Call to ACTION

TOBY JONES on the importance of bringing a true story of injustice to our screens

- 

It’s one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British legal history, but how much do we really know about the Post Office Horizon IT scandal, which has ruined thousands of lives across the UK over the past two decades? The shocking true story

is at the heart of ITV1’s new factual drama, Mr Bates Vs the Post Office, which will air over four consecutive nights. Written by Gwyneth Hughes (Vanity Fair), the series explores how a faulty computerised accounting system, called Horizon, led to innocent subpostmasters and postmistresses being wrongly accused of theft, fraud and false accounting between 2000 and 2015.

More than 700 branch operatives were prosecuted and several went to prison, while many more lost their livelihoods, homes and life savings as the Post Office held them liable for financial discrepancies.

But in 2009, sub-postmaster Alan Bates (portrayed by