STAR RATING: ***** Brilliant **** Very Good *** Okay ** Poor * Awful
Alan Bates (Toby Jones) is a sub-postmaster in a small Welsh village, visited by agents on behalf of The Post Office, suspected of stealing from the accounts. He is the latest in a long line of sub-postmasters, falsely accused of stealing on account of the faulty accounting system Horizon, installed by electronics firm Fujitsu. While many have been sent to prison and even been driven to suicide over the years, Alan and others, including Jo Hamilton (Monica Dolan), Lee (Will Mellor) and Lisa Castleton (Amy Nuttall) and David Hamilton (Conor Mullen) are presently under suspicion. But Alan, a man of principle, decides to fight back, and rounds all affected together in a battle to expose the truth.
Unless you've been living under a rock these last few weeks, it will have been impossible to escape from the scandal of the false prosecutions brought against hundreds of sub-postmasters over a span of twenty years, lauded as arguably the biggest injustice of all time, dominating the headlines in all the papers and other forms of media. While the plight of the innocent postmasters has been at the forefront of the story, the behaviour of the Post Office has also come under heavy scrutiny, especially with its seemingly unique power to being its own private prosecutions. The whole sorry affair has cast a cynical light on the thanks you get for being a decent, hard-working 'ordinary person' (and conversely, what you think you can get away with when you're all high-and-mighty and powerful.)
Like any other average person caught up in a situation like this, there's a rawness in how they react, since they never asked to be put there, and the cast here, including Jones in the commanding central role, Julie Hesmondhalgh as his sturdy partner, Dolan, Mellor and Nuttall all play everything in an affectingly natural way, without any distracting histrionics, that keeps the drama on solid ground and provides a sense of believability, guided along by a similar approach from director James Strong. In a succinct four episode take, this horrifying true life travesty is brought to shattering life.
The realist approach is reminiscent of the style of a Ken Loach film, and this fittingly has had the most shattering real life impact since Cathy Come Home led to the creation of the charity Shelter, in forcing former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells to hand back her CBE, and showing the power drama still has to address and combat injustice. ****
Alan Bates (Toby Jones) is a sub-postmaster in a small Welsh village, visited by agents on behalf of The Post Office, suspected of stealing from the accounts. He is the latest in a long line of sub-postmasters, falsely accused of stealing on account of the faulty accounting system Horizon, installed by electronics firm Fujitsu. While many have been sent to prison and even been driven to suicide over the years, Alan and others, including Jo Hamilton (Monica Dolan), Lee (Will Mellor) and Lisa Castleton (Amy Nuttall) and David Hamilton (Conor Mullen) are presently under suspicion. But Alan, a man of principle, decides to fight back, and rounds all affected together in a battle to expose the truth.
Unless you've been living under a rock these last few weeks, it will have been impossible to escape from the scandal of the false prosecutions brought against hundreds of sub-postmasters over a span of twenty years, lauded as arguably the biggest injustice of all time, dominating the headlines in all the papers and other forms of media. While the plight of the innocent postmasters has been at the forefront of the story, the behaviour of the Post Office has also come under heavy scrutiny, especially with its seemingly unique power to being its own private prosecutions. The whole sorry affair has cast a cynical light on the thanks you get for being a decent, hard-working 'ordinary person' (and conversely, what you think you can get away with when you're all high-and-mighty and powerful.)
Like any other average person caught up in a situation like this, there's a rawness in how they react, since they never asked to be put there, and the cast here, including Jones in the commanding central role, Julie Hesmondhalgh as his sturdy partner, Dolan, Mellor and Nuttall all play everything in an affectingly natural way, without any distracting histrionics, that keeps the drama on solid ground and provides a sense of believability, guided along by a similar approach from director James Strong. In a succinct four episode take, this horrifying true life travesty is brought to shattering life.
The realist approach is reminiscent of the style of a Ken Loach film, and this fittingly has had the most shattering real life impact since Cathy Come Home led to the creation of the charity Shelter, in forcing former Post Office CEO Paula Vennells to hand back her CBE, and showing the power drama still has to address and combat injustice. ****