There is a trite phrase occasionally rolled out when discussing journalism or other factual programming. “The truth,” they say, “is stranger than fiction.” It is a shortcut to describing those extraordinary stories that seem to defy the banality of ordinary life. But its occasional deployment also speaks to an inverse reality: that fiction is, usually, stranger than the truth. ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office is the perfect example of this. The true story of a group of regular people, falsely accused of fraud after an IT error, taking on a massive corporation. It is a story you don’t really need to see to believe.
Alien vs Predator, Freddy vs Jason, Kramer vs Kramer: now there’s a new fight to the death in town. Mr Bates vs the Post Office follows the efforts of Alan Bates (Toby Jones), a Post Office sub-postmaster, to bring together a ragtag group of fellow professionals who have been accused of criminality following errors in their accounting software. This is the real-life story of an injustice perpetrated by a combination of incompetence and malevolence. The road to justice is long, covering many years of campaigning, but victorious. “If we’re going to walk away,” Bates tells his wife Suzanne (Julie Hesmondhalgh), “we’ll do it with our heads held high.”
