Putting his stamp on it

Toby Jones on helping bring the British Post Office scandal to life in the hit drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office.

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Toby Jones has played both ordinary blokes, like Lance in The Detectorists, and extraordinary real-life characters such as Truman Capote, Alfred Hitchcock, Karl Rove, and various figures in British history, winning several awards. In Mr Bates vs the Post Office, he's got to do a bit of both.

When Jones took on the role of Alan Bates, the former subposter-master wasn't exactly a household name, but Jones and the TV series have helped make him one. More than 10 million viewers watched the series finale on the UK's ITV, with the preceding episodes averaging more than nine million the sort of numbers the channel got for Broadchurch and Downton Abbey. The show caused a public outcry in the UK.

The drama follows Bates as he led a two-decade campaign against the Post Office, after the Crown-owned entity accused hundreds of its "subpostmaster" franchisees of embezzlement, while denying the supposed losses were caused by bugs in its Horizon network system.

Some of them served jail time, others were bankrupted by PO demands to pay back tens of thousands of pounds, and some took their own lives.

Bates, who refused to accept his seaside Welsh village franchise's discrepancies and blamed Horizon, was forced out of his branch. He took up the cudgels for subpostmasters driven to despair by the supposedly homely British corporation - one that had the ability to prosecute its own cases while trumpeting the infallibility of its IT system.

Like many in Britain, Jones had scant knowledge of the Post Office scandal before he took on the role, despite its many years in and out of the courts and investigative journalism coverage. But after talking with the producers - with whom he had earlier made the Bafta-winning telemovie Marvellous - and writer Gwyneth Hughes, he signed on to do what he describes as "an urgent piece of drama".

What contact did you have with the real Alan Bates?