This script has been lightly edited for clarity.

Jace Lacob: I’m Jace Lacob, and you’re listening to MASTERPIECE Studio.

On the surface, the British Post Office might not seem like the most interesting subject for a four-part drama miniseries. After all, how much scandal could there be in an institution responsible for handling the mail? However, this is one instance where truth is very much stranger than fiction…

CLIP

Alan: Post Office Limited is stealing my livelihood, my shop, my job, my home, my life’s savings, my good name.

When Americans hear “post office,” we generally think of the USPS — a government institution whose employees are federal workers. We might also think of its unofficial slogan, “neither rain nor sleet nor snow.” — elements that are no match for the determined mail carriers who deliver our precious catalogs, bills, and letters from loved ones.

In Britain, the Post Office is a cherished, beloved institution, thought of as a loyal and dependable linchpin of British existence for more than 300 years. Like its American counterpart, the British Post Office is responsible for delivering mail — or “post” — as well as selling stamps and passport services. But it is also responsible for overseeing old age pensions, and even banking and numerous other financial activities. You might also mentally call up an image of those red pillar boxes, a symbol of a bygone era, in use by the Royal Mail since 1852: strong and sturdy, resolute. But the solidity of those post boxes belies the truth: the Post Office’s reputation is now in tatters.

All is not well in the British Post Office. 

Bear with us, because this is where things get a little complicated. The Postal Act of 2011 split the British postal service into two companies: the now-privatized Royal Mail and Post Office Limited, a public company whose sole shareholder is the British Government itself. The Royal Mail is responsible for delivering packages and letters, and Post Office Limited is the network of branch post offices around the nation. 

And here’s where things get both interesting and heartbreaking.

Ninety-nine percent of Post Office Limited’s branch post offices are run by independent sub-postmasters, who are a cornerstone of the local community. These branches are often a combination of post office, cafe, shop, newsagents, etc. and are in many cases the heart of the British village, a star around which village life orbits. The sub-postmasters are everyday people: retirees, small-time entrepreneurs, mum-and-pop operators. And, according to their contracts with Post Office Limited, these sub-postmasters are responsible for balancing the books and — most critically — making up any accounting discrepancies or shortfalls.

For decades, things ran smoothly.  But in the late 1990s, the postal service rolled out a new IT system called Horizon, a huge change of pace for sub-postmasters, who had traditionally always balanced their books on paper. Beginning in 1999, sub-postmasters all over the U.K. were suddenly being accused of unexplained, sudden shortages in the system, money that they had to pay back… shortages which, due to the faulty Horizon IT system… had never actually occurred at all.

CLIP

Horizon Helpline: Horizon helpline, thank you for waiting. Hello, how can I help?

Jo: Hi, it’s Jo Hamilton here from South Warnborough. I’m trying to produce this week’s cash account.

Horizon Helpline: And what’s the problem?

Jo: I know it’s probably me because I’m really rubbish with technology. But I’ve declared my cash, I’ve declared my stock, I’ve done it all three times and I still can’t get it to balance. I hate Wednesdays.

Horizon Helpline: And what does Horizon say?

Jo: It says I’ve taken £2,032.67 more than I think I have.

Over the past two decades, thousands of sub-postmasters were privately prosecuted by Post Office Limited, accused of theft or false accounting. Savings were lost, homes and businesses seized, families torn apart, lives ruined. Many went to prison for crimes they didn’t commit. 

This real-life drama, which began over 20 years ago, is still unfolding today, in real time. At its center is Alan Bates, a sub-postmaster who maintained for decades that Horizon was to blame for these shortages and who obstinately refused to give up, even in the face of hostility and disinterest from the British government. He spearheaded an entire campaign to find and unite sub-postmasters who had been persecuted to fight back, playing David to the Goliath that is the Post Office.

CLIP

Alan: I’m thinking, test the water. Set up a meeting, send out invitations, see if anyone turns up.

Some battles have been won, but not all of those affected by the Post Office scandal have been exonerated or compensated… And Alan and the sub-postmasters’ ongoing quest for justice is now a four part MASTERPIECE drama called Mr Bates vs The Post Office.

