Horizon

Thursday

James Walton

Clear, thorough and gripping: BBC2’s Horizon – The Battle to Beat Malaria

If you transcribed the narrator’s script in almost any episode of Horizon, you’d notice something striking: an awful lot of the phrases would end with a colon, and for one obvious reason: to play a neat trick on the viewers: that of making them keen to hear what comes next. (You get the idea.) Monday’s programme therefore began by explaining that the mosquito is ‘the target of one of medical science’s greatest quests: the battle to save millions of lives and end a scourge that has shaped human history: malaria’. Unusually for an uncompromising science documentary, the finale was a genuine tear-jerker Now in its 51st year, Horizon has spent

Saturday

Isabel Hardman

What lessons can we learn from the Post Office scandal?

How could the subpostmaster scandal, in which hundreds of small business owners had their lives ruined after being wrongly accused of taking money from the Post Office, have gone on for so long?  The subpostmasters were sucked into a nightmare when the Post Office installed a new accounting system called Horizon to replace old manual accounting practices. They found that their tills just weren’t balancing. Some tried to top up the difference from their own money, but the discrepancies mounted until some stretched into tens of thousands of pounds.  When they asked for help from the Post Office, they were told they were the only people having trouble. They weren’t

Monday

Duncan Campbell-Smith

How the Post Office lost its way

One of the many gems in the vast archives of the Post Office is a six-volume collection of letters from a Colonel Whitley in Head Office to the men (and not a few women) working across the country as postmasters. A former private secretary to King Charles II, Whitley effectively ran the nascent General Post Office for five years with conspicuous success. Those under his charge found him, as we might say, firm but fair. In a letter of November 1672, Whitley sternly advised one Mr Watts to crack down hard on a slipshod junior whom he had been foolish to employ on the mails. As the Colonel pointed out,