Jimmy McGovern's new drama Unforgivable proves he is TV's best writer

Telegraph

5 days ago

'This is my third time working with Jimmy,' says Anna Friel. 'And I've never finished a script that I've been offered without crying.' She's talking about Jimmy McGovern, the writer of Cracker, Hillsborough and Accused, who for the past four decades has been delivering dramas of great emotional power and moral seriousness, staking a claim as the pre-eminent TV writer of our time. No one writes with such acute insight into the lives of ordinary people – and the hopes and struggles behind closed doors.
From searing dramas, such as Priest, The Lakes and Hearts and Minds, he has gone on to campaigning works such as Common, Anthony and Time, splintering prejudice, demanding justice and a fairer country. In an age in which our screens have been hijacked by cosy crime and fantasy, as viewers escape into stories about the conspicuous wealth of the spoilt rich while everyone else's living standards fall, McGovern never gives up on realism or humanity. That he can still draw audiences to such subjects says everything about his gift for storytelling.
Friel first worked with McGovern on The Street (2006-2009), which explored the lives of people on a single Manchester street, then later on Broken (2017), playing a woman who conceals her mother's death for financial reasons. In his new one-off drama for BBC Two, Unforgivable, the 75-year-old examines paedophilia – a crime of which he was himself a victim as a boy at a Catholic school. Friel plays the sister of a man who has abused his nephew – her son – and hates him for it. 'I'm writing a drama now that's about a sex offender,' McGovern told me himself in 2023. 'And I ask the question, is his sin forgivable, too? Does he not deserve the right to start all over again?'
McGovern's answer to that question left its first preview audience stunned into silence, Friel reports. 'He's a writer that can take your breath away.' McGovern admitted this week that he thought the BBC would say no to the drama, which airs on Thursday, and that he had worried about a backlash from people who may think it offered a sympathetic view of child abusers.
'To be honest with you, it was so controversial, I think the BBC sat on it for a year,' says his long-time executive producer Colin McKeown. 'People always think that if Jimmy drops a betting slip, it will get produced. That isn't true. The journey of all the projects is always difficult, and it's always an awful lot of persuasion.' Much depends on McGovern 'being passionate enough to want to overcome the hurdles', McKeown insists.
The producer has worked with McGovern since his very earliest days in television, writing on Channel 4's Brookside – the Liverpool soap created by Grange Hill supremo Phil Redmond. Redmond recalls they were on the hunt for 'really authentic Scouse voices', and McGovern's name was mentioned – he was Liverpool-born, had had three children in his early twenties, and was working as an English teacher at a city comprehensive; he had also begun writing plays for the Liverpool Playhouse. 'Right away you could see a grasp and understanding of dialogue, passion, a really good narrative,' McKeown, who helped launch Brookside, says.
Redmond met McGovern in a pub – 'the aptly named Slaughter House', he recalls. 'Jimmy was Jimmy. He had that great sense of truth and justice… we talked a bit about the times when none of us had any money, and we survived. I just immediately knew this was a guy who would not be afraid to talk about life the way it is. I liked his humour, his empathy, his compassion. He also had that touch of sentimentality, which he tries to hide.
'I knew as soon as his first script came in that he had something,' he adds.
From 1982 to 1989, McGovern would write 86 episodes of the show, not without clashes. 'Trying to get Jimmy to bottle what he had within the television regulations, that was a challenge,' Redmond says. 'We had a few ding dongs as we went along.' The classic one, he notes, was sparked by McGovern's anger towards the government of Margaret Thatcher. 'He couldn't even mention her name in the room before he'd start shaking.'
McGovern, he recalls, 'wrote this fantastic, impassioned monologue' for one of the characters about the sinking of the Belgrano during the Falklands War in 1982. 'I said, you can't have that... it's too political.' It was too close to a general election, he believed, and could fall foul of electoral regulations. McGovern, though, wouldn't let it lie. 'He'd be doing a comedy [sequence] with [Michael Starke's perennial ne'er-do-well] Sinbad or something, and suddenly Sinbad would say, 'This reminds me of the Falklands War'. My red pen would go through it.'
The saga went on for three years, until the show sent four of its characters away on a trip to Torquay. McGovern had discovered an interesting geographical feature just off the coast. 'And in the screenplay one of them turns round and says, 'D'you know what that rock's called? Thatcher's Rock. … Do you remember the Falklands?'' Redmond laughs. He let him have it. 'That's what I used to love about him: that Scouse tenacity and resilience.'
Friel, of course, also shot to fame on Brookside, joining at 16 as Beth Jordache, a role that encompassed not only British TV's first primetime lesbian kiss but also a prison sentence for Beth, for her part in hiding her abusive father's body under the patio in the show's most talked-about storyline. She and McGovern did not cross paths on the show – he'd departed four years earlier – but she has vivid memories of watching Cracker (his 1993 post-Brookside breakthrough) at home with her parents. 'It's wonderful drama. He's still, to this day, one of my very, very, favourite writers. And I think he's one of Britain's most important writers.' And the wheel has come full circle, she notes. 'My daughter Grace has just turned 20; she's at Bristol University, and one of the things she had to break down as part of the film course was Cracker. It's now on university courses – because it was so groundbreaking.'
Gwyneth Hughes, who wrote the campaigning drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office that aired last January, also remembers 'weeping buckets' watching Cracker while staying with a friend, and her 'helpless shuddering sobs' when Christopher Eccleston's DCI Bilborough was killed at the beginning of the second series. 'I'm a policeman's daughter,' she explains.
McGovern's ability to tap into the feelings of his audience is a key facet of his talent, which he used with unflinching emotional force in his 1996 drama about the Hillsborough disaster, in which 97 Liverpool fans were killed. 'He is so socially aware, it hurts,' says the writer of The Responder, Tony Schumacher, who was later mentored by McGovern.
Again and again, McGovern has taken on dramas around single issues, while putting his characters first, without resorting to proselytising sermons. 'I think what jumps off the page immediately with Jimmy's work is that there's never a wasted word in the script,' Friel says. 'Every single word matters and is used with impact and power. It's always straight to the point,' McKeown describes watching McGovern work as a story editor on the daytime drama series Moving On. 'He scribbled something on a script, then he buggered off to the loo. I had a look at it and he'd just crossed out, 'she tosses and turns in her sleep', and put down, 'sleep won't come'.'
McGovern spent years bringing new writers through on Moving On. It was a long time later when he mentored Schumacher, but the former policeman notes that the English teacher in him was still strong. He would invite the younger man round, make him 'terrible soup' and quiz him at length about his life. Finally, weeks later, after asking him to pitch three ideas for TV shows, McGovern told him his own story should be his first show – 'and that was The Responder,' he says, 'it was my past as a bobby and everything else.
'He changed my life,' he says. McGovern, like Boys from the Blackstuff creator Alan Bleasdale before him, Schumacher believes, has become now 'part of the DNA of the city'.
Redmond, meanwhile, hints at a still untapped reserve: 'Jimmy is brilliant at comedy, you know. I think he's still got a fantastic sitcom in him. He obviously gets it in the stuff he does, but if he sat down and decided to write a pure comedy, it'd be brilliant.'
Unforgivable is on BBC Two on Thursday 24 July at 9pm