Proper Gander: Lights . . . Camera . . . Political Action? (2024)

The Proper Gander TV column from the February 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The response to Mr Bates vs The Post Office was a surprise reminder that TV programmes can still have an impact, even with so much else on our screens competing for our attention. The four-part series shown on ITV dramatised the campaign by ex-Post Office staff against their convictions for theft, fraud and false accounting. Between 1999 and 2015, hundreds of sub-postmasters were prosecuted, with thousands more suspected of fiddling their accounts. Consequently, many lost their homes as well as their jobs, fell into debt and some ended their own lives because of the pressure. Their convictions were based on discrepancies and shortfalls recorded on their Post Office branch’s accounting software, Horizon. When some sub-postmasters realised there was a pattern of innocent people being convicted, they grouped together and formed The Justice For Sub-postmasters Alliance to co-ordinate their campaign. In 2019, England’s High Court ruled that the Horizon system was faulty, acknowledging the real source of the accounting discrepancies. So far, only 93 sub-postmasters have had their convictions overturned. In 2020 the government established a public inquiry which was ongoing while Mr Bates vs The Post Office was being broadcast.

Toby Jones portrays Alan Bates, who founded the campaign group and persistently worked to persuade lawyers and MPs that the convictions were unjust. The story is one of ‘skint, little people’ as Alan says, who found themselves victimised by the rules, procedures and economic prerogatives of powerful institutions, and who are fighting back. The Post Office is represented and defended by then-Chief Executive Paula Vennells and Head of Partnerships Angela van den Bogerd, both played as shifty and conspiratorial. The IT company behind Horizon, Fujitsu, is depicted as a cold, shadowy institution, but perhaps with less emphasis than might be expected. While the drama ends with a call for the government to take more responsibility, it puts Conservatives such as James Arbuthnot and Nadhim Zahawi (who appears as himself) in a very good light. Blame is placed on the Post Office rather than the economic and legal framework which allowed for the whole situation.

While Mr Bates vs The Post Office has raised awareness of the scandal beyond its 10 million viewers, it has been reported extensively before. Problems with the Horizon system were first highlighted in 2009 by Computer Weekly magazine, which has since published hundreds more articles, alongside investigations by Private Eye, Panorama (see Proper Gander June 2022) and journalist Nick Wallis, whose 2021 book The Great Post Office Scandal was serialised in the Daily Mail. The issue has been in the background for years, but Mr Bates vs The Post Office has managed to give it unprecedented attention. After its episodes were first screened in early January, a different angle on the topic was reported on news media each day: the way that suspects were interrogated, the millions paid to Fujitsu, the petition to strip Paula Vennells of her CBE, new legislation to quash the convictions, and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak supporting a knighthood for Alan Bates.

Why has it taken Mr Bates vs The Post Office, rather than any of the previous exposés, to galvanise this action? As Marshall McLuhan said, ‘the medium is the message’, and the docudrama format of Mr Bates vs The Post Office enables it to have more of an impact than a straightforward documentary or written article. All these formats are interpretations of research into what happened, with the difference between them being in how this research is presented. In re-enacting what happened, a docudrama can employ the techniques used in filmed drama to engage the viewer. Dialogue is carefully chosen by the writer and rehearsed by the actor, often working with the real people being portrayed. Scenes are lit, filmed, scored and edited in ways intended to draw in the viewer to how the producers want the story to be told. When this is done proficiently, the re-creation of an event can have more of an emotional impact than being told about those events or even watching real footage. This gives docudramas an advantage in making the viewer feel emotionally invested in an issue, which is needed to fuel any political action. Only knowing that something is wrong or needs changing isn’t enough.

Previous docudramas have succeeded in shaping prevailing attitudes to events. The most well-known remains 1966’s Cathy Come Home, which showed a family becoming homeless and then being further persecuted by the state machinery and lack of adequate support services. The script was based on thorough research and largely filmed on location (a rarity at the time) with hand-held cameras and improvisation, giving additional authenticity. While Cathy Come Home drew attention to homelessness and led to the formation of the charity Crisis, the only reform to legislation it prompted was to allow husbands to stay with their wives and children in homeless hostels. As for wider change, director Ken Loach said that the film hasn’t achieved this: ‘it all gets smothered in this bear-hug of approbation, so that the energy of it is dissipated’ (tinyurl.com/3uasacat). A docudrama which had a particular impact on policy was The Day After, broadcast in America during 1983. This prediction of what a third world war would be like convinced then-president Ronald Reagan to pull back on nuclear proliferation. Hillsborough, shown on ITV in 1996, took a different approach to these by portraying real people, as does Mr Bates vs The Post Office. Hillsborough dramatised the campaign by the families of those who died during the Sheffield Wednesday football disaster to overturn the official verdicts of accidental death. When the deaths were instead ruled unlawful in 2016, MP Steve Rotheram stated the docudrama was ‘massively influential’ in the outcome (tinyurl.com/yeyucap4).