This week, we’re joined by Mr Bates vs The Post Office writer Gwyneth Hughes to talk about how she adapted this living, breathing story for television and the real-life impact of the drama series as the fallout from the scandal continues to echo in Parliament, the courts, and the halls of power in Britain.

Jace Lacob: And this week we are joined by Mr Bates vs The Post Office writer Gwyneth Hughes. Welcome.

Gwyneth Hughes: Hello.

Jace Lacob: So this project recounts one of, if not the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history. How did you first become aware of the Post Office scandal and what about it made you realize it needed to be adapted for television?

Gwyneth Hughes: This story’s been around for, well, 20 years, but it really struggled to gain any traction or any public interest. And I think it’s partly because it’s really complicated, very complicated, a lot of stuff about finance, a lot of stuff about computers. It involves people from all over the country, every part, every corner of the United Kingdom.

And those people are very ordinary people. They’re not the kind of people you normally see on the telly, not the kind of people who normally star in bigger, adventure stories. They are just really ordinary, nice, kind, middle aged and elderly people, not fashionable, not the kind of people to whom the media normally turns its attention.

And I had, like loads of us had, read some stuff in the papers and heard a bit on the radio, but I just didn’t understand it. I couldn’t understand the stories. And neither could anybody else. Our actor Toby Jones has confessed that he didn’t understand the first thing about it when he took the job. I think a lot of people in the UK felt that way. They’d sort of heard about it, but didn’t know anything about it. And I guess it’s one of the reasons why so many people tuned in.

Jace Lacob: So what were your initial reactions to hearing the extent of the story then? Was there a sense of initial disbelief?

Gwyneth Hughes: Oh, very much so, yeah. I just couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe, and I still can’t really believe that something like this can happen in my country, in Britain, the mother of Parliament, the home of democracy, and the rules of cricket. It’s not the sort of thing that’s supposed to happen here, that people should be subjected to such cruelty and be unable to be heard and be sent to prison for things they didn’t do and lose all their life savings, lose their sanity, in some cases, lose their lives.

So yeah, every time I hear a new post office story, and I still do because it’s still in the papers every day, I just go, I can’t believe this! That sense, that horror really motivated me throughout the three years that it took to get the show to the screen.

Jace Lacob: Along those lines, it is the scale and scope of the scandal that is truly breathtaking. Thousands of victims, more than 700 convicted of crimes they didn’t commit, at least four suicides. Does this fall into the category of truth being somehow stranger than fiction?

Gwyneth Hughes: Yeah, it really does. I kind of think there’s not much point doing a true story that isn’t stranger than fiction, because if you’re going to do it as a drama rather than a documentary, you want it to reach that heightened sort of level of madness that this story does. That’s what makes it dramatic, you know, you’ll see things when you watch the show that you will not believe. And I assure you that they are true. These things really happened to these very nice, very ordinary people. And that’s why we’re all here.

Jace Lacob: I want to take a step backwards and look at the bigger stakes here leading up to the discovery of the extent of this damage. The post office itself, this is a public institution. It’s deeply embedded into the British psyche. It’s seen, or it was seen, as innately reliable, loyal, dependable. Postman Pat, the children’s cartoon, reinforced that image, I think. How deeply does the post office scandal cut against the image or “brand”, and I’m using that in scare quotes here, that the post office has burnished?

Gwyneth Hughes: Oh, it ruins it. It blows them out of the water entirely. I mean, they have no brand. It’s gone. And by association, it infects the way we feel about public institutions in general, the way we respond to these cuddly old institutions. The post office has been around for 300 years or something. It’s an ancient thing. And it has absolutely lost all trust that it ever had.

It’s very hard, actually, I think, for people who are still running post offices, people who are still doing the jobs that our characters had to stop doing, because they’re having to appeal, please don’t blame us for the activities of the National Post Office, because we’re just trying to run shops here. So, as the scandal has worn on, it’s just sweeping up more and more victims, really. More and more people who through no fault of their own, are being tarnished with this terrible situation.

