Time, BBC 1, BBC iPlayer, written by Jimmy McGovern and directed by Lewis Arnold.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p09fs2x4/time-series-1-episode-1

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p09fs2x6/time-series-1-episode-2

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p09fs2x8/time-series-1-episode-3?seriesId=p09fs2tp

Writer Jimmy McGovern guarantees quality, his production company is a must have drama factory for BBC, and his series gets the full marketing treatment and premium billing on Sunday-night telly. Our viewing habits have, of course, changed. I watched the first episode of Time last Sunday and during the week watched the other two episodes on iPlayer. That’s the new norm. Unless it’s Line of Duty, (none of which I’ve watched) expecting upwards of ten million viewers to tune in on a Sunday night is economic and entertainment madness. As consumers we want to watch when we have time. Or so the theory goes.

The Howard League for Prison Reform tells us there are currently 78 037 people in prisons and young offender institutions in England and Wales. David Leslie in Banged Up (published in 2014) tells us there are 120 prisons in England. Scotland has the highest number of people in prison or probation in the UK, and the highest in Europe. Statistics from the Council of Europe, a human rights organisation, show Scotland’s “correctional rate” is 548 people per 100,000 – behind only Russia and Lithuania. The correctional rate for England and Wales was 459, while the Europe-wide median was 318. That’s all the boring stuff nobody much reads. Jimmy McGovern knows this, people want stories they can relate to, and that’s what he’s selling us.

I’m sure I passed an ex-lifer walking down Duntocher Road on Thursday, who had been serving a sentence for two murders. He drunk in my pub, and he’ll be out on license. I talked to another guy whose son is in prison for murder. His date for release was put back because he got involved in a gym brawl. Then there is the ongoing case of a twenty-six-year-old Dalmuir lad, who was said to have been put in a bath of what was described as ‘a corrosive substance’, and later died. The number of murderers on license has doubled in the past five years. The Probation Service was privatised and renationalised because it was in such a colossal failure that couldn’t be ignored even by Tory scum.  But here’s the rub, our prisons are in a permanent state of siege and overcrowding. Yet crime levels are generally falling.  I live in a very quiet bit of Dalmuir with other old folk, nothing much happens, and that’s the way I like it. I don’t want drama.

Jimmy McGovern’s day job (most writers’ task) is not just making something happen, but to make things worse. So here we have the new fish, Mark Cobden (Sean Bean) sent to prison. He’s killed somebody, after drink driving. Is he mad, bad, or sad?

Well, he’s remorseful, but not really bad, after all he’s a middle-class schoolteacher and most prisoner are working class and come from deprived backgrounds (or ex-school teacher, McGovern had Sean Bean dress up at night as a woman and recite The Lady of Shallot [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45359/the-lady-of-shalott-1832] to his pupils in a previous production, which is a poetry crime in extremis, so they have previous).

The twin strand of the storyline has prison officer Eric McNally (Stephen Graham) on the wing that Mark Cobden is imprisoned. ‘You were hard but fair,’ a former inmate tells him when he’s picking up drugs. But that’s to jump ahead.

Then you have the mad, Bernard (Aneurin Barnard). ‘Top bunk or bottom?’ Mark Cobden asks when he’s introduced to his new cellmate. Bernard’s body is covered in scars. He cuts himself, self-harms and is dragged away to the hospital wing regularly. He’s sick in the head. Prison officer McNally tells his mum, he’s sorry about what happened, but they were doing the best they could. The truth was most of the folk in prison were sick in the head. She doesn’t care. She only cares about her son.

In the preface to David Leslie’s Banged Up, he explains prisoner’s crimes range from the farcical to the terrible, but prisoners have one thing in common. Time. How to beat the boredom of being locked up 23 out of 24 hours, how to do time. Boredom is a killer. Drugs and bootleg booze a welcome relief. Cobden finds himself being stuck in his cell a bit of relief (like many others), because he’s been bullied by Johno (James Nelson Joyce). He steals his grub. Jumps in front of him in the queue for phones. And threatens to set his feet on fire with turpentine. He’s already flung a kettle of boiling water and added sugar so it sticks to a fellow prisoner he calls a grass. Cobden hides in his cell as a coping strategy.

The local Glaswegian kingpin on the block tells him that ‘his life will be hell’ until he hits back. Prison officer McNally’s life is already hell. His son is in a Young Offender’s and he’s told he’ll be assaulted unless McNally brings in stuff to the prison. McNally arranges with his governor for his son to be ghosted to another institution. But he’s sent a reminder that didn’t work. McNally isn’t trying to protect himself, but his son, and family. Hard choices.

Jimmy McGovern knows how to save face. Stevie (Dean Fagan) for example is Cobden’s new cell mate. And as part of retributive justice is allowed to tell his story to the victim’s parents. A lad he stabbed in a brawl. McGovern allows us to look at it in two ways. Stevie admits he was skint and took a drink from the man he murder’s pint, but he didn’t have enough money to buy him another. He’s in the sad category, but to save face he challenged him to fight. Took a hammering and stabbed him. It makes the convoluted sense that anyone living in a working-class district well understands.

