‘It’s no way to bring up kids, is it?’ … David Tennant as Bailey and Peter Palmerston as Ollie in Time. Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/PA View image in fullscreen ‘It’s no way to bring up kids, is it?’ … David Tennant as Bailey and Peter Palmerston as Ollie in Time. Photograph: PHOTOGRAPHER:/PA Television ‘Me and the lads would not survive a day in here’: inside TV’s utterly stunning, Bafta-winning prison drama The third series of Jimmy McGovern’s breathtaking series Time stars David Tennant – and just be its best ever. We go behind the scenes
Prefer the Guardian on Google “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.
View image in fullscreen ‘Me and the lads were like, we would not survive a day in here’ … Louis McCartney as inmate James in the third series of Jimmy McGovern’s Time. Photograph: BBC/BBC Studios/Peter Marley 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…