When you watch the acclaimed TV drama Time, remember this: I’ve seen inside our prisons and they are just as bleak

‘Beautiful and ugly and exact, all at once.’ The cast of the latest series of Time. Photograph: BBC/BBC Studios/Peter Marley

The new series of Time is not an easy watch. The opening seconds of Jimmy McGovern’s prison drama show a normal woman on a normal bus, as it drives up a normal road. But to the right of that road is a huge concrete wall, topped with barbed wire and CCTV cameras.

The wall is only partly visible, just as prisons themselves tend to occupy a space towards the very edges of our thoughts. They exist, but not as part of normal life. But McGovern’s drama shows just how permeable that wall is.