Jace Lacob: Part of the horror is, as you say, that this is about very ordinary lives of very ordinary people suddenly rupturing into something really extraordinary and horrific, and their subsequent gaslighting by the post office and by extension, by Fujitsu, compounding this for decades. What have you made of the public reaction to Mr Bates in Britain?

Gwyneth Hughes: Well, it’s been extraordinary. We knew we’d made something we were proud of, and we’d shown it to the subpostmasters who took part, who’d given us their stories, and they were all really pleased with it, which was the main thing I was worried about. And then it went out on New Year’s Day in the UK, and our boss gave us all, the whole team, a pep talk on the phone earlier in the day. And he said, now let’s not all get too worried when we don’t get very high ratings because the competition’s very high. It’s New Year’s Day, people have got other things to do. And we all said to ourselves, yeah, yeah, we won’t, you know, it’ll be fine. Nobody will watch, but it’ll be fine.

We wake up the next day and the ratings are through the roof to the extent that our boss thought he’d misheard them when they called him to tell them what they were. And it just carried on building, and it just built and built and built. And we were just all astonished. I mean, it’s new year, nobody’s got any money and not really going out. Watch telly instead. But there was something about it. We were all still totally astonished and amazed and thrilled. But whatever it was that we had pulled off, whatever it was about these stories had really spoken to the great British public. We’re now looking at 13 million viewers for each episode, which is just extraordinary, just extraordinary.

This particular story just really caught the imaginations of the audience here. And then now it’s going all over the world and catching them there. We’re all blown away. We had no idea that this would happen. It’s very gratifying, obviously. And it’s great for Alan Bates and the rest of the subpostmasters because they’ve got this visibility now. I mean, they’ve got the visibility, I can’t say they’ve got anywhere with their financial redress or their apologies or the quashing of their convictions or anything, because it’s all going so slowly. But there is now a huge public inquiry going on and all sorts of very high posh people are being dragged before it to give an account of themselves and their role in it. So it’s going to run and run for the rest of the year, I think.

Jace Lacob: So some of these concepts are not familiar to American viewers as the postal system here is controlled by the federal government. My first question is what is Post Office Limited and how, after the implementation of the Postal Services Act 2011, is it distinct from the now privatized Royal Mail?

Gwyneth Hughes: Well, there used to be a thing called the post office, which did letters obviously and stamps and so on, parcels. But it also did the administration of lots of bits of your everyday life, like pensions and social security payments, and getting driving licenses, passports, all that kind of thing. It was a sort of way of dealing with the bureaucracy in people’s lives. And the two things were split a few years ago. So now we have the Royal Mail, which does the letters, the parcels and the stamps, and the post office that does everything else and can’t make any money doing everything else. Because it’s just too big, too difficult.

And the post office brought in this massive new computer system which was going to make everything marvelous and easier to do. And it’s that moment, the introduction of a new computer system made by Fujitsu, that made everything go wrong. Not just introducing it when it was a bit rubbish, but failing to understand that it was rubbish, failing to respond when people started to report that they were having difficulties.

I should say as well that the post office is a private company, but it is wholly owned by the British government. It has one shareholder. That shareholder is the British government. So the scandal that’s overwhelmed it is also biting at the legs of our government too.

MIDROLL

Jace Lacob: 99 percent of branch post offices are run by subpostmasters who are independent or franchise holders. Can you explain what then a submaster does and how they fit into the daily fabric of British life, if they are responsible for all of that other stuff, as you say, that the post office is supposed to be handling?

Gwyneth Hughes: Yes, it is a bit like a franchise. It’s not actually a franchise, but it works very much like that. So what they are actually is small shopkeepers, they are the local village shop, the heart of the village throughout England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. So, if you live in a village or a small town or neighborhood of any description at the heart of that will be your post office, which may also be a general store and a grocery and a, oh, I don’t know, a gift shop, a card shop. And in a corner, a secure corner of that general store will be the post office. They call it the fortress, the little bit that they lock themselves into, to deal with what is actually quite a lot of money coming in and out, because they pay out people’s old age pensions and their social security benefits and so on.