Prisoners worst enemies are themselves is the message McGovern pitches again and again. And he’s right. But it’s not a vote winner. Locking so many people up, especially women makes no sense either economically (McGovern gets in the cost by admitting for every prisoner inside there’s an administrator’s wage being paid, and of course, added profit for private companies added as we ape the American model) or morally. Next to wrapping yourself in the flag, floggings and beating of prisoner is a sure way to get yourself elected and stay elected. The Honourable Margaret Thatcher, for example, favoured hanging and corporal punishment. Johnson favours whatever makes him sound less like the dim-witted pantomime horse he really is. Back to the drama. Yeh, worth watching. McGovern, as we expect, hits all the right beats in the right way and asks question of what we mean by atonement, and if such a thing as justice is possible outside The Book of Job?   

Adam Kay (2017) This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor.

I loved this book. It should really be read in conjunction with Jed Mercurio’s debut novel Bodies. Yeh, that Jed Mercurio that writes scripts for the BBC, Bodies and Line of Duty. Adam Kay is following a similar trajectory, half way between the drama of Jed Mercurio and the upbeat chortleness of Harry Hill. You’re probably thinking why should the tax payer should spend all that money training junior doctors, indirectly subsidising the Australian and Canadian health services, which is bad enough, but now it’s a straightforward path –albeit a long medical apprenticeship—to write for the BBC.   The answer is going to hurt.

Simply, we are screwing the NHS into the ground and junior medics are on the front line. That’s always been the case, but the pressure is more intense. Aneurin Bevin talked about needing ‘to stuff the consultant’s mouths with gold’ in order to get a National Health Service. Consultants then were treated as a rung below God. Not much has changed. In a note Kay sent to a GP, 21^st October 2010,  as a Registrar in Obstetrics and Gynaecology wrote, ‘if  you have any questions whatsoever, please do not contact me.’ It was a typo, what he meant to say was don’t hesitate to contact me, but it worked. The GP didn’t contact him. Kay had this to say about Prof Carrow, theoretically ‘on call for the labour ward.’ But ‘as much use as having a cardboard cutout of Cher’. ‘You don’t see Professor Carrrow during the day, you don’t phone him at night.’ Like a mighty liner navigated by junior staff, which changes every six months, when they change secondment, they learn on the job by that old maxim, see one, do one, teach one. Kay started 14 years earlier as a fresh-faced student and was a veteran of muddling through. So when Prof  Carrow appeared during the day Kay wondered what the occasion was. No doubt when David Cameron’s children were being treated there would have been a consultant monitoring every NHS bed the Prime Minister passed as there was for an extremely wealthy Saudi family. Here it was quite simple. A documentary camera crew was following behind Prof Carrow as he did a ward round. On camera Prof Carrow tells Dr Kay, ‘Sounds like you’ve got it under control Adam. But if you’ve any problems at all during the night, just call me.’ When the camera crew stop recording he acts more like the typical consultant, telling Adam, ‘Obviously, don’t.’

Kay, ad-libs, that one of the problems he faces is that patients don’t really see doctors are being human. His points about low pay and overwork are valid. He looks to his cohort, people he went to school with making six-figure salaries, while the parking meter in the hospital grounds makes more money than him. He suffers burnout (post-traumatic stress) when one of his patients dies. He’s not god, only human and a doctor advises him by the time he’s finished there’ll be a bus full of patients, who have died on your watch. It’s the nature of the beast. He moans about having to take a sideways or backwards step and retrain in another speciality. It would mean a loss of income.

That’s where I’ve less sympathy with Kay. Life seems sharper and speedy when you’re younger and full of seismic spasms, but it recedes like male-pattern baldness no matter how you try. Both his parents are doctors and he tells us his sister has accepted a place in a medical school, but let’s not forget middle-class parents,   getting their kids into medical school is a status thing and a mercenary operation that would make King Herod look like a lightweight.  Working class kids have more chance of playing for Barcelona than being a junior doctor. The moneyed middle-class expropriation of the means of education is a given without the need for banner waving, what Herbert Marcuse called ‘repressive tolerance’.

No meritocracy here. Kay jokes the ideal entry for medical school has A grades and plays rugby, ideal candidates such as Harold Shipman.  I’ll not bother googling how much a senior registrar gets paid. Kay should look below him, try living on the split shifts and gig economy of the hospital cleaners. His joke about the public not thinking doctors are human applies equally to those that have nothing and can expect not much more. Grenfell Towers taught us that. The NHS is staffed by the low paid, so I’m not buying into that the parking meter in the car park makes more money, poor me, I’m skint argument.

His open letter to The Secretary of State for Health is a walk in my shoes argument, ‘you, or your successor should have to work alongside junior doctors’. He makes an analogy ‘If the President wanted to press the big red button and kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, then first he’d have to take a butcher’s knife and dig it out of a volunteer’s chest himself; so that he realizes what death means first-hand, and understand the implications of his actions.’

