Mr Bates vs The Post Office

Mr Bates vs The Post Office is a four-part British television drama series for ITV, written by Gwyneth Hughes, directed by James Strong and starring an ensemble cast led by Toby Jones. The series is a dramatisation of the British Post Office scandal, a miscarriage of justice in which hundreds of subpostmasters were wrongly prosecuted (privately and publicly) for theft, false accounting or fraud due to a faulty computer system called Horizon. It was broadcast on four consecutive days from 1 January 2024.

The series takes its name from the court case instigated by the former subpostmaster Alan Bates and others.

Synopsis
A faulty IT system called Horizon, developed by Fujitsu, creates apparent cash shortfalls that cause Post Office Limited to pursue prosecutions for fraud, theft and false accounting against a number of subpostmasters across the UK. In 2009, a group of these, led by Alan Bates forms the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance. The prosecutions and convictions are later ruled a miscarriage of justice at the conclusion of the Bates & Others v Post Office Ltd judicial case in 2019.

Cast

 * Toby Jones as Alan Bates
 * Monica Dolan as Jo Hamilton
 * Julie Hesmondhalgh as Suzanne Sercombe
 * Alex Jennings as James Arbuthnot
 * Ian Hart as Bob Rutherford
 * Lia Williams as Paula Vennells
 * Will Mellor as Lee Castleton
 * Amy Nuttall as Lisa Castleton
 * Krupa Pattani as Saman Kaur
 * Amit Shah as Jas Singh
 * Colin Tierney as Martin Griffiths
 * Clare Calbraith as Gina Griffiths
 * Shaun Dooley as Michael Rudkin
 * Lesley Nicol as Pam Stubbs
 * John Hollingworth as James Hartley
 * Adam James as Patrick Green QC
 * Katherine Kelly as Angela van Den Bogerd
 * Isobel Middleton as Kay Linnell
 * Ifan Huw Dafydd as Noel Thomas
 * Mark Arends as Richard Roll
 * Andrew Havill as Stuart Wentworth QC
 * Pip Torrens as Lord Justice Fraser
 * Nadhim Zahawi as himself
 * James Naughtie as himself

Production
Written by Gwyneth Hughes and directed by James Strong, the series was produced by Chris Clough for Little Gem and ITV Studios. Filming began in May 2023 and took place in Llandudno, Conwy, and Tatsfield, Surrey. Former member of the Business Select Committee Nadhim Zahawi had a small role, playing himself.

Journalist Nick Wallis, who has written extensively about the scandal, was a consultant on the series.

Financial losses
Although the series had been watched by an estimated 13.5 million people as of late-April 2024, ITV said it had made a loss of around £1 million on the production. Kevin Lygo, ITV's managing director of media and entertainment, partially blamed the lack of international appeal in the subject matter for these losses.

Broadcast
The series was shown on ITV1 from 1 to 4 January 2024, and was released in full on ITVX on the same date. In the United States, the series premiered on PBS's drama anthology Masterpiece in April 2024. In Australia, the series premiered in February 2024 on Channel Seven.

Immediately after the final episode, ITV broadcast a documentary Mr Bates vs the Post Office: The Real Story.

Reception
The series was well received by critics and awarded four out of five by reviewers in The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The Guardian. Martin Robinson, writing in the Evening Standard, said: "The Kafka-esque situation is thoroughly humanised by the performances". On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, 94% of 16 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 8.3/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Dramatizing a grave injustice with terrific acting and plain-spoken righteousness, Mr Bates vs the Post Office shines much-needed light on a national scandal." On Metacritic, the series holds a weighted average score of 80 out of 100 based on seven critics.

The series won the Jury Prize at the 2024 Broadcasting Press Guild Awards. The series won the Judges Prize at the Royal Television Society Programme Awards in March 2024.

Impact
The series was credited for igniting public interest in the scandal and led to demands for the former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells to have her CBE withdrawn; a petition that accrued more than 1.2 million signatures.

Vennells issued a statement on 9 January 2024 that she would "return [her] CBE with immediate effect". However, this had no formal and immediate effect, as only the monarch can revoke or annul honours. Vennells’s appointment as CBE was formally revoked by King Charles III on 23 February for "bringing the honours system into disrepute".

Such was the impact of the drama that the scandal became a major news story, and on the following day Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced new legislation to exonerate wrongly convicted subpostmasters and said there would be a "new upfront payment of £75,000 for some of those affected". However, the new legislation will aim to ensure that any subpostmaster who is guilty of criminal wrongdoing is still subject to prosecution.

Post Office Minister Kevin Hollinrake said £1bn had been budgeted for compensation payments. Lead actor Toby Jones has spoken of being "very proud" of the impact the drama had, telling BBC Radio Stoke that "there have been many dramas in the past that have had a political influence, but not quite as urgently and directly as this" and that the drama was "brilliantly dramatised by the writer and the fact that it was being spoken about in Parliament within three weeks is absolutely extraordinary."