Time
BBC1

Jimmy McGovern’s new drama series is pretty well the best thing on television at the moment. Time has all the problems that tend to recur in a McGovern drama – the tendency to sentimentality and occasional preachiness, for example – but all the hallmarks of McGovern brilliance are there too. The plot is led by the characters; it has the courage to go deep into ordinary lives and predicaments; and the cast give ­performances that dig so deep that you are left wondering how they ever re-emerged.

Time, as the title suggests, is about prison. Sean Bean (inset, with Stephen Graham) is a schoolteacher, Mark Cobden, sent down for four years for killing a cyclist while drink-driving. Graham plays a prison officer with an impeccable record who’s been leant on by organised criminals to bring drugs to Mark’s fellow inmates in order to protect his own son, imprisoned elsewhere, from harm.