Following the tremendous success of Mr Bates versus The Post Office, ITV has set its eyes on dramatising another British crisis that requires more attention.
According to Deadline, Bafta-winning writer Peter Moffat is presently working on an unnamed series based on the 1970s and 1980s tainted blood crisis, which ITV has dubbed ‘the ‘biggest health scandal in our history.
When thousands of patients with blood problems, such as haemophilia, received tainted blood, they became infected with HIV and Hepatitis.
According to a 2022 study, around 1,250 individuals were HIV-infected, with one-third of them dying from HIV-related diseases.
Hepatitis C infected around 2,400 people, and at least 700 died as a result of the virus.
The TV drama will look at how the horror occurred and who was responsible.
Mr Bates against The Post Office, starring Toby Jones, Katherine Kelly, Will Mellor, and Julie Hesmondhalgh, investigated the exceptional case of inexplicable money losses at post offices around the country.
Hundreds of local sub-postmasters were fired and frequently imprisoned when money went missing under their supervision, while a faulty IT system was to blame.
What was undeniably one of the largest miscarriages in British judicial history devastated people’s lives.
https://videos.metro.co.uk/video/met/2023/12/27/8037103067129201308/480x270_MP4_8037103067129201308.mp4The four-part series was investigative drama at its best, garnering sympathy for the post office workers and eventually beginning to bring justice against the post office and its CEO, Paula Vennells, who later returned her CBE following widespread public outrage.
The Metropolitan Police acknowledged that the Post Office is currently under investigation, and staff whose lives have been wrecked by the scandal have expressed ‘ecstatic’ at the extraordinary reaction the drama has received.
‘None of us expected this. I thought it was quite a niche story which would get respectable viewing figures but I was completely wrong,’ writer Gwyneth Hughes, who spent three years researching the case, told The Guardian.
Mr Bates vs The Post Office is available to watch on ITVX.