On New Year’s Day, TV producer Patrick Spence sent an email to the creative team behind ITV drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office. “It was just warning them, kindly, that we were going to be killed in the overnight ratings by BBC One’s The Tourist, and then later in the week by The Traitors,” he says. Spence was confident that their show – about one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history – was good enough, important enough and moving enough to slowly find its audience. But he didn’t think it would take off straight away. “The tone of the email was ‘don’t be disheartened’,” he recalls.
He was completely wrong. Some 3.5 million people watched the first episode that night, a figure that has now climbed to 9.2 million, making it ITV’s biggest new drama for three years. It has propelled the scandal – in which more than 700 postmasters, between 1999 and 2015, were convicted after faulty Fujitsu software made it appear as though money was missing from their branches – to the front pages of newspapers for days. And on Wednesday, the PM announced a new bill that will grant unprecedented blanket acquittal to those wrongly convicted. The former head of the Post Office, Paula Vennells, has handed back her CBE thanks to public outrage following the show. And the man at its centre – Alan Bates, the former subpostmaster who’s led a decades-long campaign for justice – has been invited on a luxury trip to Necker Island, after Richard Branson was moved by his story.
