I watched two documentaries on the British Post Office earlier this year, and this week I watched another two on the British Post Office. It's actually not that I'm fascinated by the post. I had just finished watching a limited series called Mr Bates vs. the Post Office (2024) on the British Post Office scandal. For those that don't know, it revolved around hundreds of subpostmasters that were wrongly prosecuted for theft, false accounting, or fraud. They had not actually done these crimes. The real villain of the piece was a faulty computer system called Horizon, or more to the point, people in high places at the Post Office that were trying to bury the fact that the system wasn't really working properly.

It is fascinating stuff in many ways. It is about a situation that can be summed up in the phrase "the computer says no." The subpostmasters had kept books from the beginning, but in the late 1990s (I think) the Post Office had got this computer system from an IT company called Fujitsu, probably to simplify the bookkeeping or make it more efficient, but when people had problems with it, the "help"line always said they were the only ones having problems. The problems would result in the books showing a shortfall, which because of the contract that the subpostmasters had signed, they were responsible for this. People ended up in jail over this; some committed suicide, went bankrupt, marriages broke up, people lost their health, and so on. It had a lot of bad consequences.

The first documentary, Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office: The Real Story, really tells the same story as the TV miniseries. It shows that the makers of the series tried for accuracy. There are some minor things that the TV series seems to show differently than the documentary, some minor artistic license, but the story remains the same, and one can even see that the cast has been well-chosen to represent the real people. It shows that a lot of thought has gone into it. One can watch this movie, (which is less than an hour while the TV series is close to four hours long), and get more or less the same story as in the TV series. Still, I have to add that I liked the series so much that I would urge people to watch it. Great performances, and good buildup. Wonderfully done. And I liked to see the real people that had gone through this.

The second documentary, Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office: The Impact, on the other hand, adds something to the story as it is what happens after the TV series aired. A lot of the same people are featured in both documentaries, but not completely. There is even a mention of another earlier scandal that involved a lot fewer people but seemed to have been similar in some sense. It gives the viewer the feeling that this really had been a long-time corporate culture within the Post Office. That may not be that much of a surprise, as one has seen this so many times before. It seems that large organizations almost always go on the offense every time to save "face" rather than to actually accept something was wrong. And the conclusion seems to be that after all the time since the scandal first started to come to light, it is still not finished.

I can recommend both documentaries and the TV miniseries as well. All of them are interesting and well-made, and I really hope the subpostmasters will eventually get what they want from the Post Office.