Mr Bates vs The Post Office review: Incredibly moving drama is a major public service

Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which has aired on television this week and is available on catch-up via the ITVX streaming service, has done a brilliant job of summarising in four hours an incredibly complex issue which has taken him and his fellow subpostmasters more than 20 years (and counting) to unpick.

There has been much brilliant reporting on the scandal for many years by the likes of Computer Weekly, Private Eye and journalist Nick Wallis to gradually pull the pieces of the jigsaw together about how the Post Office and Fujitsu introduced a new IT system called Horizon to supposedly help with branch accounting then blamed, sacked, bullied, criminalised and even jailed hundreds of subpostmasters for failings it was causing with missing money rather than admit the technology was at fault.

Given the years of extensive denials of wrongdoing by the Post Office, uncovering the truth has been a painstaking process, which is still unfolding at the current public inquiry into the scandal.

That has partly contributed to limited public understanding of what happened and meant that the largest miscarriage of justice in British legal history has gone somewhat under the radar.

The brilliance of this drama and its focus on the human stories of the affected subpostmasters has brought the subject to a much wider audience and reignited calls for justice to be done.

Because so many people were affected, the programme can only focus on a limited number of their stories - the frightening thing is the production team could have selected literally hundreds of other shocking stories to profile.

But Mr Bates vs The Post Office isn’t just an incredibly moving and shocking piece of television; it is a major public service.

Buy Saturday’s Yorkshire Post to read a two-page special on the real Yorkshire victims of the scandal – and the local lawyer who helped them on the path to justice