\n<\/p>\n
\u201cI<\/span> don\u2019t think you would find a young offender institution (YOI) in which stories like these haven\u2019t happened. Seventeen years of age, loads of energy, hormones, bravado \u2013 you know they\u2019ll kick off. It must be an absolute nightmare.\u201d<\/p>\n Yes, Jimmy McGovern has gone back to prison again. After two series of Time, which told stories from men\u2019s and women\u2019s institutions, he has turned his attention to perhaps the most distressing ones of all. Set in a YOI, it\u2019s full of tales of bad decisions, directionless rage and lost potential at the most vulnerable of ages. If this third series is, as he suggests, the last, it is quite the curtain call.<\/p>\n I have come to Downpatrick, just outside Belfast, to look around the fictional institution of HMP Alderwick. We are in a former school whose strip-lit spaces are doubling as the prison\u2019s gated corridors, reception area, visiting rooms, staff room and a chapel that is firmly in the realm of functional rather than celestial. Other scenes were shot in the former HMP Belfast (now called Crumlin Road Gaol) and HMP Hydebank Wood, an active young offender centre, but the school locations are quite grim enough.<\/p>\n Alderwick\u2019s teenage prisoners include James (Louis McCartney), estranged from his parents after an apparently unforgivable act, Peter (Ollie McNulty), one of five on remand for the killing of an innocent man and Christopher (Chukwubuikem Molokwu), whose Kenyan mother hasn\u2019t seen him since he was four and whose stammer (a condition shared with McGovern), combined with her lack of English, make communication between them almost impossible.<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018Me and the lads were like, we would not survive a day in here\u2019 \u2026 Louis McCartney as inmate James in the third series of Jimmy McGovern\u2019s Time.<\/span> Photograph: BBC\/BBC Studios\/Peter Marley<\/p>\n I watch filming while standing next to a coffin and five headstones \u2013 a strong hint that all may not end well for everyone \u2013 and indeed the scene follows an incident of appalling violence. A small group including David Tennant\u2019s veteran prison officer Bailey is being led in the Lord\u2019s Prayer by Siobhan Finneran\u2019s chaplain Marie-Louise (\u201cI think my face must suggest either religious people or addicts \u2026\u201d), who has been the moral and spiritual heart of all three series even as she is now enduring a deep crisis of faith after the abrupt end of her affair with a Catholic priest.<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s heartbroken,\u201d Finneran \u2013 a \u201cvery lapsed\u201d Catholic \u2013 tells me in her trailer. \u201cThe bishop has sent the priest away and told Marie-Louise she needs to grow up. She can\u2019t understand why he couldn\u2019t have been kinder and more Christian, but she\u2019s determined not to be judgmental herself and to throw herself into being there for these kids. I spoke to a chaplain before series one who told me: \u2018You will never be more needed than in that job\u2019, which I\u2019ve never forgotten. A couple of friends who were watching that series rang up and said: \u2018I can\u2019t wait for you to knock on the door [in the show], because we can probably have 30 seconds of calm where nobody\u2019s going to try and kill each other.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Bailey enjoys precious little such respite, but Tennant still leaped at the chance to work with \u201cthe guv\u2019nor\u201d. \u201cJimmy writes very human, inconsistent, believable people, so Bailey makes sense to me. He\u2019s perfectly good at his job. It gives him a routine, but he\u2019s got into a rut until he\u2019s forced to examine where he\u2019s at professionally and, when his wife leaves him, personally: how he\u2019s got there, and how he feels about that.\u201d<\/p>\n After 35 years in the service, Tennant says while sitting in the chapel, Bailey is thoroughly disillusioned. \u201cHe once had respect and enthusiasm for the job, but it has become very compromised. He feels prisons are now just to hold these boys in place and keep them out of the way, rather than to rehabilitate them in any meaningful way. He talks about how there used to be education, a library, training, and nowadays there\u2019s not enough staff or opportunity, which he finds very difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n During a scene later in the afternoon, Bailey is told the young men must remain banged up all day due to staff shortages. \u201cThey\u2019ll be raging,\u201d he warns, his frustration and concern palpable for those in a place where self-harm, despair and violence are already commonplace. Once used as last resorts, 23-hour bang-ups and keep-aparts (where groups from particular postcodes are stopped from socialising) are, says McGovern, being deployed with increasing frequency since Covid. \u201cIt offered them the perfect excuse to keep these kids cooped up longer, but you\u2019ve got to allow people to associate or nothing will improve. It\u2019s no way to bring up kids, is it?\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018Jimmy writes very human, inconsistent, believable people\u2019 \u2026 Tennant and McCartney in Time. <\/span> Photograph: BBC\/BBC Studios\/Peter Marley<\/p>\n For young men, to be bottled up to stew over grievances real or imagined, the effects are predictably disastrous. Filming in a real prison hammered this home.