Riveting and heart-wrenching: BBC1’s Time reviewed

‘Only with women’ is a phrase used by more cynical TV types for a show that takes something that’s been done before with men, but by changing the gender of the characters can pose as ground-breaking. It sprang to mind this week when both of BBC1’s big new dramas unblushingly took the only-with-women approach; the problem for the cynics being that the programmes themselves are rather good.

Or, in the case of Time, overwhelmingly so. Jimmy McGovern’s original 2021 series – a heart-wrenchingly effective portrait of life in a male prison – deservedly won a Bafta. Now he’s back to give us a heart-wrenchingly effective portrait of life in a female one.

Sunday’s episode began with a standard chaotic-family-breakfast scene, as Orla (Jodie Whittaker) buttered toast like a good ’un and made sure that her children had their PE kits. But she was next shown in a police van going to HMP Carlingford, where she’d been sentenced for six months for ‘fiddling the lecky’.

From what we see here, the set-up in women’s prisons is markedly less brutal than in men’s, with 24-hour access to a kitchen and TV lounge. The same, however, can’t be said of McGovern’s writing. Certainly, any viewers wondering if he might go a little gentler here – the dramatic equivalent of bowling underarm to the ladies – didn’t have to wonder for long.

Because she hadn’t expected that her court appearance would lead to jail, Orla didn’t have the sanitary products that she soon vividly needed. Shorn of her phone and the numbers in it, she had little choice but to leave her children with her alcoholic mother: a choice that duly ended with them being taken into care.

Meanwhile, she met her two cell mates.