Mrs Bates Versus the Post Office, 1 Jan 2024 to 4 Jan 2023, 9 pm, ITV

[Phoenix Lazarus]

This four-part series, on the Post Office's computer system leading to wrongful convictions for theft, looks interesting.

https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/mr-bates-post-office-release-date/

[gilbertharding]

https://popbitch.com/emails/hungarian-ventrilo-choir/]

>> Post-truth <<
An interesting omission

ITV has a new miniseries on the slate for 2024: Mr Bates vs The Post Office. It's a biopic of the Post Office scandal in which an IT fuck-up saw hundreds of employees wrongly accused of theft and fraud, a saga generally considered to be one of the worst miscarriages of justice in UK history.

A quick look at the cast list shows they've found someone to play Paula Vennells, the CEO of Post Office Ltd at the time, but there's no-one playing Adam Crozier, who was CEO of Royal Mail Ltd.

Crozier played a significant role in the real-life scandal, but looks to have been snipped out of the dramatisation. Maybe it was just too tricky to write the scene where Crozier left Royal Mail to become CEO of... ITV.

[lauraxsynthesis]

I'm fascinated to see Vennells portrayed. During part of that period I was lobbying her myself trying to keep my local post office open. Glad to see her getting dragged in a major drama but that's fucked that Crozier gets a pass.

[jobotic]

No consequences for anyone ever.

[JarrowMonkey]

I'm fascinated to see Vennells portrayed. During part of that period I was lobbying her myself trying to keep my local post office open. Glad to see her getting dragged in a major drama but that's fucked that Crozier gets a pass.

She was a

I'm fascinated to see Vennells portrayed. During part of that period I was lobbying her myself trying to keep my local post office open. Glad to see her getting dragged in a major drama but that's fucked that Crozier gets a pass.

I'm fascinated to see Vennells portrayed. During part of that period I was lobbying her myself trying to keep my local post office open. Glad to see her getting dragged in a major drama but that's fucked that Crozier gets a pass.

Fucking hell, she was an Anglian Vicar as well

[lauraxsynthesis]

She was a
Fucking hell, she was an Anglian Vicar as well

Lay preacher, I think. Yeah, the CWU folks I was organising with had stories about her general unethical behaviour. She was provided a company car that she used to get driven an 8 minute walk down the road was one detail I remember. This was before people knew what was happening with the computer system.

[thr0b]

I enjoyed the first part of this, though kept getting distracted by the deliberately not quite right versions of the various Post Office logos. Nearly put my foot through the screen.

[Des Wigwam]

Ended up binging this last night and will probably watch the factual counterpart tonight as a refresher.

Thought it was going to be too stressful watching Angela from Alan Partridge stressed to buggery and then jailed. Fortunately it's very clunky with it's exposition so settled into quite a gentle ITV Sunday drama but with a really interesting/piss-boiling story.

Would have liked it to be much harder and harsher on Vennells.

Also think Fujitsu in this and a previous (Panorama?) docco get a piss easy ride but I suppose libel considerations prevent anything more. Having worked for one and then alongside other big IT consultancies (though not this lot) I can fully imagine how shit and duplicitous they were - a multi-multi million pound system for HMRC where the end output was a printed sheet of paper for someone to manually reconcile springs to mind. Sadly like the whistleblower it's so long ago I don't remember the specifics.

[A Hat Like That]

Watching the first part now and finding it good but also pretty ... stressful ... I guess.

Will Mellor's best work since 2 pints.

[curiousoranges]

Master Bates takes on the Internet

[Des Wigwam]

Watching the first part now and finding it good but also pretty ... stressful ... I guess.

Will Mellor's best work since 2 pints.

The first episode was pretty hard going for me but after that it settles into the aftermath and with a script has echoes of Legz Akimbo dialogue.


Will Mellor is always better than I expect him to be.

[thr0b]

The first episode was pretty hard going for me but after that it settles into the aftermath and with a script has echoes of Legz Akimbo dialogue.


Will Mellor is always better than I expect him to be.

Definitely this. The story is harrowing - I've been following the inquiry for a while - the acting in this drama is top tier, really well cast and doing a fantastic service to the real people.

The script however, not so much. It's very, well, as RTD might say "this is my sister" writing.

I'm also very distracted by the not-quite right Post Office logos they use to avoid copyright issues, and the awful fake Fujitsu logo. And the Fujitsu office monitors all being Dell and Acer.

But. This is a story that needs to be told and for the wider public to know about it. So it's doing its job.

It'll win awards, deservedly. But not for the script.

[gilbertharding]

I won't watch this, as I already know that everyone involved in the cover up needs to be rounded up and gassed pour encourager les autres but won't be.

However, I am amused every time I hear it by the ITV continuity announcer reading the abbreviated word in the title as 'Vzzz' instead of the more normal pronunciation 'vee' or saying the word in full as 'versus'.

[A Hat Like That]

I'm also very distracted by the not-quite right Post Office logos they use to avoid copyright issues, and the awful fake Fujitsu logo. And the Fujitsu office monitors all being Dell and Acer.

I think my favourite was a badly CGI'ed post office headquarters sneaking into view in Episode 2.

[superthunderstingcar]

However, I am amused every time I hear it by the ITV continuity announcer reading the abbreviated word in the title as 'Vzzz' instead of the more normal pronunciation 'vee' or saying the word in full as 'versus'.

Do they also pronounce Mr as "Mirr"?

