This article was originally published in The Courier on 12th July 2014.
Common:
Sunday, BBC One
Paul
Whitelaw
This much you know: we live in a
society where the working class are persistently demonised by our
right-wing government and complicit portions of the media. If this
were the 1970s – I've checked, it isn't – then our TV's would be
crackling with hard-hitting plays angrily decrying this situation.
Unfortunately, we no longer have
forums such as Play for Today in which compassionate
dramatists can vent their concerns. Those days are gone.
So hats off to the BBC for allowing
Jimmy McGovern (Cracker; Hillsborough; The Street) to hijack
90 minutes of prime-time with Common, in which he railed
against the UK's disgraceful Joint Enterprise Law. One of the last
remaining firebrands, McGovern is a fiercely moral polemicist who, at
his best, projects his social conscience through the prism of
accessible human drama.
Granted, his desire to make an angry
point often gets the better of him, and there were moments in Common
where his argument was rather bluntly stated. But I can forgive him
his excesses when the overall results are as impressive and, yes,
important as this. It was like being punched in the guts for 90
minutes, which is precisely what McGovern intended.
The protagonist was Johnjo, a
teenager with no prior convictions who unwittingly became a getaway
driver after a “friend” stabbed and killed an innocent bystander
during an altercation. Completely innocent of any wrongdoing – he
had no idea the other boys had agreed to confront a rival that night
– he nevertheless fell victim to Joint Enterprise, whereby more
than one person can be charged for the same offence.
Unflinchingly, McGovern plunged us
into simultaneous nightmares, as we followed Johnjo's plight in
tandem with that of the murdered boy's family. Special mention must
go to Susan Lynch, who was extraordinary as a mother struggling with
abject grief. The scene in which she viewed her son's corpse for the
first time was harrowing yet entirely, horribly believable.
Despite his occasional lapses into
tub-thumping, McGovern is an economical writer who taps into the
human condition with devastating ease. The judicious use of silence
in this scene – Lynch's screams were muted by sound-proof glass –
made it all the more effective. As the murdered boy's estranged
father, Daniel Mays' sad pudding face has rarely been put to better
use.
A predictable ending is usually
anathema to good drama, but not in this case. It was inevitable that Johnjo would
eventually be sent down – a happy outcome would've undermined
McGovern's point – but I was too busy empathising to care about it playing out as expected.
McGovern was more interested in
making us care about these characters so we could care about the
insanity of Joint Enterprise. Mission accomplished. When he
eventually abandoned any attempts at subtlety with a mouthpiece rant
from one of his characters, he'd earned the right to harangue.
Standing on the doorstep of Johnjo's
family home, the mother of one of the accused screamed, “Do you
know what this law is about, this Joint Enterprise? It's not about
innocent or guilty, it's about getting working class scum off the
streets! That's how they see our kids!” Point taken and welcomed,
Jimmy.
Only on TV can you drag an issue from
the headlines and present it to millions with such immediacy. He may
be part of a dying breed, but McGovern still bristles with urgent
life.
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