Life, Series 1, 2 & 3, BBC, BBCiPlayer, Jimmy McGovern (writer and creator) and Helen Black, Director Andrea Harkin, Jimmy McGovern and Samuel Bailey, Director Paul Whittington.

Posted by celticman on Tue, 20 Oct 2026

Jimmy McGovern is a writer. Helen Black and Samuel Bailey are writers too. But if Black and Bailey had approached the BBC with an idea about a drama series focusing on life inside a men’s, women’s and young offender’s institution with several recognisable stars such as Sean Bean and Stephen Graham, Orla O’Riordan, David Tennant and Ollie McNutty. With Siobhan Finneran as Marie-Louise O'Dell playing a prison chaplain that has lost her faith and whose role straddles the three different institutions and also the three series, we know what the answer from the BBC would be if anyone other than Jimmy McGovern had pitched such an idea.

Whose side are you on?

We know Jimmy McGovern writers about working-class life. He’s on our side. I mean the working class. He sets his stall early in Series Two. A Prison Officer tells Jodie Whittaker as Orla O'Riordan to call her ‘Ma’m’ and not ‘Love’. O’Riordan’s inside for not paying her ‘leccy bill’. It’s her first time, the Prison Officer tells her she’ll meet the nicest people inside. They include a pregnant junkie and a mother convicted of infanticide who she shares a cell with. Happy families they are not. Yet in women’s prison, in particular, the ideas of such families, and children, in particular, are deified.

Addiction. Sisterhood and female violence interweave with motherhood and separation in a dance in which nobody much knows the next step. But that doesn’t just reside in female prisons or men's, or young offenders’ institutions.

David Tennent has come a long way since Dr Who. Senior Prison Officer Bobby Bailey’s accent takes him back to his Scottish roots. His job in a Young Offenders' is his life. But he gets to go home at night. He’s married to another screw, but she’s screwing somebody else and leaving him. Sure Bailey likes a drink. That’s just who he is. He doesn’t miss his work or screw up.

When others do, he’s got to decide whether to cover their arse and protect the institution? Or do the right thing, especially since it’s led to the death of a young inmate that could and should have been avoided. Marie-Louise O'Dell loss of faith, in comparison isn’t up to much nick.

Ray Winston’s character, Carlin, in the prison borstal drama Scum, 1979, asks two questions that remain ongoing: ‘Where’s you tool?... And who’s the daddy now?’

The daddy of all answers is to cut foreign aid and build more prisons.

What planet are you on?

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