Time: David Tennant and Siobhan Finneran are stellar in this horrifying and exceptional TV drama

Jimmy McGovern’s grab-you-by-the-throat prison show is back and it could hardly be more urgent, prescient or excellent.

Brace yourself though … Bake Off it is not It takes a lot to drag me away from comfort TV in the autumn.

Blame the shrinking hours of light or the apocalyptic news cycle but the closest thing I like to get to televisual trauma in October is watching comedians get into their own graves in The Celebrity Traitors.

I doubt I’m alone.

I don’t want to psychoanalyse the British public but I’d take a punt that collectively we are just about capable right now of looking at Josh Widdicombe trying to find a purpose next to Emma Willis on the Strictly dancefloor (and reportedly , even that’s a struggle).

Enter legendary Jimmy McGovern with a new series of the Bafta-winning prison drama Time (Sunday, 9pm, BBC One) to drag the nation out of its Bake Off-related coma.

Having already covered the devastation of men’s and women’s prisons in the first two series, the good news is that McGovern and co-writer Samuel Bailey’s trilogy surely can’t get any more distressing.

The new episodes will be set in * checks notes* a youth offending institution for boys.

OK great.

It’s about children in prison.

Thank you, Jimmy! I hope you’re happy! No one else is going to be.

Continue reading...