Post Office scandal: 'TV drama has reignited the fight' says former North East sub-postmaster
The last episode of the series aired last night
A former North East sub-postmaster says the TV drama about the Post Office scandal has 'reignited the fight' for victims to get proper compensation.
Christopher Head was the youngest in the country aged 18 back in 2006, when he took over the West Boldon branch near Sunderland.
He was one of hundreds wrongly accused of theft and fraud, which was actually down to an IT error.
The final of 'Mr. Bates vs the Post Office' aired last night.
Christopher said: "I think the TV drama itself has come across so powerfully, how they've managed to cram more than 20 years of scandal into a mere four hours of TV drama, and they've managed to show the suffering and the callousness of the way the Post Office acted towards these people.
"This fight is not over. It's still on-going. I think the wider public itself, although they've heard of the scandal, I don't think they've really understood or really knew the true level of the destruction that it had caused people, and the level that the Post Office and potentially the Government went to in order to try and cover things up.
"It's just so important that it's known on a much wider scale. A lot of people had actually thought that the scandal was over because the high court case was settled back in 2019. I don't think they realise the true scale of what was happening and is still happening today. People are still fighting for proper compensation and some kind of accountability for what happened.
"I think the drama shows how the victims are feeling and have felt over the time and I think, as you've seen on the comments from postmasters, it has brought a lot of things back. Maybe some of the things that they had tried to move on from and buried, it has brought back some memories which obviously will be hard to deal with and upsetting.
"I think it's obviously probably reignited the fight and the support of the public that are now behind them in order to see this through to make sure they're fully recompensed for what they've been through, and also to see ultimately multiple people held to account; whether that's in the Post Office, Fujitsu or within Government itself."