The momentum generated for a couple of weeks in January by Mr Bates vs The Post Office looks like it will speed up a resolution for the sub-postmasters which will hopefully improve their situations. However, the government’s apparent enthusiasm for the convictions to be overturned is perhaps due more to them wanting to attract support in a general election year than to them being concerned that the campaign will develop further if they don’t take action. Still, Mr Bates vs The Post Office has reminded us that TV has some strength, especially in the format of a docudrama, and the programme also optimistically shows how people driven by a common cause can self-organise and co-operate.

Mike Foster

Blogger's Note:

Correction from the March 2024 Socialist Standard

February's Proper Gander (print version) stated that Shelter was founded as a result of Cathy Come Home. The programme in fact inspired the creation of the charity Crisis. Apologies.

Proper Gander: Left In The Dark (2013)

The Proper Gander column from the October 2013 issue of the Socialist Standard

Would a few days without electricity turn you into a hysterical, paranoid, petrol-siphoning looter? Perhaps, if Blackout (Channel 4) is as realistic as it hopes to be. This one-off docudrama imagines what would happen if the National Grid was shut down for a week by a terrorist ‘cyber attack’. Footage from real riots and protests is mixed with actors improvising what their characters film on mobile phones. This gives the programme a scary amount of verisimilitude, if you ignore how implausibly long-lasting the batteries in their phones must be. Through the blurry, wobbly camerawork we follow a couple of lairy lads on a looting spree and a woman with her comatose boyfriend in a hospital with its backup power dwindling. There are a few examples of individuals helping strangers, but the show focuses more on how relationships would be strained further. For instance, the character who starts out smug about having his own generator cracks under the pressure of keeping it from would-be thieves while struggling to provide for his family.

The shakily-filmed action is broken up with sombre captions giving some less-than-reassuring statistics. Emergency lighting in most public buildings usually lasts no more than three hours, apparently, while if you’re relying on a life support machine, then you’d have around five days before its back-up batteries are prioritised elsewhere. Like its grim forerunners about pandemics and nuclear war, Blackout points out that society’s current infrastructure would collapse within days of a serious catastrophe. However, the loss of electric power isn’t shown to lead to a loss of state power. Defending itself through the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, the state would bring in temporary courts, armed forces on the streets and ‘Emergency Relief Centres’, which in the drama turn out to be empty. A lack of decent contingency planning is to be expected in our society, focused on protecting the interests of the few and making the cheapest cutbacks for the rest of us. So, if the programme is right about this, would its predictions about chaos on the streets also be proved right? Such a bleak view ignores how groups of people have worked together to get through worse disasters in real life. The show would have been more interesting if it had explored how we could co-operate, but in that respect it leaves us in the dark.

Mike Foster

The War Game (1966)

Film Review from the July 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

This is a film which depicts what this country would be like during and after a nuclear attack. Peter Watkins has spared no effort to convince us that the situation would be one of unspeakable suffering, death and destruction.

There is a fire storm and a commentator tells us the gruesome details of what happens to people when oxygen is burnt out of the air they breathe. The hopelessness of so-called Civil Defence in trying to cope with such havoc is shown. Everywhere there are people with flash and radiation burns who might have been creatures from some monster film.

There are three categories of survivors. The last of these with 50 per cent body bums or more are given up; medical facilities are practically nil. The police, who are armed, put them out of their misery. About here a parson says he favours a war for law and order. In fact, religious hypocrisy comes in for much attention. The Vatican is recorded as saying they know “our nuclear bombs will be used with wisdom.” An American church leader advises survivors to “think twice before letting a neighbour into your shelter.” In the midst of all the carnage, in the background is heard the strains of Christ the Saviour is Born. There are food riots where armed survivors kill government guards and raid the food stores.

A commentator remarks that morality goes by the board when people have been reduced to this level. Almost as though they were expected to behave as if nothing had happened.

A man-in-the-street says he was offered £1 for a loaf of bread but refused it because “you can’t eat money.” This is one point worth dwelling on, as it illustrates the whole absurdity of capitalism. It is surely the things of life such as food, clothing and shelter which people need. Money stands in the way of the fulfilment of social needs. What good would a cupboard full of pound notes be if there were no food? Yet it takes a situation of social chaos and complete breakdown of effective control before it is dimly seen that food is important but money is obsolete.

One man was interviewed among the survivors, who had some young children. He helplessly pleaded that he did not want the radioactive poison working in their bones.

It has been said that in 15 years time at least 12 more nations will have nuclear bombs: that the present stock-pile will have doubled in five years and that there is already enough for everyone on earth to have the equivalent of 20 tons of T.N.T. all to themselves. What a damning indictment of the system under which we live that it can only operate in such a way.

The main object of The War Game seems to be to make the point that there is not nearly enough publicity given to the facts about nuclear weapons and their effects. Information is at a minimum, the public are not being told. They partly defeat their own purpose by telling us in the film that scenes of a similar kind did, in fact, take place in Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War Two. The fact remains that although the working-class had close personal contact with these horrors it did not produce an attitude against such madness which is obviously to be hoped for. All the widely known suffering and slaughter of World War One did not prevent the occurrence of World War Two some 20 years later. This recalls another film, All Quiet On The Western Front, which showed the useless butchery of the First World War.

