long-term future as more people switch off terrestrial TV in favour of subscription-based US streaming services. 

Lygo said that ITV and BBC can dedicate time and money to stories that would be difficult for large globally focused tech companies.

“The big streamers would never make a show like this,” said Lygo. “We and the BBC are left to be able to make these sorts of very British stories. [Streaming services] don’t really want three or four parters, they want longer running things, they want things that return.”

This also meant that the biggest challenge facing the production of the show was scraping together the money for a tale that was seen as unlikely to generate too many sales outside the UK. ITV is typically able to provide only part of the money behind its shows, relying on advance sales from global distributors and other investors for the rest.

“If you’re an American, it’s a parochial British story. So it’s difficult for producers to raise the money because all dramas now cost more than a single broadcaster will invest,” said Lygo.

When ITV went to the casting agents for actors, the channel’s executives had to admit that it could not “afford to pay what we’ve normally paid”, according to Hill. As a result, actors agreed to do the show for a flat fee, she said, “because they believed that this story needed to be told”. 

“Funding these stories is really hard because they’re incredibly British. There’s not a lot of interest internationally. They’re really important but they never get the big budgets and they don’t always get huge audiences.”

The impact of the show demonstrates the unique power of free to air TV, added Hill. “This is the power of terrestrial television: to bring the nation together to watch something together and have that response. It just wouldn’t have the same effect on a streaming show.”

Social media users have already begun to speculate about the next potential target for ITV drama, with suggestions ranging from the silly — potholes and train times — to the serious: the Iraq war and the contaminated blood scandal. 

Next up for ITV will be a look at how hospitals coped during the pandemic — but Lygo and Hill are committed to trying to find similar stories to tell through drama at least a few times a year.

Lygo compares the reaction to that of the movie Erin Brockovich, which told the story of the environmental campaigner’s fight.

But Mr Bates was not given the Hollywood treatment. Hill said that “it was always going to be authentic and true and British and there was no doing a Hollywood version of this.”