Toby Jones hails Post Office accused as ‘hero’

Actor Toby Jones, who played the lead role in the TV series about the Post Office scandal, has labelled campaigner Alan Bates as a “hero”.

Jones played Alan Bates in the ITV show Mr Bates vs the Post Office, which tells the story of hundreds of sub-postmasters who were wrongly accused of theft, fraud, and false accounting caused by faulty software.

The actor told the Hay Festival, “I get to play someone I think of as a hero, someone who doesn’t seem to be subject to the same forces we all are.”

Jones then revealed Alan had been approached to open Glastonbury Festival, but turned it down to continue his campaigning.

He continued, “He can't be bought. He's asked to open Glastonbury: ‘No, thank you’. He's asked to do these things, he doesn't want to do any of that. He says, ‘I've got work to do’, which is to get that stuff done.

“He's a hero and he doesn't want any honours until he has finished the job. And these are values that, I'm not going to say I grew up with, but I sort of remember being lectured about. About duty and about following things through.”

The actor, 57, added, “These are very, very unfashionable things that maybe stand in stark contrast with what we’ve been living with in government for some time.”

He said he believed part of the show's success was down to a national "feeling of disempowerment".

"I think that there's something in the country at the moment. There's a feeling of disempowerment. There's a feeling of outrage, justly, and the story is told very clearly, and it's by no means obvious. Computer software malfunction is not an obvious thing to make a drama about,” Jones said.

Praising the sub-postmasters caught up in the real-life scandal, he paid tribute to their "incredible humble modest humility" - adding they had lived through "20 years of living in a Hitchcockian nightmare".