Will ‘angered’ by Post Office scandal
Actor plays key character in gripping ITV drama
Burnham-based actor Will Mellor played a key role in Mr Bates vs the Post Office, ITV’s retelling of a true story that is now being called ‘one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in the UK’.
The gripping four-part drama, which aired last week, tells the real human cost behind the Post Office/Horizon scandal where hundreds of postmasters were wrongly accused of fiddling the books.
The drama has sparked a huge reaction since airing, with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announcing a new law to overturn the wrongful convictions and former Post Office chief Paula Vennells handing back her CBE.
Former Coronation Street and EastEnders actor Mellor plays Lee Castleton, one of the wronged subpostmasters accused of stealing thousands.
Between 2009 and 2015 people’s lives were turned upside down when Horizon flagged weekly shortfalls in the thousands. Many thought that postmasters like Will’s
Lee Castleton were helping themselves to Post Office tills when in actual fact accounting errors were logged by faults in the computer system.
Will said that taking on the role has given the story ‘a voice’ and ‘let the public know what the Post Office has done to these people’.
His character, Lee, is one of the most tragic stories. Despite calling the Horizon IT support system almost 100 times, suspecting the accounting software to be at fault, he was accused of stealing £26,000 and went bankrupt trying to pay it back plus the legal fees that mounted up to £321,000.
His personal life began to suffer dramatically, as Will explained.
“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’s a few thousand pounds and so he obviously thinks there’s something wrong with the system, because his calculations are right.
“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.
And it just spirals from there. Lee believes all he has to do is tell the truth and it will be fine, his name will be cleared. He believes in British justice.
“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 subpostmaster.”
Eventually, Alan Bates and a handful of others represented the 555 post office workers in a group litigation case at the High Court, with the judge ruling Horizon to be at fault.
Although high profile at the time, Mellor said that more people need to learn about this story and talk about it – and that justice still needs to be delivered to those wronged.
“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.
“I feel privileged to have a chance to tell the story for them. This is an important subject matter and also it comes with a pressure: we're dealing with people’s lives here. We have to get the story right and we want this to be noisy. We want people to talk about this.
“I was angry. Because I didn't know anywhere near
enough. I'd heard some of it and then obviously, once I took on the role, I learned more about it.”
He added: “Lee is only one of them, yet he has lost so many years of his life, fighting something that looked like it was never going to be won.
And still, the subpostmasters haven’t got their answers, and they still haven't gotten a satisfactory apology and they still haven’t got the money that is owed to them.”
Mr Bates vs The Post Office is available to watch on ITVX.