“Have you ever suffered from depression?”
“Well, there was this time when I was younger, and …”
“Yes or no?”
Welcome to prison induction: a warning of things to come; a process where niceties about mental health are observed not for the purposes of care but for the sake of resource allocation. For former teacher Mark Cobden (Sean Bean), it’s the first time. And it’s rough. Initially we see this terrifying world through Cobden’s out-of-his-depth, middle-class eyes. The barely restrained violence. The barely contained mental illness. The barely tolerable boredom and ennui. Time’s creator Jimmy McGovern spares us nothing.
Everyone is turned inward by the misery of their situation, and Time is horribly convincing in its depiction of both visceral fear and the sense of existential wheelspin as life passes without anything happening. On Bean’s face in repose, we see the torment of guilt and regret, the restless nights in an uncomfortable single bed.
Bean’s performance is supremely understated and all the more emotionally resonant for it. Its brilliance often lies in his body language; his demeanour when he does nothing other than shuffle around, keeping his head down. Either through guilt or terror, he struggles to meet anyone’s gaze. He tries to turn himself into a ghost – to dissolve into his sentence in the hope of making it to the other side. But when you’re in such close proximity to so many other damaged, angry, frightened people, that isn’t possible. Even if you aren’t looking at them, they’re looking at you, with predatory or contemptuous or eagerly opportunistic eyes.
Cobden’s first cellmate, Bernard (Aneurin Barnard), is a suicidal self-harmer. His second, Daniel (Jack McMullan), is a sneak and a liar. Cobden is routinely humiliated by the pitiless bully Johnno (the excellent James Nelson-Joyce). There are bleak truths he must learn the hard way – not least that in prison, aggression is the most meaningful currency and he’s dangerously short of it. Still, there’s nothing Johnno can do to Cobden that is worse than the pain he inflicts on himself.
Unwatchably bleak then? Thankfully, it’s not that simple. Cobden’s supervising officer Eric McNally is a good man, albeit under impossible duress himself due to an errant son who is struggling elsewhere in the overstretched and compromised prison system. McNally is played by Stephen Graham – a model of intense restraint, expressing an infinity of inner turmoil with a puff of his cheeks. McNally is as kind as he can afford to be in the circumstances. As jeopardy surrounds his son, he too is pushed to his limits.
McGovern is known for polemics but the brilliance of Time is that it manages to show, not tell. There is very little grandstanding here – we are simply presented with the grim realities of our dysfunctional penal system and asked, implicitly, how we would cope. This is television that hands an audacious amount of agency to the viewer: Time is either as brutal or as compassionate as we are willing to make it. Will we ponder both the crime and the punishment? The claustrophobia and horror render the moments of kindness – Cobden teaching fellow inmate Kavanagh (Terence Maynard) to read and write, the emotional succour offered by prison chaplain Marie-Louise (Siobhan Finneran) – almost unbearably poignant. These are tiny pinpricks of light at the end of the tunnel: people doing their best with what they’ve got.
The real redemption is to be found in forgiveness. We’re encouraged to put ourselves in Cobden’s shoes but he is a convicted drink-driver, responsible for a man’s death. His pain is palpable, but so is that of his victim’s family. “You’re in here as punishment, son” says Cobden’s mother June (Sue Johnston) while visiting. “Not for it.” Does Cobden believe that himself? In some ways, this is the heart of McGovern’s polemic. Cobden is already punishing himself. His life sentence will be endured long after his release. His own family is shattered, his initial attempts to reach out to his victim’s family are rebuffed.
Do we want offenders to suffer indignities beyond the loss of their liberty? Are we willing to consider broken people as mendable, or do we just want to throw them away? If it’s the latter, the current system is doing a pretty good job. But might there be another way? Redemption is a long, hard road. Time suggests it’s one worth walking all the same.
