Watch Nidhi Razdan: UK’s post office scandal plays out

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Transcript

00:00In this age of new technologies and various streaming platforms, who would have thought

00:08that a good old-fashioned television drama broadcast on a national network in the UK

00:13would have such a huge impact on people and cause such a public outcry that even the Prime

00:18Minister of Britain Rishi Sunak was forced to step in? That's exactly what happened with

00:22a program called Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office, which was broadcast on ITV last month. I had

00:28a chance to watch this show, which is really incredible in how it documents the story of

00:33hundreds of postal workers in the UK who were wrongfully convicted and even jailed for theft

00:39and fraud between the years 2000 and 2014. Basically, money started mysteriously disappearing

00:45from the accounts that they were maintaining. And the Post Office was blaming them for this.

00:52It actually turned out to be a software glitch in a new IT system that the Post Office had

00:56adopted, which was run by the Japanese company Fujitsu. Hundreds of workers, as I said, lost

01:02their jobs, they lost their livelihoods, their mental health, their homes, some even took

01:06their own lives. Others went to jail, even a pregnant woman worker was sent to jail in

01:12the course of this. And yet, even though this was reported in the UK media over the course

01:17of the years that followed, it didn't really get the attention of the British public in

01:22the way that this TV drama highlighted it. Because suddenly there was such a huge public

01:27outcry after this program aired. There were millions of people who signed on to petitions

01:32demanding justice, forcing Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to announce a new law in Parliament

01:38that would overturn these convictions of these people who, as I said, were wrongfully convicted

01:44in the first place. What it shows you is the power of good television even today. It can

01:50be a force for good. There are other dramas who also had similar ripple effects at various

01:56points in our lives. But it's quite remarkable that it continues even today.

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