Mr Bates vs The Post Office delivers BBC humiliation in TV ratings war
ITV’s new drama Mr Bates vs The Post Office has proved to be a stone-cold hit among viewers, with the four-part mini-series already having racked up millions of viewers. Starring Toby Jones, the show spotlights the impact and first aired on New Year’s Day at 9pm, the exact same time The Tourist season two began on BBC One.
Helmed , The Tourist’s second season sees the titular character travel to Ireland in a bid to find out why he woke up with amnesia in the Australian outback a season prior.
BBC's The Tourist stars Jamie Dorman (BBC/Two Brothers/Steffan Hill)But despite the BBC show’s first season raking in year-topping figures in 2022, its second instalment is so far lagging behind Mr Bates vs The Post Office. reports that Mr Bates vs The Post Office racked up almost double the amount of viewers The Tourist’s second season did on New Year’s Day. While 3.9 million viewers tuned into ITV’s offering, the Beeb enticed just 2.2 million.
However, it’s worth noting that the above numbers don’t include streams, just the amount of people who tuned into both shows live. That said, it’s still a significant drop off from the eye-watering amount of viewers who sat around the TV for The Tourist’s season one premiere, with 4.6 million tuning in back on New Year’s Day in 2022.
As dramatised by ITV’s new show, in 1999, the Post Office introduced a . The system was rolled out across the country, and it wasn't long before sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses began reporting issues.
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At the same time, Horizon flagged repeated losses in their accounts, with the glitchy accounting system wrongly detecting financial shortfalls in branches up and down the UK. The blame fell squarely on the shoulders of innocent sub-postmasters, who found themselves facing serious charges of theft, fraud, and false accounting.
Toby Jones plays Alan Bates in Mr Bates vs The Post OfficeA total of 736 blameless individuals were prosecuted by the Post Office between the years 2000 and 2014, with terrible consequences. Some served jail time, while others, once regarded as respectable members of the community, suffered significant damage to their reputations.
The recent ITV adaptation of the events that followed centres on former sub-postmaster played by Harry Potter star Toby.
In 1998, Alan and his partner Suzanne Sercombe used life savings to buy a Post Office branch in Llandudno, North Wales. However, when Alan refused to accept liability like many other postmasters and postmistresses using Horizon, the Post Office terminated their contract with three months' notice, prompting him to take action.
The recent ITV adaptation of the events that followed centres on former sub-postmaster Alan Bates (ITV)More than 230 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses were jailed after 700 had been prosecuted for theft, fraud and false accounting and four killed themselves. They were blamed for mistakes by the defective Horizon computer system. In 2019, Alan and five other staff took the Post Office to the High Court where a judge ruled the IT was at fault in the UK’s worst miscarriages of justice.
An independent public inquiry into the scandal began in February 2022. To this day, not a single senior Post Office boss has been held to account.
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