Streaming on 7+ (with ads) - Rod Bishop recommends MR BATES VS THE POST OFFICE (James Strong, Gwyneth Hughes, UK 2024)

Toby Jones as Alan Bates

 

When it comes to Government fraud and extortion of its citizens, the British “Post Office Scandal” makes an interesting comparison with our snappier-named “Robodebt”.

Generally considered the greatest miscarriage of justice in British legal history, the Post Office oversaw the conviction of 900 subpostmasters for fraud, theft and false accounting between 1999 and 2015.The charges arose from financial shortfalls detected by Fujitsu’s Horizon computer software, a compulsory accounting system used by the British Post Office for their sub-postmasters.

226 went to prison. Many lost their jobs. Many had to make up “shortfalls” of more than £70,000 by selling their homes and emptying their life savings. Many suffered family breakdowns, mental health issues, severe depression and criminal convictions. Four suicided.

If you have a local shopping centre where you live in this country, the folk who run the newsagencies usually handle the postal requirements as well. These are the people who were caught up in this travesty in the UK.

In 2015, court cases brought by sub-postmasters established that Fujitsu could remotely access the Horizon computers and change accounting figures without their knowledge “even at night while the sub-postmasters slept”. For 16 years, the British Post Office had maintained Horizon was “robust” and remote access impossible. They had also spent those 16 years telling any subpostmaster who called to complain they were the only one to have raised the issue. The Post Office just lied as it extorted their money.

Currently there is no reliable figure for how much money the British Post office stole or how much compensation would eventually cost.  In March of this year, in the House of Commons, the Post Office Minister said:

“The government has put $1 billion aside to deal with all this, despite the fact the Post Office has taken millions and millions from postmasters – innocent people. We have never had the figure of what was taken, although I have asked for it before”.

Whatever the amount, it was apparently accounted by the Post Office as a simple addition to its yearly profits.

When Mr Bates vs the Post Office was screened in the UK last January, this heinous scandal was revealed to many Brits who’d never heard of it. 

This four-part series opens with Alan Bates (Toby Jones) and Suzanne Sercombe (Julie Hesmondhalgh) who have lost their house and life savings to the Post Office and moved to Llandudno in North Wales. 

Bates is the epitome of a tenacious, true Brit bulldog who won’t be subjugated. Unlike bulldogs, however, he remains polite and courteous throughout his 20-year campaign for justice and restitution. Without the truth, he says, compensation and justice can’t be won.

He starts The Justice for Sub-postmasters Alliance who meet, plan and strategize in a village hall. The alliance eventually attracts 555 members and scriptwriter Gwyneth Hughes also chooses to include other victims.

Monica Dolan as Jo Hamilton

There’s Jo Hamilton (Monica Dolan), whose true love is her bakery and who runs her post office to make up for her baking shortfalls. She owes £36,000 she hasn’t got. Or ever stole.

When we first meet Lee Castleton (Will Mellor) he is making his 91^st phone call about the Horizon software only to be told – once again by the Post Office – it’s all his fault, Horizon is “robust”, no-one else has complained and pay up or face criminal prosecution. He owes £25,000 but takes the Post Office to court where he loses and is ordered to repay the money and £321,000 in costs. He is bankrupted.

Jasgun Singh (Amit Shah) has to call an ambulance for his partner Saman Kaur (Krupar Pattani) who has become almost mute from the ordeal and stabbed herself in the stomach. Suffering from severe depression she undergoes shock therapy in hospital.

The Guardian has aptly called Mr Bates vs The Post Office “like an episode of Black Mirror”. It’s also pure Kafka. At one point Jo askes Alan whether the two Post Office heavies CEO Paula Vennells (Lia Williams) and Business Improvement Director Angela Van Den Bogerd (Katherine Kelly) are “incompetent or just evil?” He replies: “It comes to the same thing in the end”.

The ensemble performances are outstanding and James Strong directs Gwyneth Hughes’s pungent and clear-eyed script with impressive aplomb.

Brit television doesn’t get much better than this.

 

7+ is also screening the documentary Mr Bates vs The Post Office: The True Story. 

Alan Bates was Knighted in last week's Kings Birthday Honours List as "Founder, Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. For services to Justice."

Streaming on Stan - A High Recommendation for THE LONG SHADOW (Writer: George Kay, Director: Lewis Arnold)

Dennis Hoban (Toby Jones), Jim Hobson (Lee
Ingleby), The Long Shadow

There is a story, possibly apocryphal, back in the 60s I hasten to say, of a teacher at a college that taught newly-arrived migrants the basics of English. The teacher, so it is reported, used to practise his students on the sentence: “In Australia if a policeman is on the ground, we kick him.” It may have had traction in anarchist and libertarian circles, small as they were. 

The phrase came back during the course of watching The Long Shadow  a six part Brit ITV series devoted to a dramatic reconstruction of the times and the deeds of the infamous Yorkshire Ripper, a man who terrorised Lancashire and Yorkshire from 1975 to 1980 and over that time murdered at least 13 women, most of them prostitutes working street beats. 

 

While Stan’s publicity tells us the series is ‘the true story of one of the most notorious and shocking serial killer cases in the world, the five-year manhunt for Peter Sutcliffe, dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper, focusing on the lives of his victims and the loved ones they left behind’ I can say with absolute certainty that the PR description is to use a word frequently employed by the coppers on the case “Bollocks”. This show is the metaphorical equivalent of kicking a policeman who is on the ground.

