The third series of Jimmy McGovern’s Bafta-winning prison drama Time shifts its focus to a young offender institution (YOI), with David Tennant joining the cast as a long-serving prison officer — and the writer has suggested it could be the programme’s final run.
McGovern said the stories depicted in a YOI are ones that would inevitably occur there, describing institutions holding 17-year-olds full of energy, hormones and bravado as a likely flashpoint. He added that the environment must be extremely difficult to manage.
After two series examining men’s and women’s prisons, the writer has turned to what the article describes as potentially the most distressing setting of all, populated by characters whose lives have been shaped by poor decisions, un directed rage and unrealised potential at a very vulnerable age.
The fictional establishment, HMP Alderwick, was largely created in a former school just outside Belfast, in Downpatrick, where strip-lit rooms doubled as gated corridors, a reception area, visiting rooms, a staff room and a chapel. Further scenes were filmed at the former HMP Belfast, now known as Crumlin Road Gaol, and at HMP Hydebank Wood, an active young offender centre.
Among Alderwick’s teenage inmates are James, played by Louis McCartney, who is estranged from his parents following an apparently unforgivable act; Peter, played by Ollie McNulty, one of five young people on remand over the killing of an innocent man; and Christopher, played by Chukwubuikem Molokwu, whose Kenyan mother has not seen him since he was four. Christopher’s stammer, a condition McGovern also has, combined with his mother’s lack of English, makes communication between them close to impossible.
Siobhan Finneran returns as chaplain Marie-Louise, the moral centre of all three series, who is now enduring a crisis of faith after her affair with a Catholic priest ended abruptly. Finneran, who describes herself as a very lapsed Catholic, said the bishop sent the priest away and told Marie-Louise to grow up. The character cannot understand why the bishop could not have been kinder or more Christian, but is determined not to be judgmental and to devote herself to supporting the young inmates.
Tennant said he jumped at the chance to work with McGovern, whom he called the guv’nor, because the writer creates human, inconsistent and believable characters. He described Bailey as competent at his job, a role that supplies routine but has become a rut, and said the character is forced to examine his professional position and, after his wife leaves him, his personal life.
According to Tennant, Bailey has grown thoroughly disillusioned after 35 years in the service. He once felt respect and enthusiasm for the work, but believes prisons now exist mainly to hold young men in place and keep them out of sight rather than to rehabilitate them. The officer recalls a time when there was education, a library and training, and laments that staffing and opportunities are now insufficient.
In one scene, Bailey is informed that the young men must stay locked up all day because of staff shortages, and warns that they will be furious. McGovern said measures once used as a last resort — 23-hour bang-ups and keep-aparts, which prevent groups from particular postcodes from mixing — have been used increasingly often since Covid. He argued the pandemic gave institutions a convenient reason to keep children confined for longer, but that people must be allowed to associate or nothing will improve.
Molokwu, for whom this is a first acting job, said filming in a real prison changed his thinking about why people end up in jail and taught him not to judge by appearances. He noted that he and his character share a background of moving from a country with fewer opportunities — Kenya for Christopher, Nigeria for him — to one with more, but said the difference is that he has a healthy lifestyle and a loving family, while Christopher remains a good-hearted but vulnerable young person shaped by growing up in care with a stammer.
McCartney, a Tony nominee for Stranger Things: The First Shadow and the exception among the newcomers, said the role affected him deeply. Sitting in a freezing cell after the door was locked, with family photographs and reminders of trips around him, he found himself thinking about how recently these young people might have been at a family dinner. He said he and the other young actors concluded they would not survive a single day in such a place.
McGovern recounted being shown into the room of a young man of about 17 or 18 who had recently received a life sentence for murder. He described the man as devastated, with every flicker crushed out of him, and said the atmosphere shifted briefly when the writer crouched to his eye level rather than standing over him. Asked what it was like there, the young man glanced around at officers before answering cautiously. McGovern said the exchange moved him greatly.
Discussing the competition for public funding, McGovern noted that resources are always found for war and asked why they cannot be found for prisons. Tennant acknowledged the ease of arguing that money should go to schools or the NHS instead, and that prisoners are often seen as having made their own beds. He argued, however, that a civilised society aspires to help its most damaged members, and that the responsibility is not merely to lock people away but to help them find a better future — especially young men, who have more potential for a life lived well.
McGovern remains undaunted by the further decline of the Prison Service since Time’s first series in 2021. His Bafta-winning 1996 drama Hillsborough reignited a campaign for justice and helped shift blame from fans to police, and the so-called Hillsborough law, intended to prevent institutional cover-ups, is now heading for the statute books. McGovern said he hopes Andy Burnham, whom he knows through the Hillsborough campaign and who introduced the bill in 2017, will bring about the changes needed in the prison system. He also argued that institutions built around principles such as justice, Christian faith or solidarity tend to be defended at the expense of the principle that founded them, and that inside a YOI the truth often goes untold for fear of the trouble it would cause.
This article was amended on 9 October 2026. It has been 30 years since the television film Hillsborough, not 20 as an earlier version said.
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