Mr Bates vs The Post Office, Breathtaking and The Way. Images: ITV; ITV; BBC / Red Seam/ Jon Pountney / Simon Ridgway
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Watch out Rishi Sunak, television drama is in revolt. The astonishing public reaction to Mr Bates vs The Post Office on ITV was just the beginning. Now, two more primetime TV dramas – Breathtaking and The Way – are set to keep political failure and public discontent firmly in the spotlight.
When Mr Bates vs The Post Office hit a nerve with the viewing public in January, it sparked political panic. The scandal of the subpostmasters wrongly convicted of fraud, sacked, publicly shamed, financially ruined and, in some cases, jailed or driven to take their own lives had been known about for years. Yet nothing happened. Not really. Despite the best efforts of campaigners and some journalists. Nothing substantial happened until an ITV drama showed the human impact of the story to a primetime audience. Come for Toby Jones and Julie Hesmondhalgh being brilliant, stay for the rage-inducing story.
Millions watched. Word spread. And suddenly, plans for compensation were announced. Overnight, powerful politicians engaged with a story too many of them had ignored. It is a timely reminder that, even as the Conservative Party are undermining our right to protest, people power can still change the political conversation.
While we await the findings of the much-delayed public inquiry into the government’s response to the pandemic, Breathtaking fills a vital public need for information. It is set to fill another political vacuum, and provide an outlet for the fury of millions.
The new three-part ITV drama is based on Dr Rachel Clarke’s searing memoir, charting the early days of the pandemic from the NHS frontline. If the book made readers take note – offering the firsthand look at the chaos and the impact of PPE shortages plus the human cost of the delays and downright lies of the politicians in power – the TV series could have an even greater impact.
Clarke has co-written Breathtaking with Line of Duty supremo (and former doctor) Jed Mercurio and actor-writer-director (and another former doctor) Prasanna Puwanarajah. It is vital viewing. We must not turn away, however much we might wish to avoid returning to such wretched times during our evening viewing.
In a new interview with The Big Issue, Clarke says: “I don’t know anybody in the NHS who worked with Covid patients who isn’t today deeply scarred and traumatised by the experience.
“I cried writing the script. I cried on set. And I cried watching it. I just hope NHS workers feel seen.
“It feels as though, in a way, society desperately wants to move on, to say, ‘That was awful, let’s now turn away, pretend it never happened, look forwards.
“But NHS staff don’t have that luxury. Because what we experienced was too traumatic… [and] if we want to avoid a similar death toll next time round – and there will be another pandemic – we need to learn the lessons from this one.”
By setting the drama – all of it based on true stories from NHS wards – against the political messaging at the time, we see just how much we were lied to, and the human cost of multiple failures of leadership.
Starting at the same time on BBC One is an epic drama that, while fictional, feels all too real. The Way grew out of a collaboration between actor Michael Sheen – who directs the three-part series, screenwriter James Graham, and pioneering documentary maker Adam Curtis.
The Way is set in Port Talbot, in Wales. In this fictional account, as in real life, the local steelworks – once the bedrock of the town – have been sold off and are being slowly dismantled, leaving people flailing and adrift.
People protest. Their protest catches a public mood and becomes a national story. Privatised security firms are drafted in to back up the local police. And before long, Wales is in lockdown and a family are on the run, refugees in their own country.
Callum Scott Howells plays Owen Driscoll in The Way. Image: BBC/Red Seam/Jon Pountney
So why is TV drama taking aim at political failure at the moment? Well, for one, there is a lot of it about. And as Mr Bates vs The Post Office has shown, our appetite for understanding the impact of these failures is very hearty. But TV drama has always has done this. What was Cathy Come Home if not a call to reform the welfare system to prevent homelessness? And Jimmy McGovern looked to make a similar difference with his drama Hillsborough – though warm words in its wake from people in power were not followed through.
These three new series are in the fine tradition of those films. They each show what happens when political power is seen to work only to protect the powerful.
Adam Curtis, speaking to The Big Issue about his part in creating The Way said: “I tell you exactly why Mr Bates vs The Post Office got that response. Because it connected with the way people experience the world.
