‘Me and the lads would not survive a day in here’: inside TV’s utterly stunning, Bafta-winning prison drama
“I don’t think you would find a young offender institution (YOI) in which stories like these haven’t happened. Seventeen years of age, loads of energy, hormones, bravado – you know they’ll kick off. It must be an absolute nightmare.”
Yes, Jimmy McGovern has gone back to prison again. After two series of Time, which told stories from men’s and women’s institutions, he has turned his attention to perhaps the most distressing ones of all. Set in a YOI, it’s 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.
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’s 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.
Alderwick’s 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’t 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.
I watch filming while standing next to a coffin and five headstones – a strong hint that all may not end well for everyone – and indeed the scene follows an incident of appalling violence. A small group including David Tennant’s veteran prison officer Bailey is being led in the Lord’s Prayer by Siobhan Finneran’s chaplain Marie-Louise (“I think my face must suggest either religious people or addicts …”), 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.
“She’s heartbroken,” Finneran – a “very lapsed” Catholic – tells me in her trailer. “The bishop has sent the priest away and told Marie-Louise she needs to grow up. She can’t understand why he couldn’t have been kinder and more Christian, but she’s 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: ‘You will never be more needed than in that job’, which I’ve never forgotten. A couple of friends who were watching that series rang up and said: ‘I can’t wait for you to knock on the door [in the show], because we can probably have 30 seconds of calm where nobody’s going to try and kill each other.’”
Bailey enjoys precious little such respite, but Tennant still leaped at the chance to work with “the guv’nor”. “Jimmy writes very human, inconsistent, believable people, so Bailey makes sense to me. He’s perfectly good at his job. It gives him a routine, but he’s got into a rut until he’s forced to examine where he’s at professionally and, when his wife leaves him, personally: how he’s got there, and how he feels about that.”
After 35 years in the service, Tennant says while sitting in the chapel, Bailey is thoroughly disillusioned. “He 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’s not enough staff or opportunity, which he finds very difficult.”
During a scene later in the afternoon, Bailey is told the young men must remain banged up all day due to staff shortages. “They’ll be raging,” 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. “It offered them the perfect excuse to keep these kids cooped up longer, but you’ve got to allow people to associate or nothing will improve. It’s no way to bring up kids, is it?”
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.
“I’d never really considered why people might be in jail, or that idea of not judging a book by its cover,” says Molokwu, one of a number of the young cast for whom this is, remarkably, their first acting job. “I realised that me and Christopher have something in common, coming from countries with less opportunities – Kenya for him, Nigeria for me – and moving to a country with more. The difference is that I’m blessed with a healthy lifestyle and a loving family, but he’s still a good-hearted kid, just vulnerable because of growing up in care with a stammer, someone who hasn’t had the opportunity to learn how to make the best decision in a bad situation.”
McCartney, the exception among the debutants as a Tony nominee (for Stranger Things: the First Shadow), was also profoundly affected by the role. “I’d get in this freezing cell, they’d lock the door, and you’d think: yeah, simple enough, I’ll do that. But the scene is three minutes long, so you’re sitting on your bed, tray in front of you, hearing muffled voices. Then there are pictures of James’s family, a dog, some trips that he’s taken … You’re just sitting there like you’re strapped in some electric chair, seeing all of your mistakes. It’s 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.
“We were in a young offender institution and got shown into a young man’s 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’t expecting that, because he’s used to officers standing and talking down to him. I asked him: ‘What’s it like here?’ Then he looked around like, am I able to answer this question?, seeing officers, and said: ‘Well, it’s all right …’ It was a strange conversation, but it moved me immensely.”
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. “And yet we always find resources for war,” he says. “Why can’t we find it for prisons?”
That debate is further compromised by the relative ease of arguing for putting money into, say, schools or the NHS instead. “Yes, prisoners have made their own beds and deserve to be there,” sighs Tennant. “That’s the thinking, isn’t 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’re not just locking people away so we don’t have to look at them, but to help them find a better future. That applies especially to these young men because there’s more potential for a life lived well. We’re all trying our best and we all make mistakes, so that vulnerability combined with that possibility is heartbreaking.”
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.
“But I wouldn’t do this unless I loved doing it,” he says. “I 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’t tell the truth because it will get us and the institution into trouble, so let’s not. It’s a major problem which ought to be addressed … but it never will be.”
In the meantime, he will keep on telling stories that bring us all down to eye level, daring us to look away.