Absolutely, but the moron’s moron in the White House isn’t really like that. He’s got flunkeys to do that kind of thing. Draft dodger Trump guilty of having a spurious bone spur on one of his feet and now with the biggest arsenal in human history, we have a spurious President Tweeting policy on the hoof. A no-brainer, reality is no obstacle to his egotistical whims. A straight choice between blowing up thirty million Koreans and starting an apocalyptical nuclear winter or being seen as being a weak-fall guy that doesn’t get bogged down in too much (or any) detail, then it’s goodbye world.

Poor people don’t really exist for him and his ilk. The NHS is an aberration and abomination because it doesn’t work for them. Nicholas Timmins wonderful book The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State sums it up, the Americans used to run to us and try and work out how through cooperation and not competition we could provide such an efficient and low-cost service, now we run to America and look at  model that doesn’t work. Cannot solve the problems they create and in the hunt for revenues calls for more of the same, more privatisation, more trickledown economics and taking money from the poorest in society and gifting it to the richest. State subsidies as opposed to handouts for the poor. Adam Kay has nailed it, privatisation is a sham. It costs around £15 000 to deliver a child in the private sector, but when something goes wrong they use public resources. Let’s call it public theft by private means that enrich the already wealthy. That makes me mad. I’m not laughing.

Filth, Film4, 10.40pm (Jon S Baird 2013)

I didn’t watch this film all the way through. I got to the bit where Detective Sergeant, Bruce Robertson, (James McAvoy) of Lothian Police force looks in the mirror and sees the image of a pig.  Pig, filth, black comedy. Gettit? I turned the telly over and watched the end of the Liverpool game. That was exciting. The truth is I don’t know what truth is. But I don’t really need to see the end of the film to know what happens. Writers have a tendency to write the same thing over and over and over again. Some of them get rather good at it. They win prizes, they win awards, they become rich. Irvine Welsh is I guess a rich man (compared to me most men are rich, those that aren’t tend to shop at the foodbank). This film had four different blocks of producers flashing up on screen flinging money at the same old, same old shite.

Let’s go back to Trainspotting. ‘The sweat was lashing oafay Sick Boy; he was trembling…Ah tried to keep ma attention oan the Jean-Claude Van Damme video.’

Drug taking [tick]

Violence [tick]

Sex [tick]

Black comedy, what the fuck does that mean, yah stupid radge cunt? Just fuck off out of my face [visage] or I’ll stick the heid on yeh.

There was something gallus about Trainspotting. Irvine Welsh knows his music and he knows his drugs and he knows he’s slightly dyslexic and he knows he’ll not get published because nobody publishes shite in the common argot of arsehole from the lowest place on the planet, a junkies arse.

So Mark Renton/Rentboy has got his hit, but it’s not injectable form he’d hoped, but an opium suppsitory. Anyone that had seen the film knows what happens to Ewan MacGregor next. ‘Ah whip oaf my keks and sit on the wet porcelain shunky. An empty my guts, feeling as if everything; bowel, stomach, intestines, spleen, liver, kidneys, heart, lungs and fucking brains are aw falling through my arsehole intae the bowl.’

It’s not often that the film is better than the book. Ben Hur is an epic example of that. I’d guess Trainspotting the film is better because Irvine Welsh wasn’t the screenwriter. In Filth, there’s a little in-joke the Chief Inspector doesn’t do any police work because he’s too busy in his office writing screen plays. Gettit? Shite.

Trainspotting was a phenomena and cash cow.  Ewan McGregor got to fucking play with lightsabers in Star Wars and the force was with him and to a lesser extent Robbie Carlyle is Begbie and Kelly McDonald is Kelly McDonald. Peter Mullan was a bit part player in the film but no plastic bronze medal, Hollywood for him too. Closer to home Spud, Ewen Bremmer, got to play a cop in Line of Duty. Gail, Shirley Henderson, seems to be in every Irvine Welsh production since then. In Filth, she’s not so much an object of lust, but an object of dirty phone calls from Detective Sergeant Robinson that has been called into to deal with the dirty phone calls, and dear old Shirley Henderson, who plays the same slightly deranged character in each play/film/movie is called to revel in the lust and take the sting out of it by rolling in the dirty with the dirty cunt that’s phoning her and thereby unmanning the man. Gettit. Shite. I’ve not mentioned Sick Boy yet, Jonny Lee Miller. Sick Boy in Trainspotting ‘It seemed, for women, that fucking was just something you did wi Sick Boy, like talking of drinking tea wi other punters’. Sick Boy was played by Jonny Lee Miller. And as we all know his cast off, and former spouse was Angelina Jolie. What a brilliant piece of casting by Danny Boyle. But it was Trainspotting rather than the critically acclaimed Shallow Grave that made his reputation.

Now we’re getting a Trainspotting 2. Shite. Back to Filth. No, I’ll not bother. You watch it if you want. But if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.