So yeah, the post offices were at the heart of individual British communities and people who went into it, people who wanted to do that job as small business people, as shopkeepers, were the kind of people who really wanted to give something back to their community. They’re all the kind of people who wanted to have that role at the heart of their communities and to help people and to look after people and live that very community based, small-scale life, which makes what happened to them even more tragic because they really didn’t deserve it.

Jace Lacob: So these subpostmasters, then, they’re not federal employees. They’re not even really post office employees. They run, as you say, businesses in the heart of the village that are subcontracted to keep the post and those OAPs, those old age pensions flowing. So part of that contract stipulates they’re personally liable for any shortages. What did subpostmasters make of this liability? Was it a concern before Horizon was rolled out?

Gwyneth Hughes: It can’t have been because they all signed the contract. I mean, they tended to sign very short versions of what was 200 pages or something mad. I mean, one or two of them said to me, we never thought that that would be a problem because we thought the post office were good people and they would look after it. And if we did discover that we had a shortfall, we’d be able to work it out. Obviously there’s a lot of money going across the desk in either direction and a lot of that is little tiny amounts of money for stamps and birthday cards and things.

Obviously you’re going to tend to find that you’re a pound, two pounds out in one direction or another quite often, but people were finding that there were thousands of pounds out, thousands of pounds out, and they couldn’t find what had gone wrong. They would go through their till receipts, go through their records, and they simply couldn’t find what they’d done. And the thing is, they hadn’t done anything. The problem was in the computer.

But when they reported it to the post office nationally, they were held to account for it, forced to pay it back. Well, I say pay it back. They hadn’t lost it! Thousands and thousands of losses, they were not real. It’s so hard to understand, but they were not real losses. They were confected by the computer. There was no lost money. No money had been stolen. So the post office would tell you that you had lost money that you had to pay back, but you hadn’t lost the money. So you weren’t paying back. You were giving them money. They were effectively stealing from you.

And that’s what happened over and over again to people, being forced over and over again. You know, you’d pay it off and six months later it would all go wrong again. You’d pay it off. People were ruined like this. And at no point did the post office take their accounts seriously. At no point did they listen.

What we actually think happened is that the post office somehow always thought that they had a lot of villains and bad guys working for them. God knows why they thought this, but that’s what they thought, but they could never prove it. In came the computer system and suddenly, whoa, the computer says this person is a thief. It’s like confirmation bias, you know? The post office already thought they were villains and now it had proof. But of course it didn’t have proof. It just had a record of a loss, which was never a loss and never existed.

And you know, the really terrible thing, we think the money that these individual subpostmasters were forced to pay to the post office for these shortfalls that did not actually exist, that money went into the post office profits. Disappeared into their profits. I mean, you’ll see why I go, how can this possibly happen in my country? How can this possibly happen here? It’s just madness.

Jace Lacob: That is madness that then it would become profit. So these poor people’s lives were ruined and the post office, not only hounded them and pursued them, but actually profited from it, for losses that never actually occurred in the first place. I mean, the fact that the post office could privately prosecute without buy-in from the Crown Prosecution Service, this seems like a somewhat arcane prosecutorial power on the part of the post office that really shouldn’t be legal. How aware was the British public that the post office could privately prosecute?

Gwyneth Hughes: Oh, not aware at all. I wasn’t aware of it. And neither were the sub postmasters. So that when the heroine of our story, Jo Hamilton, was herself astonished to find herself in court on the say-so of post office investigators. She remembers thinking, oh, I’m going to get arrested now. The police will come for me. But the police never came because the police were not required because the post office is allowed to prosecute people in a criminal court on its own authority. I didn’t know that. It’s astonishing. I mean, it’s just madness, more madness.

They have stopped doing that now, because obviously it’s mad, but they did do it over and over again. And they had an entire investigations department, some of whom were ex police officers, who would go and do investigations into people and charge them with criminal offenses and see them in court. And no police officer was ever involved for criminal offenses. I mean, nothing about it makes sense and nothing about it is believable, but you know, all the best true stories are unbelievable. And this one certainly is.

Jace Lacob: The extent of it, though, however, I think is positively Kafkaesque. It just boggles the mind that this could actually occur, that it could be legal, that so many thousands of victims were affected, that they lost everything from savings, money, time, freedom, their lives in some cases. Why was the post office so adamant that it had done nothing wrong, so incredibly insistent that Horizon was infallible?

