Story of Bridlington man falsely accused features in new ITV drama ‘Mr Bates vs the Post Office’

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.

Actor Will Mellor, known for his role as Jambo Bolton in Hollyoaks and Warren Stamp in EastEnders, will be portraying a sub-postmaster from Bridlington called Lee Castleton, who was forced into bankruptcy after the Post Office wrongly ordered him to pay more than £300,000.

Mr Mellor said to ITV: “Lee Castleton is what you’d class as an everyday guy. He's got his wife and two children and he runs the local Post Office. He’s just an average person, like most of these people are.

“And then he suddenly sees some discrepancies showing up on his system as well as some shortfalls. It all starts to go wrong from there: the Post Office deny that there's any fault at their end and though Lee says that he hasn’t taken the money they say he’s going to have to pay it back.

“Meanwhile this whole thing gets out in to the public domain, and people are spitting at his children, swearing at him in the street, because he’s been ‘stealing from old people,’ in his role as a sub-postmaster.”

“Whilst we were filming, after we’d say cut, we’d have conversations as a cast over lunch saying, ‘Can you believe what these bastards put these people through? Can you believe they knew what they were doing and they just kept turning the screw?’ Where's the humanity in this, where's the people going, ‘This is wrong’?

“It felt so important. We had long, hot days filming in that church hall but afterwards we were saying it is so important that we give these people a voice and we let the public know what the Post Office has done to these people.

“The real people who we are portraying… I'd like them to feel heard. Obviously they need compensation, of course they should be compensated. But just for people to go, ‘We hear you,’ would be amazing. And then to make these people that did this to them accountable. Because I just felt that pain and that feeling that no one was listening to them.

“So make sure that they are heard. If it can help with that then we've done our job. So I urge people to make sure you watch this because it's going to be followed by a documentary. So yeah, tune in for the week.”

The four-part series will air on ITV and ITVX for four consecutive nights. The first episode will air at 9pm on Monday, January 1 and the final episode will air at the same time on Thursday, January 4.

A documentary called ‘Mr Bates vs The Post Office: The Real Story’ will be shown on Thursday, January 4 at 10.45pm after the series has been aired.