Jimmy McGovern suggests meeting in The Grapes, a working man’s pub near his home in Liverpool that has an abundance of fruit machines and the TV racing on at full volume. I had expected him to pick his local, another traditional pub called the White Horse, but it turns out that it’s non-smoking now, so that is that.
“Smoking and drinking are the tools of the trade,” he says slightly ruefully, lighting up a fag. “Do you want another glass of lager?” Human weakness in the face of temptation is, of course, McGovern’s stock-in-trade. Alcoholism, gambling addiction, adultery, rape and, ultimately, guilt and death are the engines that have driven his dramas from Cracker to The Lakes. Other writers use these themes, naturally, but nobody does it quite like the Master. McGovern is renowned for having zero squeamishness around ugly subjects.
“Even the darkest things I think — it’s nothing that the vast majority of men have not thought themselves but would never say,” he observes between mouthfuls of bitter. “But I will say it.” It helps that McGovern was raised a Catholic and taught by hardline Jesuits, “a truly awful experience”. “The tools of Catholicism are great for a writer. It’s the examination of conscience. When you are prepared to face up to unpleasant things about yourself . . . you’re more prepared to put them in a script.”
McGovern is back this week with a cracking new six-part drama series for BBC One called The Street. Each episode goes into one of the houses in a working-class street and tells the story found there.
Early in episode one a downtrodden housewife, played by Jane Horrocks, is seen with her knickers round her ankles having a furtive bunk-up with a neighbour while her husband is at work. In a later horrific scene, her lover accidentally runs her child over in his car. The subsequent fall-out as the girl lies in a coma blows two families apart. Never think you can get away with it, is the moral message, there’s always a price to pay. It is raw, heartbreaking stuff.
From this first episode you might assume that here is McGovern in his old stomping ground — illicit sex, comeuppance, guilt, retribution. But the rest of the series takes him to hitherto unexplored pastures. This is partly because McGovern insisted on recruiting non-established writers who would be “hungry and fresh”. He attempted a trawl of dozens of experienced writers but found most of the ideas depressingly hackneyed. One of the newcomers, Alan Field, who ran a Merseyside gym, approached McGovern in the street outside this very pub saying he had a storyline which McGovern saw instantly had “wonderful potential”. Episode two, about a man coming up to his 65th birthday and getting an unpleasant shock, centres on an issue which incenses McGovern — that thousands of people are going to be shafted by the pensions system.
“You realise that if you’ve done the conventional thing and put money into a pension you’re f***ed,” he says. “What you should have done is what all the wide boys did — buy property and get mortgaged up to your neck. To get a decent pension you need half a million. The average person my age must be worried sick.”
But there is humour as well as angst, particularly in an episode starring Timothy Spall as a taxi driver who picks up an asylum seeker and ends up taking him to his own house. Though he can’t speak a word of English, a friendship develops.
The idea for The Street has been percolating inside McGovern’s head for years, loosely based on the street where he grew up in Kensington, Liverpool. He was the fifth of nine children of a betting shop manager and did not speak properly until he was 8, and then with a stutter.
All the writers are Scousers but McGovern did not want the dramas to be filmed in Liverpool, so tired is he of Liverpudlians complaining that they are portrayed in a bad light, so it was made in Manchester. McGovern believes it’s a “f***ing shame” that people here are so sensitive. “I’m sick of it. Every Cracker I’ve done has been based in Manchester. I’ve filled Manchester full of psychopaths, but no one there complains.”
McGovern believes that the TV networks are spending far too little on programmes. ITV primetime dramas, he says, “nine times out of ten are crap”. Then he laughs to himself. “That said, when Cracker goes out it will be . . . at 9pm!” This is McGovern’s other big news — he has written a new, one-off episode of Cracker for ITV to be broadcast later this year. It has been ten years since his last. Other writers came in and McGovern moved on. Robbie Coltraine, who plays the psychologist Fitz and wields the real power, had told Granada, the producer, he would make another one only if McGovern wrote it. Then, last year the sponsor for the Hillsborough Memorial Golf Day fell through so McGovern went to Granada and said that if they would sponsor it he would write them a Cracker. They bit his hand off.
It is telling that it took the subject of Hillsborough to motivate him. The impact of his outstanding, epic drama about the 96 Liverpool FC fans killed there contributed considerably to the decision to open a second inquiry into the disaster. The bereaved families are still his friends and it remains the project of which he is most proud.
This time the story explores the American response to 9/11, which he thinks has been catastrophic, and a Brit driven mad by it. He could well face a backlash in America but is sanguine. “I think a lot of people will say, ‘At last it’s being said’.”
There is something else on the horizon too. McGovern is writing an opera set at the outset of the American Civil War but based in the Lancashire cotton mills. “One of the first things Abraham Lincoln did was blockade the ports in the South so nothing was getting out and because of that there were people who starved in the mills in Lancashire,” he says. “We are going to have a brass band instead of an orchestra, and marry all that black music from the cotton fields with the brass band music of the mills.”
Despite offers, McGovern has no desire to write for Hollywood or even move from the North to London. He knows that this is the community where the real stories are — that if he removes himself he will lose his muse. “I still drink in the same pubs that I’ve always drunk in,” he says. “I’m happy with that.”
- The Street, Thur, BBC1, 9pm