 

It’s about the coppers in all their inglory. It peels away layers of Brit police incompetence, sexism, racism, prejudice, petty harassment and dogged refusal to acknowledge the blindingly obvious. “You have failed’ becomes a catchcry from the most senior levels of the force as they berate the various detectives that over time are put in charge of the investigation. Their replacements however all seem even more dim and misguided than those that went before. One, Dennis Hoban played by the awesome Toby Jones, the first cop in charge of things states how appalled he is that, after being taken off the case and kicked upstairs to a desk job, his replacement is Detective Hobson (Lee Ingleby) whom Hoban clearly thinks is incompetent. Hobson proves to be so.

 

George Oldfield (David Morrissey)
The Long Shadow

Hobson is eventually replaced by George Oldfield (David Morrissey) who spends years getting absolutely nowhere. The fact that in episode two an identikit drawing of Sutcliffe has been dismissed as irrelevant and tossed in a drawer where it remains until (SPOILER ALERT) various women constables manning the help line phones piece the pictures together. 

 

On the way through, as the true horror of what Sutcliffe got up to slowly emerges we get a picture of petty police harassment at ground level, dogmatism at middle levels, and flailing blame shifting at upper levels. This is not swinging London. It’s the other Britain of the 70s – grim, grey, mean – on full display. 

The Long Shadow is written by George Kay who if he were writing for film would likely be being celebrated with mid-career retrospectives. His output ranges through Killing Eve, Lupin, The Hour, the quite extraordinary Litvinenko and much more. Here he delivers another devilishly good piece of TV, something to make you suspicious of coppers all over again.

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison recommends EMPIRE OF LIGHT (Sam Mendes, UK, 2022)

Olivia Colman

I rate Sam Mendes’ new Empire of Light  as his most substantial work. He has gone on record as not wanting to have a recognisable style but this one is a perfect match for American Beauty, his most individual film and, if you look at his body of work, despite the variety of subjects and settings, you can see that the ones that show the most personality do have a unity. They are all about people who are unable to find sustained happiness in their so thoroughly established environments.  

Hey, that’s British films of the post war period - the school masters of the Mr. Perrin and Mr. Trail, The Guinea Pig and The Browning Version  trilogy, the sports fans of Maurice Elvey’s The Great Game or It’s a Dog’s Life, his worst films, the fun fair visitors in the free Cinema Films, or the wannabe lovers of Brief Encounter, which has a movie going sub-plot. These are the sub-strata of the British miserabilist tradition and they were the entertainment which was still circulating when Mendes grew up in sixties Reading.

Maybe that’s why Empire of Light’s notion of the movies has more in common with The Purple Rose of Cairo than it does with the current cycle of films that are celebrating cinema.

The setting, again a dominant element, is The Dreamland Multiplex in dimly established British South Coast Margate, repurposed as The Empire - Cinema, ballroom, restaurant and snacks. Manager Colin Firth dreams of restoring its former machine-made glory, retaining the red velvet curtains though two of its four auditoria are closed and pigeons roost in their empty shells. His hopes center on hosting the South Coast Premier of Chariots of Fire in the presence of the Mayor and Laurence Olivier.

That’s two Mr. Darcys in our picture already, though Firth authoritatively spades under his Jane Austin background, having dowdy deputy manager Olivia Colman  pleasure him in the office between sessions. She’s still a bit fragile after a spell in an institution and the rest of the artificial staff family aren’t coping all that well. Projectionist Toby Jones (below) has replaced his failed marriage with the magic of shutters and the phi-phenomenon, in his projection box papered with clippings of his favorite stars - the nearest the film comes to the current Babylon, Meet the Fabelmans enthusiast cycle. The ushers compete in describing the grossest item they’ve found clearing out the seats. One of the most deft touches is the way ticket box girl Hannah Onslow looks like being a major character but is moved from center by Colman going full blast. 

                                

Curiously, the isolated scene where Olivia calms the mean customer, who wants to take his chips and coffee into the show, is one of the film’s most resonant.

Into this environment they introduce ticket tearer Micheal Ward, who is black in the period where the streets are full of agro skin heads on about taking their jobs - “that stuff in Brixton.” Uneasily Ward and Colman become an item, restoring an injured pigeon with an improvised sock bandage, watching seaside fireworks from the roof and taking a red bus ride to the beach.

Dramatic incidents disrupt this unstable equilibrium - Colman’s losing it, the Gala Night and the street filling with thundering mods and rocker vandals in riot, to be hustled off by previously inactive bobbies. Enter Ward’s intimidating career-nurse mother Tanya Moodie.

Mendes has provided a heavy load to shift here and he deserves credit for coming close to resolving all the plot elements effectively, more than criticism for a too cheery outcome. Olivia has Toby show her first film - the carefully chosen Being There.

Performance and technical work are remarkable. Adding this one to his other films, with Mendes and the Cohens, makes cameraman Roger Deakins one of the notables in his field. Design and music complement the idea content. Empire of Light is one of the not so frequent films that makes its point by atmosphere more than narrative. The participants have chosen to push their skills to the limits and that’s something extraordinary in itself. It’s the kind of daring that endangered film making needs. Are this, Babylon and the rest, ominously going to be like the final burst of creativity in silent films - Metropolis, Asphalt,  Sunrise, Wings, Lonesome?

Micheal Ward, Olivia Colman