Writer Jimmy McGovern has penned an original 90 minute drama for the BBC, and details have been released. More here.
The BBC has announced that a new, feature-length drama written by Jimmy McGovern is in production. Currently untitled, the new film is “set and filmed in Liverpool. The fictional drama centres around the Mitchell family who are dealing with the devastating aftermath of an act of abuse, and the knowledge that it was perpetrated by a member of their own family who, after serving his sentence, has just been released from prison”.
Anna Friel, who was BAFTA-nominated for her previous work with Jimmy McGovern in Broken, leads the cast alongside Bobby Schofield, Anna Maxwell Martin, David Threlfall and Mark Womack.
Julia Ford is directing.
McGovern said “I can’t believe the cast and crew that have been assembled for this production. It’s a challenging film, yes, but I can’t wait for it to be shown”.
Lindsay Salt, Director of BBC Drama, said “Jimmy McGovern is one of our greatest dramatists, and a master at writing about today’s world. His new film sensitively examines the pain of abuse and how it affects not only the victim but ripples out across the whole family. To see it brought to the screen with such a high calibre cast and creative team is further testament to the quality of Jimmy’s writing”.
McGovern is responsible for some of the greatest, most hard-hitting drama broadcast on British television in the last 40 years.
Getting his start on soap opera Brookside, he went on to create Cracker, a crime drama that focused on the psychology of the criminal more than the actual crime. Robert Carlyle’s haunting performance as a murderous Liverpool fan jaded after the Hillsborough disaster, and Christopher Eccleston’s heartbreaking performance in the same episode, is a high point of 1990s television drama. He further explored the tragedy in the astonishingly powerful 1996 drama Hillsborough, which McGovern wrote with the full blessing of the families of the victims, extensively interviewing them to do justice to their stories.
He continued to write ground-breaking, socially conscious drama into the 2000s, with anthology shows The Street, which honed in on the personal lives of the denizens of a Manchester street, and Accused, which examined the circumstances leading up to a crime. For this writer, Olivia Colman’s performance in episode two of series two, Mo’s Story, is one of her greatest ever – Accused was recently remade in America, season two is currently in production.
You can watch Cracker on ITVX, while both series of McGovern’s most recent BBC drama Time are available on BBC iPlayer. Accused can be watched free of charge via Amazon Freevee.
