How to watch Toby Jones in 'Mr Bates vs The Post Office' online

Q: How did your story come to be told as a TV series?

A: Following the judgements and the court findings about how the Post Office had lied and covered up the true facts about all the problems with its Horizon system there was quite a lot of publicity. A number of people from different production teams began to contact me. Natasha [Bondy] at Little Gem approached me and the series and documentary came from there.

Q: And yet it was a story that was overlooked for so long.

A: It was. The biggest problem with all of this is that the Post Office decided to take an approach of utter denial about everything, an approach which was effectively a threat to sue anyone who dared say otherwise. Over the years we've gone through a whole host of other processes but the Post Office just kept on assuring everyone that everything was fine and the system was robust and there were no problems with it.

Q: Why do you think the Post Office fought you so obstinately? What motivated them?

A: I put it down to arrogance and ignorance with a side order of incompetence. They got paid the big bucks with enormous bonuses to make appalling decisions, and were in control, and did what they wanted, as government used to take the stance that the Post Office was run independent of government. Just before I was terminated, I recall a Post Office Senior coming to see me. Over the years I’d written numerous letters about the problems with the system and asking for assistance.

He just turned around to me and said, ‘We've got more important things to do than answer your letters.’ It was typical of the Post Office’s arrogance. And then they terminated my contract giving me 3 months’ notice, refusing to give me a reason, and walked off with our investment simply because they could do that, because we all know what happens if you try and sue them individually – you don’t stand an earthly.

Q: What for you would be the right end to the story?

A: For me to try and draw a line under my involvement will be when the initial 555, the group that brought the court action, have received the financial redress due to them.

That's a process that is underway now, and in theory, should be finished by August of next year. You will never be able to repay people for what they've gone through and you will never be able to give them back all those years of suffering that they've had to endure. But hopefully, it might alleviate some of their problems going forward.

Another issue, and my current source of campaigning, is around the mental anguish of the families. At the moment the government hasn’t taken that on board. These families need professional mental health assessments and support, not just financially but in other ways as well. I’ve been trying to push this with ministers and I just get back civil servants’ letters, as you might imagine. That's high on my campaign list at the moment as well as trying to bring the real guilty in all of this to account for what they have done.

Q: What do you hope this drama might achieve?

A: First, is to expose the truth behind what the Post Office has done and that has always been the aim of the group. The overturning of the convictions and the compensation have followed that, but from the outset the campaign was always about exposing the truth.

Then there’s overturning the convictions. You’ve probably heard that there were something like 700 people who have convictions, and only about 90 or so have been to the Court of Appeal and had them overturned. Well, that 700 is actually closer to 1000 if you include Northern Ireland and Scotland, which until recently somehow the government seemed to forget to include in their figures. We need more of those people to come forward, because there are schemes available now where they can have their cases looked at again by the court, and there is also legal support available for them, so it won't cost them anything to have their cases reviewed and with success would be eligible for receiving financial redress. Hopefully the drama will highlight what went on and we all hope will bring some of these people forward again.

Q: How did you come to be cast?

A: I was approached earlier this year by Patrick Spence, the Executive Producer, who I had worked with previously on Marvellous (BBC). I was already predisposed to it because Patrick is such a fantastic producer. He and James [Strong, Director] and Gwyneth [Hughes, Writer] talked me through the issues that it addresses, which I am ashamed to say I had a scant knowledge of. Gwyneth had hewn a drama out of the most extraordinary amount of research. I wanted to do it because it’s an urgent piece of drama, so much TV today is preoccupied with our recent history, rather than what is the actuality.

Q: What contact did you have with the real Alan Bates?

A: One of the brilliant features of this story is that it features characters from the whole of the United Kingdom; one of the pleasures of it will be recognising how multicultural and how diverse the population of subpostmasters are. I wanted to represent Alan properly in that context.

