Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, I listed some significant British anniversaries that will occur in 2025, hoping that others might help me explore and honor them. Tina enjoyed a memoir about dogs, Scotland, and the pandemic: Olive, Mabel and Me by Andrew Cotter.

Mr. Bates vs The Post Office is a dramatization of the British Post Office scandal — an event that I was completely unaware of, even though it happened in this century. The four-part show was originally broadcast on ITV at about this time last year. PBS Masterpiece broadcast it in April 2024.

We thought this was a terrific story about the power of “the little people” when they get together to take on corporations and government.

According to this BBC article, ITV claims that the series lost money because it doesn’t have a lot of international appeal. On the contrary for me. I liked learning about a British institution that I know little about — the subpostmaster who has a contract with the Post Office. In the US, our postmasters are employees. In the UK, some of them are small business owners.

The story is about subpostmasters who lost money due to problems with the computer system but were blamed as if they had stolen it. These people lost their money, their livelihoods, and their reputations. Over two hundred of them served prison time. Some committed suicide.

One big break for the subpostmasters came when Computer Weekly broke the story in the press. I appreciated that as someone who, in the past, regularly read computer trade publications.

The series Mr. Bates vs The Post Office had a real-world impact. Legislation was passed last year that reverses convictions and provides compensation for many of the subpostmasters who were victimized by the Post Office’s false accusations.

Toby Jones, who played Mr. Bates in the drama, also narrated a documentary, The Real Story of Mr. Bates vs The Post Office. In the US, both shows are available to stream from PBS with a PBS Passport, a benefit of membership supporting your local station. The series and documentary were released as a 2-disk DVD set which is widely available in libraries.