The present panorama is making it “increasingly hard” to fund British tales such because the Post Office drama that’s at the moment dominating the information agenda, in line with ITV‘s drama boss.
Polly Hill, who commissioned the four-parter that’s on the entrance web page of each nationwide newspaper this morning, raised issues that exhibits distinctive to British tradition corresponding to Mr Bates vs The Post Office are “important” however “increasingly hard to make.”
“It’s now become harder to fund these British stories,” mentioned Hill, who was seemingly referencing super-inflation within the drama market and the necessity to appeal to co-production funding, which might dilute editorial. “We must be able to keep making them, because Mr Bates vs The Post Office shows that drama can help make a difference, and importantly that the audience wants to hear them.”
The success of the drama, which starred Toby Jones, Monica Dolan and The Crown’s Alex Jennings, was made extra stark in comparison with the present it got here up towards final week, the second season of BBC One’s Jamie Dornan-starrer The Tourist, which is co-produced for Australia’s Stan and Germany’s ZDF, and airs on Netflix within the U.S. ITV’s sequence almost doubled The Tourist’s linear score every evening and has attracted hundreds of thousands extra to ITVX.
Hill informed Deadline the story “demanded to be told.” She was eager previous to even studying a script after being approached by UK producer Patrick Spence, who had already met Bates and a gaggle of former sub-postmasters prepared to inform their surprising story. The scandal noticed lots of of those sub-postmasters wrongly accused and lots of prosecuted for theft, false accounting and fraud on account of discrepancies that confirmed up of their accounts, which it has since been proved was the fault of a pc system known as Horizon launched round 20 years in the past.
“None of us could possibly have imagined that it would become the national conversation, but how wonderful that it has,” added Hill. “The sub-postmasters and mistresses deserve to be heard and we hope this ITV drama helps bring about real change.”