How do you think you’d do in prison? Wrong! You’d do really, really badly, sorry. Look at you. I don’t know how to say this politely, but you have “Guardian reader” written all over you. You just have the face of someone who intrinsically knows who Nigel Slater is. They’d batter you with pool balls before you could say “Bravo Marina Hyde”.
Anyway, to series two of Time (Sunday 29 October, 9pm, BBC One), which further proves my point. Series one dropped out of nowhere in 2021, and was devastating – Sean Bean quietly saying “Yes boss” a hundred times, Stephen Graham’s tight jaw, Michael Socha’s beautiful gloopy eyebrows and an all-timer threatening bully turn by James Nelson-Joyce. There were these gorgeous spinning parts – Graham’s McNally being hauntingly threatened over the safety of his incarcerated son, Sue Johnston as Bean’s permanently-worried-but-trying-not-to-show-it mum, an uncomfortable prison death where it’s hard to say exactly whose fault it was. I famously feel no emotion and have never cried at a film ever in my life, but Bean’s quest for atonement in the final episode made me sob three separate times, and it was embarrassing for all involved. It really was as-good-as-it-gets British drama with that old stamp of approval at the top of it: “Written by Jimmy McGovern.”
So how can series two get anywhere close? It helps to repeat the trick of casting astoundingly well: the three leads here are Jodie Whittaker, Bella Ramsey and Tamara Lawrance, as well as the returning chaplain (“Hi Jimmy – any chance we can have one without Catholicism in it?” “No.”) being Siobhan Finneran. As you may gather, we’re now in a women’s prison. However, this isn’t just “series one but with period poverty”; the stakes have changed, the parts are moving differently, the whole thing is on another frequency. Lawrance is the stoic lifer with a single enormous problem in the one environment where she can’t escape it; Whittaker is the well-meaning mumsy dipshit who is allergic to making good decisions; Ramsey is the skin-scratching scam-artist drug addict who never stood a chance. None of them are friends but none of them are quite enemies, either. They’re all thrown together in a minimum-security facility – I don’t think I’ve ever seen a prison drama where someone sits on a sofa – and we go from there. It is, as anything McGoverned, absolutely gripping from the off.
Bella Ramsey is going to get a lot of the plaudits for their role as Kelsey – they really are having a year, and continue that form into this. Their pregnancy storyline is the glue that holds this whole thing together. (Also of note: I’ve been watching a lot of Deadwood lately, where everything is very brown and everyone is very dirty and festering with boils, and I still don’t think I’ve seen anyone look as putrid on screen as Kelsey in episode one – ready to gnaw through the screen and really aggressively ask you to go to the shops.) But it is Whittaker’s storyline that most affected me: we open with her in a cramped flat feeding jam on toast to her three children, then cut to the prison van where she’s unexpectedly been incarcerated for “only fiddling the leccy”, and everything starts slithering downhill from there. She didn’t have enough phone numbers memorised, she didn’t think she’d end up here, the kids haven’t been picked up from school, and suddenly everything gets more urgent. She’s a week away from having her children split up and put into care and she’s powerless; her mum isn’t much help and she doesn’t want them staying with her anyway; there’s mistake after mistake after mistake. It’s such a cannily written (I know, I know: McGovern) portrait of poverty in this country in 2023, how one small but human error can lead to an avalanche of misery. Every time she calls her son and pleads with him to go to school you’re thinking: please, mate. Please just go to school a bit. You’re just going to be in the exact same poverty for ever if you don’t.
The sheer power of series one has been slightly geared down a bit here – having three prisoners’ stories to follow instead of Sean Bean’s one dilutes the plot a little – but that does also feel like nitpicking to a molecular level. When we want to, this country is the best in the world at drama, and Time is an absolute example of that. Watch all three episodes in rapt awe, then make a little vow to yourself afterwards to stay out of trouble. They really would eat you alive in there.
