Paula Vennells is one of the central figures depicted in new ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
New ITV drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office dramatises the real-life story of the Post Office scandal, which saw hundreds of subpostmasters and mistresses working up and down the UK being falsely accused of theft, fraud and false accounting by their employer following an IT malfunction.
In telling the story, the series depicts a number of real-life figures as played by the show’s cast, with one of the most central being Paula Vennells, the CEO of Post Office Limited between 2012 and 2019.
But who is Vennells, how does she factor into the story told in the ITV drama and who plays her?
Read on for everything you need to know about Paula Vennells, as seen in Mr Bates vs The Post Office.
Who is Paula Vennells and what happened to her?
Paula Vennells is a businesswoman who was chief executive officer of Post Office Limited from 2012 to 2019.
She started her career with Unilever and L’Oreal, before working for companies including Dixons Stores Group, Argos and Whitbread Plc, where she was group commercial director.
She joined the Post Office in 2007, and was appointed as CEO in 2012.
It was between 1999 and 2015 that the Post Office sought to prosecute 700 subpostmasters and mistresses based on information from the faulty Horizon computer system.
When this came to light, Vennells ordered a series of internal reports into the prosecutions and the Horizon system.
But during her leadership, Post Office Limited fought lengthy legal battles against subpostmasters seeking redress, as Vennells insisted Horizon was “robust”.
Vennells later issued an apology for the scandal, saying: “It was and remains a source of great regret to me that these colleagues and their families were affected over so many years.”
Later, when more convictions were quashed in 2021, she said that she intends to “work with the government inquiry to ensure that staff and the public get the answers they deserve”.
Other roles Vennells has held throughout her career have included being a non-executive director of Morrisons Plc between 2016 and 2021, a member of the government’s Financial Inclusion Policy Forum and a member of the Ethical Investment Advisory Group for the Church of England.
She is an ordained Church of England Minister, but stopped her duties as of 2021.
She also served as a non-executive board member at the Cabinet Office between February 2019 and March 2020.
Vennells stood down from her positions on multiple boards in 2021 after a number of subpostmasters and mistresses had their convictions quashed, explaining at the time: “It is obvious that my involvement with the Post Office has become a distraction from the good work undertaken by the boards I serve.
“I have therefore stepped down with immediate effect from all of my board positions.”
She received a CBE in the 2019 New Year Honours List for services to the Post Office and to charity. There is currently an ongoing campaign to strip her of her CBE, in light of the Post Office scandal.
Who plays Paula Vennells in Mr Bates vs the Post Office?
Paula Vennells is played in Mr Bates vs The Post Office by Lia Williams, who has previously had roles in series including Silent Witness, Doc Martin, The Missing, Strike, Death in Paradise, The Lazarus Project, The Capture, The Crown and His Dark Materials.
She has also had roles in films including Living, Benediction and The Foreigner.
Williams said of playing Vennells: “I tried to portray her with ambiguity, because I felt that that best served the script and the piece. It leaves the audience to decide what they think of her, rather than me ramming something down their throat.
“We only know that she lost control of a situation that she had no idea how to manage. It was beyond her.”
She continued: “My understanding is that the writer Gwyn [Hughes] had to deal with Paula very carefully, because there were lawyers all over it. So the part that I played was mainly transcripts, pulled from emails and quotes directly onto the page.
“There was only a certain amount of interpretation I was allowed, and for an actor, that’s so difficult – because we don’t speak in the same way that we write an email or text. So I had to try and make the written transcript sound as if it belonged in her mouth.
“On the other hand, I did feel that she kept having to lapse in to ‘corporate speak’ to deal with that fear because that’s all she knew. As long as she had facts and figures and numbers in front of her she was fine. The moment she went off script, as it were, she was struggling.”
Mr Bates vs the Post Office arrives on 1st January at 9pm on ITV and ITVX. Check out more of our Drama coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what’s on.
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