'Time' with Sean Bean and Stephen Graham — cast interviews, release date, trailer and our guide to this new prison drama
Sean Bean on Time's Mark Cobden...
Sean Bean plays mild-mannered teacher Mark Cobden who is brought to Craigmore Prison to start a four-year sentence for accidentally killing a man. But prison proves a terrible shock to Mark and life quickly becomes unbearable when he finds himself incarcerated alongside aggressive and disturbed fellow inmates.
Sean says: ‘Time tells you what it’s like for a regular guy to be imprisoned, and the nightmare that is,’ he says. ‘Mark has had an uninteresting, normal life where nothing much happens. But he suddenly finds himself taken to prison and locked up among a frightening bunch of people who are all going through their own suffering, mayhem and paranoia.'
To make matters worse, Mark, who’s estranged from wife Alicia (Nadine Marshall), misses his teenage son terribly, and is plagued with remorse about the crime he’s committed. ‘It’s a thing he can never atone for,’ says Sean. ‘He takes on all the responsibility and all the guilt because that's what he believes he should do.
‘Time is about lots of different facets of being imprisoned and guilt, suffering and inequality. You’ve got a real cauldron of emotions and violence and it’s every man for himself…’
https://www.whattowatch.com/watching-guides/a-quick-guide-to-sean-beans-new-prison-drama-timeBBC One’s Time was written with Sean Bean and Stephen Graham in mind
BBC One prison drama Time was written with series leads Sean Bean and Stephen Graham in mind, according to creator Jimmy McGovern.
The “difficult to watch” series reunites the two actors, who previously co-starred together in a standalone episode of Accused, also penned by McGovern.
Speaking to RadioTimes.com and other press, McGovern said he had Bean and Graham “uppermost” in his thoughts when he wrote their characters: Mark (Bean), a soft-spoken inmate, and Eric (Graham), a principled prison guard.
“I did. I had those two [actors] uppermost in my thoughts all the way through,” he said. “Yeah, absolutely. Because I just think that they’ve got faces you’d die for, you know? Full of life; full of compassion and humanity. I think if you’re going to write about a prison, that’s the kind of thing you need, isn’t it? Compassion, humanity, experience all in the lines of those faces.”
Graham responded, “It’s such an honour for me to even hear that Jimmy’s considering me while he’s writing the character. For me, that’s something that’s beyond my wildest dreams.”
On working with Graham and McGovern again, Bean previously said, “Getting to be involved in a Jimmy McGovern drama again is a real privilege and it will be great to be reunited with Stephen. Mark Cobden is another of Jimmy’s complex and superbly written characters and I am looking forward to bringing him to life on screen.”
https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/time-bbc-written-sean-bean-stephen-graham-newsupdate/Liverpool gets set to take leading role as BBC drama Time airs on BBC One
https://theguideliverpool.com/liverpool-gets-set-to-take-leading-role-as-bbc-drama-time-airs-on-bbc-one/Stephen Graham and Jimmy McGovern on 'Time', and How the Prison-Industrial Complex Fails Us
"Time says something that should be said about the British penal system - it’s not good, I’m afraid. It needs looking at”
Halfway through Time, the new hard-hitting Jimmy McGovern prison drama, one of the guards, Eric McNally (Stephen Graham) is launched upon by a grieving mother outside the jail. Her son - in prison for manslaughter - has died in their care, and she cries out: “You put a seriously ill boy in segregation and that’s when he decided to kill himself!”. McNally replies: “You say he should have been in hospital, but that goes for half the men in this place. They should all be in mental hospitals, not in this nick. But there’s no room for them, so they stay here and we do the best we can.”
It’s a theme that runs at the heart of the often brutal three-part BBC series. The show focuses on two men’s experiences of either side of the system, Graham as the “firm but fair” prison guard, forced into an impossible moral dilemma; and Sean Bean as Mark Cobden, an older teacher serving time, wracked with guilt for killing a man while drink driving and who now has to navigate the ruthless workings and hierarchies of the jail.
But beneath these two men’s stories, we’re also shown a no-holds barred inner workings of the prison industrial complex. It’s a look into the other side of the justice system, what happens to people once we lock them up in the hope of punishment, retribution or rehabilitation. The sad answer is almost always none of those things. What we see are desperate and disturbed men, many with mental health conditions; locked away, growing angrier, forced into violence or gang activity or turning to drugs, which are rife within the prison.
According to a Ministry of Justice report, as of November 2020, there are currently 78,838 prisoners in jail - the number of inmates has almost doubled since 1993 - and this is expected to rise to 98,700 by 2026. Nationwide austerity measures have had a devastating effect on prisons and their inmates. Speaking to Vice, forensic psychologist Kerry Daynes said that more than 70 percent of inmates suffer significant mental health problems while serving time: “Prisoners are an 'out of sight, out of mind' group, and the myth of cushy, holiday-camp British jails is still the stuff of tabloid headlines. When prisons are pressured and punitive rather than rehabilitative, they create more of the very problems they were designed to tackle – post jail-term reoffending rates are at an all-time high.”
