The BBC's Unforgivable asks if we can ever forgive a child sex offender

Telegraph

24-07-2025

Warning: contains spoilers
It must be galling for the BBC to be reminded that it didn't make Adolescence. Four months post-release and it's still creating news: as Netflix's most watched show of the year with 145 million views, or picking up 13 Emmy nominations. The closest thing the BBC can offer is Unforgivable (BBC Two), a new one-off drama from Jimmy McGovern that mines a similar seam of social realism, and is also about a family coming to terms with one of them committing a terrible crime.
As with all of McGovern's work, it is well written and impeccably acted. Those are the two elements on which Unforgivable needs to sell itself, because nobody thinks, 'A drama about a man who sexually abused his nephew? Must sit down to watch that.'
Maybe that's why it's buried on BBC2 on a Thursday night. Also, there isn't much of a plot. It's more a study of a family torn apart. They are related both to the abuser and the victim, and how do they navigate that? For Anna (Anna Friel), it's straightforward. Her brother abused her son. She will never forgive him. She has been left to pick up the pieces: her boy, Tom (Austin Haynes) has stopped speaking since the abuse, save for 'yes' and 'no'.
Anna, a single mum, has to homeschool him while also trying to hold down a job on the supermarket tills. Her mum has just died, so she is grieving and also supporting her newly-widowed dad (David Threlfall). It's a lot. Friel gives the best performance of her career, managing to make her lines sound improvised even though they're not. 'I'm a lousy mother who's doing the best I can,' she tells her kids.
The real focus, though, is on the perpetrator. Joe (Bobby Schofield) is released from prison near the start of the drama. He moves to a hostel run by an ex-nun, played with unnerving stillness by Anna Maxwell Martin. He hates himself, but feels more guilty about the pain he caused his mother than the damage he did to Tom. It emerges, via therapy, that Joe was abused himself by a predatory football coach. This complicates things. Joe is both the abuser and the abused. That is true in many real-life cases, although a fellow victim of the coach points out that he was abused too but didn't turn out to be a 'nonce'. It's not a given.
It's an unpalatable truth that the vast majority of children who are abused have been preyed upon by someone they know, many of them family members. McGovern isn't afraid to go there, but he also goes further by asking us if we can feel compassion for Joe. At times, this seems too big an ask, even if Schofield is impressive in scenes where the tears flow. Tom, by contrast, is a mute presence; we understand that this is a response to trauma – even if his mum, oddly, asks if he's doing it for attention or a bet – but rendering him voiceless feels unfair. Perhaps that's deliberate. Anna complains bitterly that she has been unable to get child mental health support for Tom, because the system is overloaded, yet Joe has therapy on tap.
The ending is too neat, as if McGovern was told he needed to wrap it up on a positive note. Until that point, though, it's a thought-provoking piece on a subject that most writers would avoid.