Time - Creating Series 3

Time returns for its third series on Sunday 11th October

The third series is written by Jimmy McGovern together with Samuel Bailey and focuses on a Young Offenders' Institution.

Prison Chaplain Marie-Louise (Siobhan Finneran) comes to the young offender institution having lost her faith. When tragedy strikes in the prison, Marie-Louise clashes with veteran officer Bailey (David Tennant), a man in the midst of his own crisis. Bailey knows more about the circumstances that led to this major incident – but will he come clean before the guilt gets too much?

Meanwhile, two teenage young offenders, Peter (Ollie McNulty) and James (Louis McCartney), struggle through the terrifying first weeks and months of their incarceration. Can James ever face his broken parents after an unforgivable act of violence and will Peter tell the truth about the death of an innocent man, or does family loyalty mean more? An unlikely friendship between them looks to shift the trajectory of their futures, but in an increasingly unstable environment, is change ever possible?

We spoke to Samuel Bailey about co-writing the series alongside the legendary Jimmy McGovern.

How did you find the process of writing with Jimmy McGovern on Time Series 3?

Writing with Jimmy McGovern was a bit of a dream for me, really. He's a writer who I've always looked up to.  I watched so many of his programs growing up, Cracker, The Street and Hillsborough, so many. When the opportunity to work with him came about, I absolutely jumped at it and the process has been great.

We've been working on Time (Series 3) for probably 18 months, from initial conversations to storylining, outlining, to then writing the scripts, and then getting everyone involved and shooting it.  We've had a good working relationship.  

Jimmy wrote the first drafts of the first and third episodes, and then I wrote the first draft of the second episode, and then we sort of passed it all back and forth between each other.

Generally, we’d work remotely and then we'd meet up in Liverpool every few weeks to have a bit of a chat in person about how we were all feeling. Jimmy took the lead on a lot of David Tennant and Siobhan Finneran's stories and similarly, you know, I took a lead on some of the boys’ scenes, but again, with Jimmy contributing back and forth. It felt like quite a shared process. A great collaboration. I couldn't have asked for a better first experience of working on a TV show.

What was it about the world and story of Time Series 3 that you found exciting to write about?

The world of young offenders institutions is something I've written about before. I wrote a play called Shook about 6 years ago, which is set in the same environment. So, to come back to it was something that I was always very interested in doing. I think it's an environment that we don't see a huge amount of, either in the theatre or on screen.

We've seen a lot of things set in prisons, but I don't think we've seen a lot of stuff on young offenders, and they are quite different. You know, for one, these are young people, these are children, essentially. So there are different questions that you need to pose when you're interrogating an environment like that. There's something about examining young men at this stage in their life that is very exciting.

They are young men in crisis, and they are young men who've come from very difficult backgrounds, but they are also full of hope and potential and hopefully we've managed to capture some of that. The Young Offenders Institutions, the YOIs, are places that most people will never set foot in, and will never go, and will never have contact with so, as a place, it is quite exciting to get to represent it a little bit.

Is there a particular character you enjoyed writing for?

So Peter (played by Ollie McNulty - read an interview), the character has just come into prison with his cousin, and two of their other friends.  He also has a small baby on the outside, and ‘kids with kids’ is a theme that I've looked at before. I think it's a really interesting way of examining that cycle of how things can repeat and, certainly in the play that I wrote, that was a big theme.

Writing for Peter, and writing for Toby (Paul Smith Junior), and writing that group of lads were a group of characters I loved writing for. Going into production after the read through was so fun, because they felt like this unit of kids who've known each other since they were seven or eight years old, and are really tight. So that was great. They were great fun to write for.

James (Louis McCartney - read an interview) is an interesting character. He's got a very interesting voice.  He's a real motor mouth and doesn't varnish his opinions of what he thinks of the prison and the people who work within it. His storyline is quite dark and he's one of these young men who, you know, it's all the bravado and he's got this front because he doesn't want to face the reality of what he's done. A difficult but interesting tension to play with that character as well.

What was the most challenging part of writing the series for you?

One of the most challenging parts was trying to find some of the light in it, and try and find some of the areas where we could just have a bit of warmth and a bit of connection, so that it's not all high drama, high conflict. When we went to visit prisons and Young Offender Institutions, the boys that we met were full of impulsive jokes and a lot of them were very charming.

Finding the light still proved difficult because, one of the things that we wanted to interrogate, was the fact that a lot of these young men are being held in what are called ‘bubbles’. This started happening in COVID and is now, unfortunately, quite a big factor in these prisons where young men are being kept in social groups of maybe only two or three. They will be the only people that they're allowed to see throughout their entire time and because these young men are single celled as well - they're not allowed to share a cell with anyone because they're under the age of 18 - it means they're spending an enormous amount of time either on their own or in very small social groups.

That was something we wanted to explore, and wanted to shine a light on, so that people can see that that is what's happening, and maybe that shouldn't be the case. But, again, trying to find those spaces where there's interaction and life going on and we see a little bit of softness, rather than just the hard-edged was trickier.  I mean, these are young men who are continually on the lookout or on the defensive, because they're worried about their physical safety. So those moments where they can open up and be vulnerable to other inmates, especially ones they don't know can be few and far between.  Hopefully we found spaces so you can really connect with those characters, and that you can really root for them as well, to an extent.

What do you think was the most important thing you learned from the process of writing on Time, Series 3?

I've learned an enormous amount from Jimmy, also from Andrew Morrissey, Michael Parke and Molly Rees (BBC Studios Fiction), who were the development team that we work with, who were all just brilliant, brilliant at their jobs. This wouldn't be anywhere close to what it is without them. 

I came into this from a theatre background and I think one of the things I learned on quite early from Jimmy is how much TV swallows up story. I'd come into a room and I'd have two or three - what I thought would be great ideas for us to have for half an episode or something - and Jimmy's got such a great brain for how an idea translates into scenes and the visual. So he'd be like, "Yeah, great. Okay, that's two scenes. What happens after that?" And I'd not thought that far through! In theatre, you're dealing with less story just by the format of what it is, so that was a steep learning curve.  Hopefully, I got there fairly quickly and started to realise how much you actually needed to keep that story going.

One of the other things that I've learned from Jimmy that I will take forward is, when we went round to the prisons, he was so instinctive and intuitive about where there was a story, when to press for the truth, and of what someone was talking around, and when to back off. He had such a good instinct for these young men. 

What Jimmy wants to do is tell an authentic story and something as close to the truth as possible.  I was far too polite when I went in there, being like, "oh, okay, no, don't worry about it, you don't have to chat" but Jimmy would push a little bit sometimes in a completely safe way and ultimately, those boys did want to share and did want to talk about their experiences and sometimes he would get this bit of information that would just unlock something, and just meant that we could do our job so much better, and represent this world that they live in that we don't know anything about personally. Talking to those boys and making sure that we represent their stories truthfully was priority number one, and I've learned that from Jimmy.

You do sort of forget that writing’s not just you with a laptop in your office, or on the end of your bed, or wherever you can find a space to write. It's so important, if you're writing about an environment that you don't know, or a demographic of people you don't know, to get out there and talk to people and find out what their experiences are so that you represent it as accurately and as truthfully as possible.

Getting to do that with Jimmy and have access to YOIs and getting to meet some of those young men and talk to them and hear their stories and their lives and where they come from and what they wanted to do going forward was an experience I won't forget. I'm just very glad to have been a part of it.

All episodes of Time series three will be available on BBC iPlayer from 6am on Sunday 11 October, with episode one airing at 9pm on BBC One.