Behind bars again, and it’s a real cracker
A heroin addict, a lifer and a mum who ‘fiddled the ’lecky’. Jimmy McGovern’s Bafta-winning prison drama is back – this time with three women
TIME
Sunday, BBC1, 9pm
Three very different women end up as cellmates in Carlingford Prison. Orla (Jodie Whittaker), a single mother of three, is going inside for the first time, having been sentenced to six months for ‘fiddling the ’leccy’. She hadn’t been expecting to go to prison so hadn’t even told her children she was in court. Now she’s terrified that they might be taken into care.
Kelsey (Bella Ramsey) is a heroin addict whose biggest worry on her first night – the third time she’s been inside, despite her youth – is that she might not get a sufficiently large dose of the heroin substitute methadone to combat her withdrawal symptoms. At least, that’s her biggest concern until she is told she is pregnant.
Abi (Tamara Lawrance) is a lifer, in for killing her sister-in-law, or so she claims. She’s been transferred to Carlingford from another prison and is the most difficult to read of the three: guarded, self-contained, seemingly just intent on doing her time.
This is the second series of writer Jimmy McGovern’s drama. The first, starring Sean Bean and Stephen
Graham and set in a men’s prison, won huge critical acclaim. This time around there is a completely different cast, apart from prison chaplain MarieLouise (Siobhan Finneran), who returns from season one.
Ramsey, so great in the hit zombie drama The Last Of Us, is equally impressive here as a young woman whose pregnancy might just inspire her to try to get her life back on track. Whittaker is tremendous as a mum who was struggling to make ends meet and who can now see her life starting to go off the rails.
Best of all is Lawrance as an intelligent and empathetic woman with a complicated backstory that is only gradually revealed. Abi knows that to show weakness is dangerous – maybe even fatal – in prison so she’s trying to cope as stoically as she can. She’s prepared to help her fellow inmates but, at the same time, no one should get on the wrong side of her.
This is a hard-hitting, thoughtprovoking drama. Time manages to evoke sympathy for difficult characters and features some edge-of-the-seat sequences. It’s certainly not an easy watch but it’s also difficult to take your eyes off it, even as it seems to be spiralling inexorably towards tragedy.
McGovern has always been particularly good at writing about desperate people in extreme situations. Think of Cracker, Hillsborough and, indeed, the first series of Bafta-winning Time. He sets the bar very high but he and Helen Black, his co-writer on this season, have cleared it here.