Jimmy McGovern

A woman sits beside a hospital bed, making tea for her husband and trying to keep her face straight, because she was over the road with another man when the car hit her daughter. That is Jane Horrocks in the first hour of The Street (2006), and it is McGovern's method whole: one ordinary household, one wrong turn, sixty minutes with no way back. Almost nothing is said. We were wrecked by it, and it was Horrocks doing so little, not the drip or the monitors, that did the damage.

He learned the trade on Brookside, writing for it from 1982 to 1989 after years as a labourer, a bus conductor and a teacher, and the people in his scripts have stayed the people he once worked beside: working-class, northern, and in trouble. Cracker (1993) made his name and is still the best thing we have from him, a crime series built around Robbie Coltrane's Fitz, a man written to irritate and never smoothed over for our comfort. Single dramas followed, Priest (1994) and Hillsborough (1996), the second made with the help of the families of the dead. Then came The Lakes (1997), The Street, Accused (2010), Moving On (2009) and Time (2021), a prison drama about punishment and what an institution does to the people locked inside it.

What interests him is the distance between the law and justice, and the anthology shape, one household and out, has suited him better than it has any right to. He shares the writing more than his reputation suggests, with Paul Abbott and Ted Whitehead on Cracker and Daniel Brocklehurst, Marc Pye and Alice Nutter on The Street, and the seams barely show. Sean Bean has worked with him three times. His own summary of the job is "simplicity of narrative, complexity of character", and on his best days that is exactly what is on screen.

The flaw is that he has never trusted an audience to draw its own conclusion when a character could stand up and draw it for them. The Street has a speech, delivered straight and at length, that tells us what the hour had already shown, and Cracker has stretches where Fitz's excesses are demonstrated one more time as though repetition were revelation. Some critics file him as an issue writer rather than a formal one, and he would probably not argue; the form is a postcard and the argument is the point.

The other trouble is the laughter, or its absence. Real people in real grief make bad jokes at the worst moment, and The Street will not let its Mancunians do it, so six hours of bad news arrive without relief. Start with Cracker, then take The Street an hour at a time, and forgive the speeches. The kitchen scenes before them are why you came.