It’s not the people who are bad, it’s the system that’s brutalising. If there is any message from Time, it is this.
Sean Bean earned a Bafta for his lead role as a man thrown into the prison system in the first season of veteran writer Jimmy McGovern’s prison drama and Time was named the best mini-series of 2021. There were no plans to extend the story and the writer’s job appeared to be done – until the BBC suggested that he create a second season set in a women’s prison.
McGovern agreed but he wanted to bring aboard a woman to co-write. He chose Helen Black, who was coming off the TV movie Life and Death in the Warehouse, in which the fact of being female – a woman’s unborn child is endangered as she struggles to keep up with productivity targets in a giant online dispatch centre – focused the broader social issues of work in the machine.
Reproductive reality is all over Time. Orla (Jodie Whittaker, Doctor Who) is unexpectedly sentenced to a prison term, didn’t bring her contraceptive pills and has to mop up menstrual blood with wads of toilet paper. Kelsey (Bella Ramsey, The Last of Us) is a young heroin addict who doesn’t know she’s pregnant until she’s locked up. Abi (Tamara Lawrance, No Offence) is doing life for a murder committed amid the throes of postnatal depression.
We’re implicitly invited to wonder why any of them are there. Orla, after all, was a single mum just trying to make ends meet on an inadequate wage when she stole electricity. Shouldn’t Kelsey be getting treatment for her addiction to the drug she was caught trafficking, rather than being further traumatised? And wasn’t Abi mentally ill when she did what she did? Yet here they are, and this is how the system works.
There is a narrative arc to the three-part series and there are supporting characters and dramatic events, but they somehow take a back seat to the blunt fact that this is how society currently deals with these individual problems.
By contrast, Screw, originally produced for Channel 4 and also granted a second season after a successful debut, is all about the drama – and sometimes the laughs – and rather less inclined to make us think. It opens with the return of prison officer Rose Gill (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell, Derry Girls) from the messy events of season one, when she got caught up in a gun-smuggling plot while trying to protect her brother.
While she’s settling back into Long Marsh C Wing, her boss Leigh Henry (Nina Sosanya, Teachers) is trying to get her head around the disruptive rumour that there is an undercover cop on the wing – an idea that the prison’s acting governor (Barnaby Kay, Wallander) is very keen that she should just leave alone. But the pair of them also, and this seems a stretch, have a thing going on.
It’s not that Screw is unrealistic – creator Rob Williams drew on his own experience working in British prisons – so much as that it’s less interested in the reality than in creating a watchable mixture of comedy, drama and soap opera. It’s gritty for all that, but it won’t linger. Time, on the other hand, poses questions that might be hard to get out of your head.
Time
Streaming: Neon and Sky Go from Sunday, November 19
Screw
Streaming: TVNZ+ from Monday, November 20