Gwyneth Hughes: Oh, well, that’s the $64,000 question I can’t answer. We’ve all got our theories. We’ve got so many theories. I’m really hoping that the public inquiry, the very impressive public inquiry that’s going on now, will come up with some answers to this. Probably not until early next year, but there are a lot of questions like that. I mean, what did they think they were doing? Who did they think the enemy was? Why did they go along with it? From a human being point of view, it’s very difficult to understand. And in our show, we had to be quite careful, very careful, in fact, how we characterized the post office management and what we accused them of, because obviously nobody wants to end up in a court of defamation. And we had to portray the post office management, we wanted to, but we had to be very careful what we accuse them of.

In fact, in the case of the main post office, the chief executive of the post office, a woman called Paula Vennells, I was warned by our lawyers that we couldn’t accuse her of anything, that I couldn’t put words into her mouth. So we basically went through all the emails she ever wrote, all the interviews she ever gave to newspapers, all the letters we could come across, some conversations that she had with people that we trusted, like Alan Bates, and I concocted her part from all this material. And then we had to get a really good actress to play her who could actually make all this really terrible, clotty, awful, you know, email English sound like someone was speaking the Queen’s English, which luckily we did get a really good actress who did pull it off, I think. So we were under a lot of pressure with that kind of thing.

Jace Lacob: I take it then, you did not speak with Paula Vennells during your research. I am curious what you made of her from observing her from afar, as it were.

Gwyneth Hughes: Oh, unsurprisingly, she didn’t want to engage with us. I mean, we can’t blame her.

Jace Lacob: What? No, I can’t believe it.

Gwyneth Hughes: No, she didn’t want to engage. I wish I knew. I wish I knew what was going on. My personal feeling is that she was overwhelmed by it, that she didn’t know what to do about it, and she became a frightened rabbit, that’s the only way I can understand it. But she is giving evidence, she’s been called to give evidence for the public inquiry. She may say nothing because the fear of criminal prosecution looms very large for all these people. She has never accepted responsibility for it. She’s always said it was somebody else’s fault. And she’s always said that she’s not guilty of a criminal offense, which she’s perfectly entitled to say.

Jace Lacob: Earlier this year, there was a petition to strip Vennells of her CBE, which was signed by 1.2 million people. She agreed to give back her honor, though it should be noted that it can only be annulled by the King and the Honours Committee. What do you make of her behavior here? Is it in any way a statement of remorse, or is it just window dressing?

Gwyneth Hughes: Well, you know, I think it’s actually not the important thing about the CBE. CBE is a very important honor which is in the gift of the king, it’s one step down from being a knight, being Sir and Dame. So it’s very important and a big thing. So I think what’s really interesting is, not how she gave it up, but how she got it in the first place. What were the Honours Committee thinking when they gave it to her? It was already the case that we knew, it was known that the Horizon scandal was brewing. It was known that there were problems. It was known that there were miscarriages of justice. So what were they doing giving it to her? And what was she doing accepting it?

What it suggests to me is that she didn’t take it all seriously. She thought it would all go away. Otherwise, why would she take this honor, which was clearly going to just blow up in her face later? So it’s the beginning of that story rather than the end of it that interests me, but I can’t answer any questions about it because I don’t know. None of us know.

Jace Lacob: I believe she was given the honor in the 2019 New Year’s Honours. At what point did the post office become aware that the Horizon software was faulty then? It was something like 2010, almost 15 years ago at this point, correct?

Gwyneth Hughes: Well, our story begins in 2003, 21 years ago when Alan Bates tells them very, very clearly that there were problems. Alan never accepted that it was his fault. He was such a self confident techie sort of guy. And he, from the beginning said, this is not my fault, it’s yours. And he tried to persuade them. And he sent reams of paperwork. He tried to involve ministers and members of Parliament and lawyers and lots of people were having problems then, but the post office didn’t listen.

