Jimmy McGovern

Jimmy McGovern is a writer whose sleeve is rarely heart-free. Since cutting his teeth on Brookside in the early 1980s, he’s served up one crunching drama after another (Priest, Hillsborough, Broken etc. etc.), all of them characterised by a mix of dark personal stories and even darker social issues conveyed in a way that leaves us in little doubt about how we should respond. Granted, there are some concessions to light and shade – but if there’s such a thing as unsubtle nuance, then McGovern has mastered it. Even so, Time may be the most crunching of the lot. The first series of this anthology show took place in a men’s prison and spared us none of the violence, mental illness and institutional failures involved. The second, set in a women’s prison, didn’t either.

‘Only with women’ is a phrase used by more cynical TV types for a show that takes something that’s been done before with men, but by changing the gender of the characters can pose as ground-breaking. It sprang to mind this week when both of BBC1’s big new dramas unblushingly took the only-with-women approach; the problem for the cynics being that the programmes themselves are rather good. Or, in the case of Time, overwhelmingly so. Jimmy McGovern’s original 2021 series – a heart-wrenchingly effective portrait of life in a male prison – deservedly won a Bafta. Now he’s back to give us a heart-wrenchingly effective portrait of life in a female one.