SECOND THOUGHTS BLOG 9/1/24

ITV is quite rightly getting credit for waking a wider world up to the Post Office scandal with the drama ‘Mr Bates v the Post Office’. Now I discover that an ITV regional news bulletin in the South of England provided the first TV coverage of the problems sub- postmasters were having as a result of the Horizon computer system.

On February 2nd 2008 Meridian News reported on what 15 years later would turn out to be one of the most memorable episodes in the drama:

‘A postmistress who admitted fraud has walked free from court – after villagers came to her rescue. Jo Hamilton had called a meeting to explain to neighbours in South Warnborough near Basingstoke why cash had gone missing from their post office. She said couldn’t cope with the computer system. Well, the village soon rallied round, and raised thousands of pounds to help pay the money back’.

It appears the next broadcast was in September 2009 when S4C covered the Post Office scandal on a series called ‘Taro Naw’. The programme reported on the case of a jailed Anglesey sub-postmaster and wondered whether there were more cases ‘across Britain’. It is now available again on iplayer here with English subtitles here

The first BBC coverage I can find was three years later also in regional programming in the South of England, on Tuesday 7 February 2011. 

At 7.05 a.m BBC Radio Surrey Breakfast transmitted:

BBC Surrey Jingle: “BBC Surrey. With Nick Wallis.”

Good morning. You’re about to hear a special investigation by BBC Surrey Breakfast. In November last year, a listener called Davinder came to me in a bad way. His wife Seema, who was a Postmistress in West Byfleet, had been sent to Bronzefield Prison in Ashford for stealing more than £70,000 from her own Post Office. In a very emotional phone call, Davinder told me his wife had never taken a penny from the business, but had fallen foul of a problem with the Post Office’s computerised accounting system.’ 

That evening BBC 1 South broadcast an investigation by the same journalist, Nick Wallis, in the Inside Out regional TV documentary strand. The billing was: 

‘A special investigation by the Inside Out South team into the sub-postmasters who have fallen foul of the Post Office’s Horizon computer system’. 

You might think that in the light of the extraordinary interest now created by the ITV drama the BBC might now consider putting the regional Inside Out report back on the i-player. After all it is available on youtube.

But raising its profile on iplayer might risk reminding viewers that the Inside Out strand was scrapped amidst controversy in 2022. 

The Press Gazette reported then:

‘The BBC’s director of policy has said the refresh of its regional current affairs programming which is resulting in the cancellation of Inside Out is “long overdue”.Clare Sumner told Ofcom that Inside Out, which was cancelled with the loss of 29 jobs this year as part of plans to save £25m across BBC England by March 2022, was no longer making the same impact it did when it launched almost 20 years ago.Its audience has been in decline for ten years, she said’.

ITV’s Meridian News in the South of England followed up their original coverage in December 2014. They reported that ‘now postmasters and postmistresses across the South have gained the support of their local MPs’. Former postmistress Jo Hamilton and local MP James Arbuthnot were interviewed.

A few years after the 2011 BBC regional broadcasts Nick Wallis got network showings for reports he made for The One Show on BBC 1 in 2014 and a special UK wide Inside Out in January 2015. Panorama picked up the network current affairs baton with John Sweeney’s ‘Trouble at the Post Office’  in August 2015 and Nick Wallis’s own Panorama in 2020. The sub-postmasters told their story in another Panorama ‘The Post Office Scandal’ in 2022. Wallis was also commissioned to present a radio/podcast series for BBC Radio 4 last year, he was an adviser to the ITV drama and has been freelancing on different news outlets since the ITV drama began. 

Next up for Nick Wallis; more than 20 dates, starting at the Marine Theatre,Lyme Regis on 23 March, for his one man show ‘Post Office Scandal -the Inside Story’ . Some real life versions of the characters you saw in the drama have agreed to answer questions, as has what Wallis calls ‘a major anonymous source in my book’.