And as his campaign grew, it became more and more the case that they should have started listening, that government ministers should have started listening. So they never accepted that there was a problem. I can’t really tell you exactly at what point they should have recognized it, but certainly by 2013 when they commissioned their own internal investigation, which you will see in the show, and their own investigation showed that there were terrible problems, to such an extent that the investigators switched sides, went to work with the subpostmasters because what they found shocked them so much! So, it’s 10 years that they have known they’ve had good evidence that their system wasn’t working properly. And here we still are.

Jace Lacob: So you spent three years working on this project, beginning during the COVID 19 lockdown in the UK with Zooms, and then you eventually got on the road to meet these subpostmasters face to face. How receptive were victims to speaking to you, and how forthcoming were they with details or recollections or documents?

Gwyneth Hughes: Oh, they had no hesitation at all. I mean one or two people didn’t want to do it, but most of the people I contacted just could not wait to tell me all about it. They were thrilled that someone was taking notice and very generous with their time and their stories and some terrible, painful memories. There were a lot of tears, a lot of awful, awful memories that I felt terrible about digging up for them.

You know, you’d expect people to be maybe a bit reluctant to talk to journalists and the media and a dramatist who turns up out of nowhere on their doorstep, but everybody wanted to be involved. Everybody wanted to be involved. They really thought it was their one big chance to be heard. And I’m thrilled to say that they all just love it. They really love the way they’ve been portrayed.

I had many sleepless nights before we showed them this show because what if they didn’t like it? I hoped they would. I had done my best to be as truthful and as respectful as I could, but what if they hadn’t liked it? It would have been awful, but they love it. And they love the way that we’ve portrayed 20 years of this dreadful story. So yeah, no reluctance at all. Everybody was a volunteer.

Jace Lacob: What was your reaction to hearing their stories for the first time, meeting Jo, say? What sort of consolation or comfort were you able to offer these people?

Gwyneth Hughes: Well, over the three years that we’ve been making this show, which is longer than one would normally spend, one of the advantages of that is it’s given us all time to become really good friends, actually. I’m proper friends now with most of them and I still talk to them, and we still swap reactions and responses to everything that’s going on. Every single day there’s a new headline, a new big story in the papers. So, I think that I tried very hard to offer a kind ear to, to just offer kindness and to always keep them really, really up to speed with what my plans were and what I was writing about.

And they were incredibly patient because I was always ringing them up, I was always going to see them. There was always something else I needed to understand because the story is very hard to understand, and I needed their help a lot, which they always gave. Great people.

Jace Lacob: You are a documentarian as well as a screenwriter and this isn’t so much archaeology as it is excavating the very, very recent past, digging up some incredibly painful truths. Did your extensive background in documentaries serve you here as you crafted this narrative drawing from these real life accounts as you did?

Gwyneth Hughes: Well, yes, I was a journalist, newspaper reporter, and then a documentary director. And yes, it’s incredibly helpful to have… I’ve just got years and years and years of experience of walking up to someone’s front door, banging on it, getting let in and asking my questions in a way that won’t be upsetting or harsh. I’m not scared of people I haven’t met before because I’ve done it so often. And I think that that was really, really helpful. I think it would be hard to do a true story like this if you hadn’t had that experience of turning up on people’s doorsteps with your notebook over and over again, and just having to get off on the right foot immediately and keep people confident in you and confident in the process, because it’s a big deal to give your life story to some complete stranger off the telly.

What if I’d been a villain? Oh, you know, gosh, that would be awful. So yes, it really did help. It’s been the culmination in some ways of my long years as a journalist and documentarian and my 30 years of doing drama. It really brought all those things together perfectly, which is great.

Jace Lacob: Gwyneth Hughes, thank you so very much.

Gwyneth Hughes: Thank you.

Next time, the course of love continues on its chaotic path in the world of Alice & Jack. And for Jack’s ex-wife Lynn, time has helped to heal the early wounds of this rocky affair… almost.   

CLIP

Jack: Thanks for asking after her.

Lynn: Well, you can’t go around hating people. Except for you, of course.

Jack: Of course.

Tune in next Sunday as we talk with actor Aisling Bea about how her character Lynn manages to keep her head above water despite the chaos and unpredictability of Alice and Jack.