大象传媒

Mr Bates vs the Post Office

The Horizon Post Office scandal saw more than 900 sub-postmasters prosecuted for theft, due to errors with a computer system called Horizon which had said that they had been stealing. Campaigners had been fighting for justice for some time, but in 2024, ITV’s broadcast of Mr Bates vs the Post Office – which dramatised the story and featured Toby Jones as the eponymous campaign leader Alan Bates – made it headline news, and brought the issue into sharper focus for those in charge.

“It catapulted the scandal into the public consciousness,” says Mark, “prompting over a million people to sign a petition demanding that the CBE of former Post Office executive Paula Vennells be revoked, which it was.

"Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's announcement of new legislation to exonerate wrongly convicted sub-postmasters also followed hot on the heels of the series broadcast.”

Carol White in the 大象传媒 One television play Cathy Come Home.

Cathy Come Home

Director Ken Loach says that making a film with the intent to change the world is “clearly impossible”, but most of his projects have helped spur public discussion around issues of poverty and societal imbalance.

His Bafta-winning 2016 film I, Daniel Blake concerned a man unable to work due to a recent heart attack yet unable to claim unemployment benefit because the system has declared him fit for work. But Loach's impact began way back in 1966 with Cathy Come Home, a TV play about a woman who drifts helplessly into homelessness as she encounters obstacles she has no way to get over.

After Cathy Come Home was broadcast in 大象传媒 One's Wednesday Play series in November 1966 and seen by 12 million people, the subject of homelessness was raised in Parliament. Loach says his aim in his work is, if not to change the world, to “leave people with a question. You can leave them feeling disquiet and constructive anger, if you’re lucky.”

Someone's Daughter, Someone's Son

Nearly 60 years after Cathy Come Home, Mark says this powerful 2024 documentary by Lorna Tucker has “brought homelessness back into the spotlight”. In Someone's Daughter, Someone's Son, Tucker returns to the people and places she knew when she was homeless, 25 years ago. Having seen many good films highlight people living on the streets, she felt there needed to be a film by someone who’d lived that life, in the hope of sending audiences away not despairing, but understanding.

“You have to see the reality and realise these people were exactly like you at one point,” says Tucker. “You also need to see that that person, with the right help and care, can go on and lead a normal life.”

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

In 2007 Christian Mungiu's drama caused great controversy when it won the Palme D'Or, the biggest prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Set in Communist Romania, it follows two friends as they try to secure one of them an abortion, which is illegal.

Although set in Romania, it fuelled abortion debate around the world. Ellen says it reminds her of a quote from Gloria Steinem, an American journalist and activist who has been instrumental in the fight for women's reproductive rights. Steinem said: “It's the basis of every democratic regime that you control your own body, and it’s the basis of every totalitarian regime that you don't.”

As Ellen reflects: “I think it's worth people remembering this isn't some niche women's issue. It's very central to our democracies.” In recent years, as Ellen points out, the issue of abortion rights has become ever more prominent in film and in TV shows like Girls, Jane the Virgin and A Handmaid's Tale. The subject was tackled again in Eliza Hittman's critically acclaimed 2020 film Never Rarely Sometimes Always, which followed the journey of a Pennsylvanian teenager to her nearest accessible abortion clinic in New York City.

Get Out

Jordan Peele's Oscar-winning 2017 debut movie is a whip-smart horror, but also a film that tackled racism in America in the 21st Century. Get Out follows a young Black man (portrayed by British actor Daniel Kaluuya) as he goes to meet his white girlfriend's apparently liberal parents for the first time.

In a wildly entertaining blockbuster that mixed horror, politics and humour, Peele stripped away the idea that racism was something only perpetuated by ‘bad people’ and challenged its viewers to consider their own behaviour, even those who considered themselves the good guys. You could arguably trace the prevalence of the term ‘anti-racism’, meaning the active combatting of racism, back to this film.

Queer As Folk

For a long time, the depiction of gay and bisexual men on TV typically showed lives of loneliness, rejection and sadness – or as sexless comedy sidekicks. Romance between men was depicted nervously. Famously, in 1996, in EastEnders, a kiss between secretly bisexual Tony and openly gay Simon was edited down to half a second, yet still caused complaints.

A few years later, in 1999, like a blast of fireworks, came Russell T Davies's Queer As Folk, which showed gay men enjoying their lives unapologetically and making just as many stupid mistakes as anyone else. While the Channel 4 show courted plenty of controversy – and deliberately so – it began a shift in how LGBTQ+ people were perceived. It's something Davies would do again with his 2021 series It's a Sin, which depicted the lives of a group of gay men and their friends during the HIV/Aids crisis of the 1980s.

Bernard Hill as Yosser Hughes in Boys From the Blackstuff.

Boys From the Blackstuff

Alan Bleasdale's classic 1982 drama concerns a group of working class men in Liverpool. With unemployment in the early 1980s high, Boys From the Blackstuff focussed on the friends as they tried to get by on poorly paid illegal work, while evading the eye of benefit fraud officers. It provided a standout role for actor Bernard Hill – who recently passed away – as the troubled Yosser “Gizza job!” Hughes.

It was broadcast on 大象传媒 Two at a time when UK unemployment was over 3 million and it hit such a nerve with the public that when the series finished broadcast it was repeated just a few weeks later (this was well before the days of on-demand TV). Its legacy has been long, with a theatre production currently playing in London.

To hear more about the power of films and TV shows to help to change people's minds, listen to the full episode of Screenshot here.