I’m not playing Alan Bates. I’m playing Gwyneth Hughes’ version of Alan Bates’. I had said to Alan, ‘I’m not going to imitate you, but I need to be you enough to differentiate you, to show where you’re from and to root you in a specific context’. This was because Alan isn’t metropolitan like me, or from the south. He’s originally from Liverpool and has been living in Wales for some time. So, I talked to him about his roots, his work, the main events of his life, his routines. Secretly, I was trying to work out what drove him on, but he’s remarkably adept at obfuscating, at not giving any clues as to how he has come to do what he’s done. It’s a genuine humility that he has and there is something mysterious about that in this day and age.

Q: What did it make you feel about the Post Office and their motivation in victimising their own staff?

A: I kept thinking, ‘What are they defending here?’ There's this corporate culture that seems to have evolved, that in part runs on fear and shuffling problems up to the next level, people not making decisions and not taking responsibility. This is a story of a situation like that. There is something about the way that our culture works now, which seems much more hierarchical and less horizontally-based in terms of who takes responsibility.

And it remains mysterious to me but to a certain extent, people are insulated against the cruel consequences of what happens when something like this takes place.

Q: And why is a drama like this important in a cultural sense?

A: On a cultural front, you make drama like this because it's about people's relationship with their community. Often people feel isolated or are atomized: here is a story about people coming together. The oldest Greek dramas are about a chorus uniting behind a cause, and a hero emerging from among them and taking on forces that appear to be far stronger and more anonymous and immutable.

And yet the hero wins. So in a way this is an ancient story, and it's a very uplifting story. It shows that people can talk to each other, and unite and take action. I'm very proud and relieved that they came to me because I'm honoured to have anything to do with Alan Bates. Anyone who talks about it is honoured to have had dealings with him. He's an extraordinary man.

Q: Who are you playing in Mr Bates vs The Post Office?

A: I play Paula Vennells, who was the CEO of the Post Office at the time the scandal erupted. She was the woman who was brought on board to turn the Post Office around, into a multi-million-pound business.

Q: What do we know about her backstory and her character?

A: It's difficult because people who worked with her are very guarded — difficult to get information from anybody about Paula. But my understanding is that she comes from a corporate background and she was extremely successful in that field because of her very corporate mind. That's why she was brought in for this job. The Post Office was struggling at the time and she very successfully turned it around. “She’s a fascinating character because she was an ordained minister (she's left now), married with two boys, I believe. She loved music, exercise, she was a runner and a cyclist. And my understanding of her is that she's very bright. I tried to portray her with ambiguity, because I felt that that best served the script and the piece.

It leaves the audience to decide what they think of her, rather than me ramming something down their throat. It was very important that I didn't present her as some evil monster when I don't truly know who she is or what was going on behind closed doors. We only know that she lost control of a situation that she had no idea how to manage. It was beyond her.

Q: Why do you think she continued to defend the Post Office brand against its own staff, even as it became apparent that they had been horribly wronged?

A: She was brought in by the Government to turn the Post Office around, and to my mind she was ambitious to do that and wanted to please the people that had put her there. I just think she became blinkered. I cannot see anywhere that she was a bad person, I just think the situation became horrendous and beyond her control and she probably got terrified and didn't know how to handle it. And then it started to build, and it became out of control. And then I think she buried her head in the sand. She clearly got it horribly wrong. And she's going to have to explain that quite soon, one way or another.

Q: What were you most shocked to learn?

A: One of the things that shocked me — and I think Toby Jones and the other cast who were playing subpostmasters have done this absolutely beautifully — is that the people in these post offices around the country were suddenly expected to take on a new computer system that they had no idea about. There was no proper tuition, no proper learning. They were just expected to manage a brand-new system that was pretty high tech, and run their post office from it. That baffled me: I can't get my head around how that could have happened. And then even once it had happened they weren't given the real support they needed when they didn't understand it, or when it started going wrong and started glitching. Money started disappearing, and yet there was no proper support anywhere for them. And that, to me, seems astonishing.