Early January in the UK witnessed an extraordinary outpouring of public outrage. In four parts, shown on successive nights, a TV drama documented prosecutions undertaken by the Post Office (the counterpart of the US Mail) against hundreds of “postmasters and mistresses”: managers of small branches responsible for handling mail and other Post Office transactions. The documentary will be shown on PBS in April.
At the center of these prosecutions was a series of financial irregularities recorded by the Post Office’s computer system, Horizon, which is supplied by Fujitsu. As represented in the drama, employees falsely accused of having stolen money were forced to pay large sums of money to the Post Office to make good on their accounts. Many were jailed. Some admitted to lesser charges to avoid more serious ones. The accused lost their jobs, were bankrupted, estranged from family and community. It turns out that the Horizon system was faulty from its inception—something the Post Office long denied. There are even suggestions that Fujitsu made ad hoc attempts to rationalize accounts by intervening on the systems that postmasters/mistresses used at their branches and that, as the Post Office insisted, only they had access to. Even in the face of mounting concern, the Post Office persisted with prosecutions till 2015.
I say “as represented in the drama.” There seems to be no one—at Fujitsu, the Post Office, or anywhere else—now willing to argue that this is misrepresentation. It may be the most serious miscarriage of justice in British legal history.
Two things are worth noting. First, the drama is fiction, though fiction based on fact and, in many respects, very close to fact. The producers have put in a great deal of effort on behalf of the victims of this scandal to depict the case realistically, though it is said that some characters and scenes are fabricated. Where we can assume that what is depicted in certain scenes did, in fact, take place, we should not assume that they occurred quite as represented in the drama. Such creative liberties are not called fiction because “fiction” has another meaning in this context, implying falsehood and deception, a charge that everyone wants to avoid (although the BBC did describe it as a “a semi-fictionalized account”). The second is that none of this is new to the public. The modestly resourced Computer Weekly stood up to Post Office bullying and started publishing on the scandal in 2009, an action followed by Private Eye, the BBC, various newspapers, and a few MPs. These efforts have, at last and with agonizing slowness, begun to bear fruits. Within a week of the drama, the Prime Minister promised a law to exonerate and compensate victims.
Without seeking to force this complex and, for many, very personal story into a philosophical straitjacket, it is worth considering what this suggests about fiction and moral knowledge.
While the drama is careful with its facts and chronology, few viewers will, I suspect, be able to extract an accurate timeline of events from the portrayal. I’ve had a minor interest in the Post Office scandal for some time and still can’t give anyone who asks a coherent narrative of what occurred. What viewers are most likely to recall is the emotional distress suffered by the victims as their losses mount, while hostile authorities insist (falsely) that “no one else is experiencing this”: the prospects, and then the reality, of losing their livelihood, freedom, and the respect of their communities. In this way, the drama did what documentary makers and journalists had failed to do: generate a massive popular consensus that this must be put right immediately. While documentaries have included moving testimony from victims who describe their suffering, the drama showed it—or rather, and this is important, it depicted it. The drama was not a documentary. We did not see the suffering of the victims; we saw actors portraying their suffering such that we could imagine and be affected by that suffering in the way we would have been had we been confronted with the real suffering. But none of this would have resulted in outrage directed towards the Post Office if the depiction was not of real events, and that the depictions provided were, within reasonable limits, faithful to reality.
Did viewers have reason to believe that this was faithful to reality in the relevant respects? Some did: those who already knew the course of events could see that what was shown closely represented what they knew had occurred. Indeed, they would very likely be justified in inferring, in cases where something represented went beyond their prior knowledge, that this was also true on the grounds that what they did know provided reasons for assuming that the drama is generally reliable. What of people (most viewers I suppose) who did not have much or any of that prior knowledge? Were they taking this on groundless faith? They might have reasoned, for instance, that no one would spend a good deal of money and effort on making a drama that would immediately attract costly lawsuits, had it not been very close to the truth. Did people make these inferences? Probably many did not, but we can say at least that this line of reasoning was easily available.
Perhaps what matters is not so much the states of minds of the viewers as the epistemic environment. Everything salient in the drama was a matter of public record, easily contestable if wrongly represented, and catastrophic to the producers should it turn out to be an egregious misrepresentation. In a different environment, one less epistemically benign, the same drama would not provide knowledge or anything like it, though it might have equivalent effects on public mood. Had it been the product of a Putin-style regime exercising virtual control of the media with little access for ordinary people to the relevant information, such inferences would have been unsound and the process by which the depictions were arrived at would not have been appropriately truth-tracking, even if everything in it was true.
Should we be concerned about an avalanche of rhetorically driven dramas designed to create outrage about events more complex and nuanced than a gripping drama can fairly represent? Perhaps. But the makers of Mr Bates vs The Post Office had a special set of circumstances disposing us to general outrage. This was one event in public life that did not divide audiences on partisan lines, and one in which the remedy seems both obvious and achievable: pardons and compensation for the victims and legal confrontation of decision makers. In this case, a slight push sent the glass smashing to the floor.
Gregory Currie
Gregory Currie was educated at the London School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley. He has taught at universities in Australia, New Zealand and the United States. He joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of York in 2013. He has published a number of articles and books, mostly on the arts and their relation to the mind. His most recent book is Imagining and Knowing (Oxford University Press, 2020).
