Mr Bates vs The Post Office tells the astounding, but unfortunately real-life story of, as ITV puts it, "one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British legal history".
A group of subpostmasters – the self-employed business owners who ran Post Office branches across the country in the late Nineties – were wrongly accused of fraud and theft, and in many cases were successfully prosecuted for these crimes. Some of the subpostmasters received criminal records, were fined, lost their livelihoods, fell ill and were even imprisoned. Their lives were destroyed by the false assertions: people sold their houses, were separated from their families, died without ever achieving justice, and at least four took their own lives.