The creator of Time, Jimmy McGovern (also the writer behind The Lakes, Hillsborough and Accused) said it’s an issue that’s bothered him since the ‘80s, when he spent time leading writing workshops in prisons. At a launch event for the series, he said: “I was always fascinated by it for all kinds of reasons but the main reason is I always felt ‘there but for the grace of god go I’. I was young and skint once as well, I did a few naughty things but I was extremely lucky.”
As the drama expands to cover the back stories of the other prisoners (featuring highly-charged, emotive turns from Aneurin Barnard, Jack McMullen and Jonathan Harden) we’re given a glimpse into the motivations for their crimes - desperation, poverty, revenge, even “saving face”. In some of the most unfortunate cases, it’s simply making the wrong split-second decision, like Mark getting in his car after a vodka session. McGovern added that we’re all potentially not too far from finding ourselves in a similar situation: “I’ve been close, especially when I was a young man, I was a headcase, I really was. But Time says something that should be said about the British penal system - it’s not good, I’m afraid. It needs looking at.”
Graham agreed: “I think there’s certain elements or things we could do that could put us in those situations, or things which are beyond our control which could put us in those situations.” But, he noted, “There’s those elements of the system itself that can also go against the individual.
“[Series like Time] have that term ‘difficult to watch’. So why is this difficult to watch? It’s because it’s coming into your living room and like Jimmy says, we need to look at the penal system, and certain elements within it.”
As part of Graham’s role, he swatted up on life on the inside through the Channel 4 documentary series Prison: “I just thought it was brilliant, it gave such an insight which was magnificent, it was tearful and [full of] things which our piece goes into and develops, such as people who are in prison who shouldn’t really be, they should be in a mental institution”.
He also spent time with a prison officer of 30 years who gave him further insight on the role of prison guard: “After about two and a half hours with him I came back and I kind of got into character and opened the cell door. I stood in there with my back to the door, opened the flap before I went in. You always make sure you have your back to the door, that you don’t get trapped in the cell. The fella was helping me with other stuff, such as treating each prisoner differently, like a human being, but also having that firm but fair thing that’s also in the script. I soaked it up like a sponge.”
The drama was filmed in and around Liverpool and in a disused prison in Shrewsbury that was painted a colour that was intentionally made to look miserable and oppressive - a greying tone that washes out the actors that the set designer specially created for the job. Graham said: “When that seeps out of the walls, as an actor, I find they’re creating a playground for us to believe we’re in, which is 98 percent of the job for us, to believe where you are. The environment of the prison was so brilliantly done.”
The climax of Time comes to a gripping end and questions the idea of crime and punishment and whether atonement is ever truly possible. It’s something that will have viewers mulling over long after the credits finish. Graham added: “Time is not overtly political, or ramming an opinion down anyone’s throats but if it’s difficult to watch it’s because you’re looking at a society which is represented by yourself.
“Jimmy’s putting a mirror up to society and going, ‘I’m not sure if we’re getting this right?’ It makes you think. And if I can be part of something to make you think for a split second after it, then that’s all I ever wanted to be a part of. Something that says something socially, d’you know what I mean?”
Time starts on BBC One on Sunday June 6 at 9pm.
https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/tv/a36616044/time-stephen-graham-and-jimmy-mcgovern-interview/Time: tough lessons from life inside
Sean Bean, Stephen Graham and Jimmy McGovern on the harsh realities behind the prison drama
Over the past 20 years three working-class men have done more to define and challenge what it is to be a British man on TV than almost anyone else — writer Jimmy McGovern, Stephen Graham and Sean Bean. In Time, McGovern’s new prison drama, they reunite for the first time since Tracie’s Story, a 2012 episode of Accused. Bean plays Mark Cobden, a teacher, husband and father who is jailed for manslaughter and finds the brutality of prison life too much for his soft background. Graham is Eric McNally, the prison officer trying to protect him but putting his family in peril as a result.
Jimmy McGovern As a kid all the hard boys used to talk about Risley prison in Warrington
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/time-tough-lessons-from-life-inside-pj9kpthljBBC One’s Time star Stephen Graham likes that his work is difficult to watch
https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/time-stephen-graham-bbc-difficult-to-watch-newsupdate/7 Questions with… Time actor James Nelson-Joyce
What was it like working with Sean Bean?
Sean’s a gentleman. The mad thing is you forget how old he is, you forget his age. He’s just a gentleman. He walks round on set, he introduces himself to everyone, he’s always there if anyone wants a coffee.
When it came to the scenes, I remember halfway through the shoot, I was stepping on one morning and he just went: “Oh, no – not you again James!” Because basically every scene I’m in, I’m making his life hell.
I just walked away from it with a bit of a man crush on him, if I’m honest.
https://celebrity.land/en/7-questions-with-time-actor-james-nelson-joyce/Time [DVD] [2021] Release date : 5 July 2021
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B096KR49LC/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=time&qid=1622753278&s=dvd&sr=1-2