Ever since Netflix’s Adolescence caused global alarm over the mental state of teenage boys last year, television has been preoccupied with masculinity. In the 12 months since, we’ve had the excellent Waiting for the Out, set in a philosophy class in a men’s prison; Channel 4 showed us Tip Toe, in which a man commits a terrifying atrocity against his gay next-door neighbour; and there was Half Man, in which Baby Reindeer‘s Richard Gadd beefed up to become an aggressive psychopath who terrorised his own brother.
Joining the ranks is the third series of Jimmy McGovern’s excellent BBC drama Time. While the first was set in a men’s prison (arguably pre-empting the trend for excavating the minds of men) and the second in an institution for women, this series takes place in a young offender institution where boys under 18 are locked up for murder, manslaughter, assault, GBH.
Kept in single cells and at the mercy of the prison guards’ whims, the boys are loud, aggressive, violent, and – above all – angry. Even the softer boys – Ushindi (Chukwubuikem Molokwu), who has a stammer, and Peter (Ollie McNulty) – are vexed, and not just because they’ve landed themselves in prison (for what, we rarely find out).
“Don’t open a gate unless it is absolutely safe to do so,” David Tennant’s prison officer Bobby tells new employee Marie-Louise (Siobhan Finneran, whose character has been the thread through all three series of Time). She promptly tells him that she knows how prisons work, to which he ominously responds: “You haven’t been in a young offender institution before.” It’s not long until his warning comes to pass in a brutal way.
It’s all about power, of course. For decades, society has told men that they must be the strong ones, the providers, the alphas above women. In more recent years, as those traditional roles have softened, the definition of what makes a man becoming less rigid, those damaging narratives have been resurrected by the likes of “manosphere” influencers like Andrew Tate. But in a young offender institute there are very few women, so the power struggle is turned on their fellow inmates. “Ratings innit,” says Peter when Marie-Louise asks why he joined in on an attack on another inmate.
Though it isn’t just the incarcerated who live out the most toxic versions of masculinity – their guards, the men who are supposed to be quashing such behaviour, are just as noxious to themselves, the inmates and one another. Freddie (Daniel Ryan) lords his authority over his charges by periodically punching them in the stomach – where no-one will see the bruises – and over his co-worker, Bobby, by similarly violent means. Meanwhile, Bobby simply stands by and watches his marriage fall apart, unwilling – or perhaps unable – to express any strong emotion; he also uses violence as a crutch, threatening to beat up his wife’s new partner upon their first meeting.
Beyond their anger, all these men and boys have one thing in common – they all want (but can’t quite handle) love. Freddie wants the love of his son; Ushindi wants the love of his long-lost birth mother, and James (Louis McCartney) can’t cope with his parents’ love after murdering his own brother. It’s love and the enormity of emotion it inspires, the softness and vulnerability it requires, that fuels their anger, which ultimately erupts into the only way they can express themselves – through fists and knives and blood.
It should go without saying that masculinity itself isn’t inherently toxic, and there’s a reason a large portion of these masculinity dramas are set in prisons. Not only because it’s where such expressions of manhood can lead, but because the strained, underfunded prison system itself – with its own social codes and hierarchies – can perpetuate it.
In one pivotal scene, a disillusioned Bobby explains that 10 or 15 years ago there used to be a library, training, education for the inmates. Now, he says, “it’s lock them up in their cells 23 hours a day; don’t want to see the bastards, don’t want to hear the bastards”.
And while successive Governments have pledged extra funding for expanding prisons, there appears to be little political appetite for investing in the things that could help turn prisoners’ lives around. As McGovern said in a recent interview: “We always find resources for war. Why can’t we find it for prisons?”
So, prisons are petri dishes where fury and resentment are given the perfect conditions to fester, particularly when – as happens in Time – isolation is used as a means of making the inmates feel helpless.
Time doesn’t have many answers as to how we can fix the so-called “masculinity crisis”, nor does it attempt to reform the prison system. But it does show us what happens when it goes unchecked – where boys will end up should they pursue becoming a certain kind of man. Lives are ruined, sometimes even lost, and only misery and pain await.
‘Time’ continues tomorrow at 9pm on BBC One. All episodes are streaming on BBC iPlayer