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d never really considered why people might be in jail, or that idea of not judging a book by its cover,\u201d says Molokwu, one of a number of the young cast for whom this is, remarkably, their first acting job. \u201cI realised that me and Christopher have something in common, coming from countries with less opportunities \u2013 Kenya for him, Nigeria for me \u2013 and moving to a country with more. The difference is that I\u2019m blessed with a healthy lifestyle and a loving family, but he\u2019s still a good-hearted kid, just vulnerable because of growing up in care with a stammer, someone who hasn\u2019t had the opportunity to learn how to make the best decision in a bad situation.\u201d<\/p>\n McCartney, the exception among the debutants as a Tony nominee (for Stranger Things: the First Shadow), was also profoundly affected by the role. \u201cI\u2019d get in this freezing cell, they\u2019d lock the door, and you\u2019d think: yeah, simple enough, I\u2019ll do that. But the scene is three minutes long, so you\u2019re sitting on your bed, tray in front of you, hearing muffled voices. Then there are pictures of James\u2019s family, a dog, some trips that he\u2019s taken \u2026 You\u2019re just sitting there like you\u2019re strapped in some electric chair, seeing all of your mistakes. It\u2019s so important to remember these guys are kids who, maybe a month ago, might have been having a family dinner. It made it so real. Me and the other lads were like, we would not survive a day in here.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were in a young offender institution and got shown into a young man\u2019s room. He must have been 17 or 18, recently given a life sentence for murder. He was sat on his bed, every flicker crushed out of him, devastated. What changed the dynamic for a second was that I got down to his eye level. He wasn\u2019t expecting that, because he\u2019s used to officers standing and talking down to him. I asked him: \u2018What\u2019s it like here?\u2019 Then he looked around like, am I able to answer this question?, seeing officers, and said: \u2018Well, it\u2019s all right \u2026\u2019 It was a strange conversation, but it moved me immensely.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/span>\u2018She\u2019s determined not to be judgmental\u2019 \u2026Tennant with Finneran in Time. <\/span> Photograph: BBC\/BBC Studios\/Peter Marley<\/p>\n McGovern has spent his writing life getting down to look people in the eye; the results have a rawness, honesty and empathy that few writers can match, frequently fuelled by a righteous anger that surfaces when I mention prisons losing out in the intensifying competition for investment from an ever-shrinking public purse. \u201cAnd yet we always find resources for war,\u201d he says. \u201cWhy can\u2019t we find it for prisons?\u201d<\/p>\n That debate is further compromised by the relative ease of arguing for putting money into, say, schools or the NHS instead. \u201cYes, prisoners have made their own beds and deserve to be there,\u201d sighs Tennant. \u201cThat\u2019s the thinking, isn\u2019t it? But if we aspire to be a civilised society, then we aspire to help the most damaged member of that society. Our responsibility is to make sure we\u2019re not just locking people away so we don\u2019t have to look at them, but to help them find a better future. That applies especially to these young men because there\u2019s more potential for a life lived well. We\u2019re all trying our best and we all make mistakes, so that vulnerability combined with that possibility is heartbreaking.\u201d<\/p>\n The indefatigable McGovern remains unbowed by the further deterioration of the Prison Service since the first series of Time in 2021; after all, his Bafta-winning 1996 drama Hillsborough rekindled a campaign for justice and helped shift the focus of culpability from fans to police. Twenty years later, the so-called Hillsborough law designed to prevent institutional cover-ups is finally heading for the statute books, so McGovern is used to the long game.<\/p>\n \u201cBut I wouldn\u2019t do this unless I loved doing it,\u201d he says. \u201cI hope Andy Burnham, who I know through the Hillsborough campaign [and who introduced the bill in 2017], will bring about the changes we need in the prison system. But the real problem with society is that we find a wonderful principle, like justice or Christian faith or solidarity, and establish an institution around it. Then the institution becomes beautiful and we start to defend it at the expense of the very principle that founded it. So, inside a YOI, we can\u2019t tell the truth because it will get us and the institution into trouble, so let\u2019s not. It\u2019s a major problem which ought to be addressed \u2026 but it never will be.\u201d<\/p>\n In the meantime, he will keep on telling stories that bring us all down to eye level, daring us to look away.<\/p>\n Time is on BBC One on 11 October<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cI don\u2019t think you would find a young offender institution (YOI) in which stories like these haven\u2019t happened. Seventeen years of age, loads of energy, hormones, bravado \u2013 you know they\u2019ll kick off. It must be an absolute nightmare.\u201d Yes, Jimmy McGovern has gone back to prison again. After two series of Time, which told<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52432,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[25378,131,2222,16169,2798,7391,2640,1779,289,15969],"class_list":{"0":"post-52431","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-crime-justice","8":"tag-baftawinning","9":"tag-day","10":"tag-drama","11":"tag-lads","12":"tag-prison","13":"tag-stunning","14":"tag-survive","15":"tag-television","16":"tag-tvs","17":"tag-utterly"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=52431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/52432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=52431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=52431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=52431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}