TV Tonight: Mr Bates vs the Post Office

Mr Bates vs the Post Office starts tonight at 9pm on ITV1 and ITVX.

Toby Jones, Monica Dolan, Julie Hesmondhalgh, Lia Williams, Alex Jennings, Ian Hart, Katherine Kelly, Shaun Dooley, Will Mellor, Clare Calbraith, Lesley Nicol, Amit Shah, and Adam James star in the new ITV drama, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, written by acclaimed screenwriter Gwyneth Hughes (Tom Jones, Honour, Vanity Fair) and produced by ITV Studios  and Little Gem.

The drama tells the story of one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British legal history. Hundreds of innocent sub-postmasters and postmistresses were wrongly accused of theft, fraud, and false accounting due to a defective IT system. Many of the wronged workers were prosecuted, some were imprisoned for crimes they never committed, and their lives were irreparably damaged by the scandal.

In tonight’s episode, after a new computer system called Horizon is rolled out across the country, mysterious financial losses start to appear in village Post Office tills. But when subpostmasters Alan Bates, Jo Hamilton, Noel Thomas and Lee Castleton seek help, the Post Office insists that each of them is the only one having problems. Alan refuses to believe it. And when the Post Office goes on to accuse, harass and even prosecute subpostmasters for the shortfalls, Alan leads the fight back. Their lives, livelihoods and good names destroyed, his little band decide to try to clear their names.