“I’m not saying everyone has a post office manager who’s been thrown into prison. But everyone has been on the phone and been told ‘the computer says no’, right?
“Mr Bates vs The Post Office showed how power now works in the modern world. And those in power just don’t understand – because they are the other side of the computer.”
Curtis sees this as highlighting the key political struggle of the day – which can be seen in the rise and fall of Jeremy Corbyn, the Brexit vote, Trump in America, the toxicity of online debate. It’s everywhere.
“Every age, those in power have a map in their minds of society and how it works and how people function,” he explains.
“So they know how to navigate it. But at the present moment, the map in the minds of most of the people in power – including politicians and journalists, TV producers and artists – does not reflect the territory.
“What we’re waiting for is someone who can actually create that new map that describes the territory we’re dealing with. And that is what I tried to suggest to Michael [Sheen] that we do in our series. That was my underlying thinking.”
The key character in The Way, for Curtis, is alienated Owen, played by It’s a Sin’s Callum Scott Howells.
“He feels very alone and I think that will resonate with lots of people,” Scott Howells told The Big Issue. “We’ve all felt lonely and like we’ve had to face our problems on our own.
“In this digital age, we are so overexposed to everything. There is so much happening constantly. I think we all feel this numbness at some point in our lives.”
The disconnect between ordinary people’s struggles and the people in power is mirrored in Breathtaking. We see Dr Abbey Henderson (played with heart and skill by Downton Abbey’s Joanne Froggatt) in the days before lockdown. She is already treating people with symptoms but is not allowed to test them for Covid. She is denied protective equipment, with people way behind the frontline telling her the wards are safe – ‘computer says safe’. But as millions discovered, they absolutely were not.
Hospitals were already beginning to resemble a war zone when PM Boris Johnson addressed the nation, saying: ‘I was at a hospital the other night where there were a few coronavirus patients. And I shook hands with everybody, you’ll be pleased to know.’
The people in power were not serious people. And their distance from the consequences of their decisions and words – whether on the adequacy of PPE in this case or elsewhere on the impact of the cost of living crisis or the precarious state of the welfare state in this country – is telling.
“I passionately wanted to be part of telling this story,” says actor Froggatt. “As the public, we need to know. This is the truth. Every part of our story really happened.
“The facts speak for themselves. We were told there wasn’t a PPE shortage. There was. People were given PPE contracts that shouldn’t have been. We were told care homes were ring-fenced. They weren’t.
“There are 150,000 NHS workers that are left with long COVID, some are completely debilitated by it. And some are now starting a lawsuit against the NHS because they felt they were sent into an unsafe environment.”
These TV drama interventions can be seen as the direct result of governments working against the interests of working people. And a direct result of a failure to tell the truth. It is also the result of the failure of many in the news media to hold the powerful to account.
If the job of government (and a supine media) is reduced to maintaining power for the ruling party, decisions are not made in the public interest. And these decisions are not properly interrogated.
What is the result? The kind of short-term thinking that has had such a devastating impact on housing, health, industry. Managing news cycles rather than the country leads to a failure to plan for and protect against future emergencies. It is there in the way assets are sold off to balance books in the short term. If key industries and public services are run for profit only, the public and those working in those service industries become pawns in a bigger game.
It is what we see with the devastating pollution wrought by water companies – even as bosses bank huge bonuses. And that is what we saw in Mr Bates vs The Post Office as the public facing frontline of a once proud Post Office were undermined, ignored and abused by a richly rewarded management team far removed from public accountability.
This is not the time to turn away from these stories, however difficult they may be. And, smartly, just like Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, both Breathtaking and The Way focus on personal stories rather than polemics.
But the personal is political in these dramas. And the takeaway message for many viewers looks set to be: turn on, tune in, vote them out…
Breathtaking is on ITV and ITVX, 19 Feb at 9pm. The Way is on BBC One and iPlayer, 19 Feb at 9pm.
Read interviews with Joanne Froggatt and Rachel Clarke in The Big Issue magazine, on sale from 12-19. February.An interview with Adam Curtis will be in The Big Issue magazine from 26 February.
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