[robhug]

i thought it was a pretty good effort for ITV. I've cried a few times reading the testimonies of some of the postmasters stories in the last 5 or 6 years.

I suspect theres an even bigger story out there about how the whole system ended up in the hands of fujitsu in the first place, and how fujitsu continue to be given very lucrative government contracts to this very day.

[Des Wigwam]

i thought it was a pretty good effort for ITV. I've cried a few times reading the testimonies of some of the postmasters stories in the last 5 or 6 years.

I suspect theres an even bigger story out there about how the whole system ended up in the hands of fujitsu in the first place, and how fujitsu continue to be given very lucrative government contracts to this very day.

Yes - tbh that is something I would love to see. I've worked and work on various public money systems all of which have one of the big consultancies draining the money and not giving value. I'm pretty jaded now though and don't think it would change anything - or even be a particularly big expose.

[Des Wigwam]

I watched the factual companion piece the other night. I was a bit sceptical of the assertion the Fujitsu / PO had deliberately

Spoiler alert

framed the federation guy who witnessed the live data changes

[close]

- if only because these organisations aren't that competent.

I thought that the documentary version down played that to the point of not even alluding to it.

[A Hat Like That]

I've tried doing my own reading on this, but somewhat thwarted.

What actually went wrong? Where did the losses accumulate to*?

From the TV show (not watched the real life documentary yet), there were several bits where someone must have had sign off - has anyone ever seriously dug into that? Or was it that the computer must be right so follow the process and try not to think too hard about it?


*cut to Richard Pryor in a sportscar.

[lauraxsynthesis]

Private Eye was where I first heard about all this, maybe 11 years ago.
https://www.private-eye.co.uk/special-reports/justice-lost-in-the-post

[popcorn]

I've tried doing my own reading on this, but somewhat thwarted.

If you tried reading the Wikipedia article then you could be forgiven for not having a fucking clue what it's all about. It's a subject that badly deserves a good Wikipedia article but it's a fucking rambling mess.

[thr0b]

I've tried doing my own reading on this, but somewhat thwarted.

What actually went wrong? Where did the losses accumulate to*?

From the TV show (not watched the real life documentary yet), there were several bits where someone must have had sign off - has anyone ever seriously dug into that? Or was it that the computer must be right so follow the process and try not to think too hard about it?


*cut to Richard Pryor in a sportscar.

It's worth looking at Law Gazette online, as they're covering the inquiry fairly extensively.

[robhug]

Not featured in the drama but Fiona McGowan from Edinburgh was sacked and prosecuted for a 30 grand shortfall, in the build up to the trial she overdosed on pills and booze and died aged 47 leaving two young pre teen boys with out a mum. Turned out at the time she died that the PO had already dropped the charges but nobody from the post office or courts has bothered to let her know, they found out years later from a freedom of information request.

[studpuppet]

I've tried doing my own reading on this, but somewhat thwarted.

What actually went wrong? Where did the losses accumulate to*?

This Radio 4 podcast was pretty useful for me:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jf7j/episodes/player

[Des Wigwam]

I've tried doing my own reading on this, but somewhat thwarted.

What actually went wrong? Where did the losses accumulate to*?

From the TV show (not watched the real life documentary yet), there were several bits where someone must have had sign off - has anyone ever seriously dug into that? Or was it that the computer must be right so follow the process and try not to think too hard about it?


*cut to Richard Pryor in a sportscar.

There will be much better sources than me and I'm just speculating based on the couple of doccos + the drama + having worked on similar software. It looks like the heap of shit that Fujitsu supplied had a host of defects in it rather than one specific issue. Of the two that are shown explicitly in the drama it looks like one issue would be that some fuckwit had written the code to keep adding amounts to a loss rather than adding a negative amount to zero it and the other thing that Will Mellor had looks like the system cached data in the case of outages and then applied it - but without any checks to make sure it wasn't double counting.

It was down to the individual subpostmasters to sign off their daily accounts and it would appear that they were under the impression that they had to do that at the system was infallible or would correct itself and so ended up skint and done for false accounting once they ran out of cash. Alan Bates did absolutely the right thing and refused to sign off incorrect figures.

There were no losses - the subpostmasters who thought that they were making up the losses were just overpaying the Post Office.

It looks like Fujitsu were trying to mitigate their lack of testing and poor software by manually reconciling accounts on the backend and correcting things but with 6 million transactions a day (or whatever it was) there's no way they could hope to keep up.

[Peacock Johnson]

Nick Wallis' book is a hefty and comprehensive guide to the whole thing; I got the second edition this time last year but it was already somewhat behind the "where is it at now" with the myriad compensation schemes and the inquiry - a big addendum/new edition will surely follow. But deffo worth a read for the background.

[Des Wigwam]

One of the Whatsapp groups I am in for co-ordinating a hobby is largely full of boomers and therefore silenced. Just checked it and there's a post up asking to sign a petition to withdraw Vennells' CBE - there will probably be a lot of noise for a couple of months about this but I doubt much will happen.

[jobotic]

Tonight's episode is hard going. And I'm getting really pissed off with these ad ident things before and after each break. Police go to a tell that poor woman that her husband has killed himself and straight to a stupid and unfunny joke ad.

The idea that there could be any justice seems quaint after Covid.

[popcorn]

Watched the first ep of this since it's an interesting topic. But god almighty I don't know how people manage to sit through British TV drama. The writing and performances feel barely above the level of children's television.

[kalowski]

The script however, not so much. It's very, well, as RTD might say "this is my sister" writing.

"Happy wedding day, sis!"