Time:- and Punishment.

"You come here bad and you get out worse. Everyone knows it" - Bernard

When Mark Cobden (Sean Bean) is sent to prison for four years for "dangerous driving" he is thrown into a world of violence, of snooker balls in socks wielded as weapons, and of hot water thrown in the face of a 'grass'. A world where people are forced into impossible, and desperate, situations.

It's a world of broken men brushing their teeth over sad little sinks, of exercise yards, of grey marl, of risk assessments, and of Victorian punishment architecture. Set against this bleak background, it is a marvel that Jimmy McGovern's latest drama, the brilliant Time (BBC1/iPlayer), managed to include some astonishingly tender moments of humanity. I flinched, for sure, but I also, equally predictably, cried.

On arriving at Craigmore to 'do jug', Cobden is roomed with Bernard (Aneurin Barnard), a deeply troubled young man who suffers panic attacks and opens his veins as easily as Cobden once reached for the vodka. Bernard is a danger, primarily, to himself but other inmates soon realise Cobden, a former school teacher and, at nearly sixty years old, a much older man than most, is ripe for bullying and become a danger to him.

 

 

 

Already estranged from his wife Alicia (Nadine Marshall) and son Tom (Lee Morris), Cobden is consumed by remorse, haunted by his demons, and, now, threatened by psychotic prison hard men like Johnno (James Nelson-Joyce) and, later, the even more terrifying Jackson Jones (Brian McCardie, who many will recognise from Line of Duty).

Other prisoners forge a better relationship with Cobden. Paul McAdams (Kevin Harvey), Daniel (Jack McMullen) who killed a man in a pub brawl to "save face", and, most of all, Patterson (Nabil Elouahabi) who Cobden teaches to read and write. An act of kindness that Patterson does not forget.

Prison officer Eric McNally (Stephen Graham), too, is a kind man ("firm but fair" - Cobden assesses him) and, on the surface, his life looks a happy one. The nice house and the loving marriage with Sonia (Hannah Walters, Graham's spouse in real life) is underpinned by a deep sadness, evinced by an early scene when McNally looks into the empty bedroom of a son.

The band posters are still on the wall but the son is nowhere to be seen. David (Paddy Rowan) is his name and he's been incarcerated in another prison. Some of the prisoners in Craigmore have discovered this information and are using it to try and blackmail McNally. He finds himself having to choose between his own morality and his son's safety.

Which, of course - along with Cobden's attempts to atone for his crimes, is what drives this dark drama. But it's a dark drama with a beating heart. We are shown how the power of romantic rejection can destroy a person, how learnt toxic behaviour can result in lethal violence and, of course, McGovern goes big on Catholicism. Not in the form of propaganda but as a form of conflicted reality for many of those who have found themselves incarcerated and as a potential, though highly uncertain, route towards salvation.

But the stolen glimpses of sunshine through the iron bars of the prison windows could almost be visual metaphors for the way the acts of kindness sit so starkly with the brutality of the prison experience. Cobden is visited by his kindly parents June (Sue Johnston) and John (David Calder) and he, in turn, writes letters to Anne (Anne Madeley) whose husband was the victim of his dangerous, and drunk, driving.

Those scenes, for me, rendered Time reflective of life and how the redemptive power of love and forgiveness is forever locked in a Manichean struggle with our own, all too real, human foibles, insecurities, and selfish desires. It asked questions about why we do what we do, why we make the decisions we make, and, more than anything, how we must live with them.

Often for the rest of our lives. In Time, prisons are shown to be places of violence, places of punishment, and places of humiliation. They are shown to be places of sadness and places of shame, petri dishes for all that is worst about humanity. 

All of which, sadly - by their very nature, seems inevitable. But Time, while making important points about the prison industrial complex and how the lack of mental health care for young men is responsible for so much crime, also asked if prisons could be places of redemption. That's a question that Jimmy McGovern and Time were unable to answer because that's a question that society is unable to answer and, in many quarters, unable to even ask.