The War Game makes no criticism of capitalism as a system, and the idea emerges that hut for the menace of nuclear bombs everything would be just fine. This fallacy is something common to all piecemeal thinking. It leaves out of account the inter-relation of all the major social problems and ignores their common origin. When we are confronted with two-thirds of humanity starving and charity organisations passing the hat round, while in the same week there is an appeal for cancer research, and we know that there are still millions of ugly slums all over the world, it is ludicrous to think of problems in isolation. Neither should it be forgotten that so-called conventional weapons serve no working class interest. While all the attention is focused on one end product—the Bomb—capitalism grinds its sinister way from one crisis to another with war lurking as an ever-present possibility.

It is the questions left unanswered by such films which hold the key to the whole problem. What is the cause of war? How can it be abolished? To publicise the effects of nuclear weapons is useful but not in itself an answer to war.

The concept of nationalism is one of the attitudes which makes war acceptable to workers. This is not referred to in the film. While the idea of “the nation” survives, workers will continue to think of themselves as British or Russian etc.; and, therefore, when their ruling-classes clash over markets, oil or investments, they will wrongly believe they have something at stake.

The vital thing is to replace such fallacies with Socialist understanding, which points to the unity of working class interests all over the world. Then from the basis of a sound understanding of the world they live in, they will take the necessary political action to end the nightmare of capitalism and replace it with a world community of production for use, where the conditions out of which wars arise will cease to exist

Harry Baldwin

The War Game (1980)

From the October 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

This BBC documentary film, made in 1965, shows the possible effects of nuclear attack, and was banned from television screening. It is currently being used quite widely by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as a recruiting film. The effects of the winds and heat of fire-storms, of the displacement of oxygen by carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, and of radiation itself are portrayed to horrific effect. Mass neurosis and widespread mental debilitation are evident, and those who survive are driven to violent rioting over meagre food supplies. Evacuation and other civil defence provisions are shown as tragically futile, and it is suggested that Britain, with its NATO bases, would be the worst hit area in the world in the event of war. Armed police are shown prowling the streets and supervising the burning of bodies and there is a pervasive chaos of devastation.

The film was based on the supposition of a “minimal” attack; today the effects of nuclear weaponry would be many times more destructive. (Sigvard Eklund, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency estimates the number of warheads in the world today to be 50,000, with the power of 1,000,000 Hiroshimas.) All the same, the film is essential viewing for anyone who is concerned to get even a vague idea of what the threat of war really amounts to. The War Game also ridicules the attitudes of the clergy, quoting one minister who has said that he trusts nuclear bombs will be used “with wisdom”, and another who defends their use provided that the war they are to be used in is a “just war”.

One important irony in the film’s use as propaganda by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, is that it is based in part on the effects suffered at the bombing of Dresden in 1945, when no nuclear weapons were used. The fact is that it is not just nuclear weapons which can be responsible for unspeakable human suffering and universal devastation; “conventional” arms are quite sufficient for the purpose, to say nothing of the horrors of chemical and biological warfare. So that if CND were in some miraculous way able to persuade governments to start dismantling some of their immense nuclear stock, there would still remain all manner of other terrible weaponry. The problem is that these people, however genuinely concerned they may be about the threat of war, have responded by considering the tools with which war is waged, instead of the cause of war itself (of whatever kind) and removing that once and for all.

The cause of war was stated by Joseph Chamberlain nearly a century ago when he said that

All the great offices of state are occupied with commercial affairs. The Foreign Office and the Colonial Office are chiefly engaged in finding new markets and in defending old ones

and by W M Hughes, ex-Prime Minister of Australia:

The increasing intensity of competition for economic markets must lead to armed conflict unless an economic settlement is found. This, however, is hardly to be hoped for. Talk about peace in a world armed to the teeth is utterly futile.

So what are these “markets” over which so much blood is spilt? They are simply the areas in which capitalist enterprises, including that monster enterprise, the USSR, try to sell commodities in order to realise a profit. The markets, materials, territories and trade routes fought over in wars all represent profit, which belongs to the property-owning, capital-controlling class in society. The working class have no reason to fight over the property and profit of the various sections of the world’s ruling class.

The cause of war is world capitalism, the profit system, and it is that which will have to be removed. If it is not acceptable to see welfare services cut back while a minor nation like Britain spends more than a million pounds an hour on arms, then we must withdraw our support not just from Conservative politicians, but from all of the representatives of the profit system. And that applies equally to the Labour Party and the USSR patriots of the Communist Party who want nuclear bombs to defend state capitalist Russia.

It should not be forgotten, though, that war is just one particularly destructive aspect of the capitalist system. Capitalism’s converse of “peace” in some ways holds in store just as many horrors.

The expressive faces of despair which feature in The War Game are by no means uncommon in the world today. The problems of starvation or malnourishment are rife in capitalism, and sometimes unemployment is all that the working class can hope for from this system of wage-labour and capital, whether the state of affairs is officially described as “peace” or as “war”.

Clifford Slapper