As the creator of Cracker, the writer Jimmy McGovern made one of the most influential contributions to British television drama in the 1990s, fundamentally shifting the locus of the crime series from action and consequence toward psychology and motivation. Elsewhere, his work has encompassed a broad generic range while retaining a powerful and distinctive voice, exploring themes of guilt, loss, and working-class identity. Underlying these concerns is a disconcerting sense of moral ambiguity and a readiness to challenge an audience’s liberal assumptions on such taboos as racism, sexism, and homophobia. McGovern uses television, he admits, as “a kind of confessional” (Butler, p. 22).

Born into a working-class Catholic family in Liverpool, the fifth of eight children, and educated at a Jesuit-run grammar school, McGovern moved through a succession of jobs before deciding in his early 20s to train as schoolteacher. His brief teaching career (at Quarry Bank Comprehensive, the school earlier attended by John Lennon) would later provide the basis for the serial Hearts and Minds, about an idealistic probationary teacher struggling to inspire his pupils while battling professional demoralization and cynicism. It was while teaching that he began to submit plays to local theaters and radio and, through this, met the producer Phil Redmond, who was setting up Brookside, the house soap opera for the new Channel 4. Over the next seven years, he wrote approximately 80 scripts for the series and, on leaving, had a small stock of stories that he had been unable to introduce but that he now began to develop. The idea for a story about a Catholic priest surfaced in his early single drama, Traitors, an account of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 focusing on the dilemma of a priest who opposes the plan but, because he has heard of it through a confession, is powerless to act on his concerns. McGovern returned to this event in 2004 with Gunpowder, Treason and Plot, a sweeping historical account, backed by a large budget and a cast led by Robert Carlyle (whose early career is closely linked to McGovern’s work) as King James I. The moral dilemma of Traitors was also at the center of Priest, originally written as a serial but produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) as a single film and given a limited theatrical release in which an inner-city priest struggled with his own homosexuality and with the knowledge, again gleaned through confession, that one of his parishioners is being abused by her father.

A further story idea from Brookside was to produce one of the most compelling threads in McGovern’s later work. In 1989, 94 soccer fans, supporters of the Liverpool Football Club, were crushed to death and a further 170 seriously injured on an overcrowded terrace at the Sheffield Wednesday ground at Hillsborough. For McGovern, the significance underlying this tragedy lay not only in the culpability of the police and the conduct of the subsequent enquiry but also in the contempt displayed toward the Liverpool crowd by the tabloid press and in particular the Sun newspaper. McGovern’s storyline involving a commemorative burning of the Sun was ruled out of Brookside, but his anger over the event and his reflection on the class prejudices that it revealed would form the basis of one of the most powerful episodes of Cracker, in which a working-class young man began a campaign of murders to avenge the Hillsborough victims, transforming himself into the image of a shaven-headed delinquent as a response to the institutional stereotyping of his class. Having met some of the bereaved families during the making of this episode, McGovern went on to confront the impact of the event and its aftermath in the drama documentary Hillsborough. As well as exploring the political question of institutional responsibility (and contributing to the campaign for a public inquiry into the event), the play found its dramatic core in the lives of three families and in the emotional fall-out of grief, pain, and self-reproach that follows sudden and violent bereavement.

Although McGovern claimed to have felt restricted by the overriding concern for factual accuracy in writing drama documentary, he twice returned to the form. Dockers was an account of a lengthy but largely unpublicized strike in 1995 by Liverpool dockworkers against deteriorating working conditions that had resulted in hundreds of men being fired and replaced. In concentrating on the effect of the political upheaval on family relationships and friendships, it drew much of its insight from McGovern’s co-authorship with a writing workshop made up of men and women involved in the original dispute. Sunday commemorated the 30th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” shooting of demonstrators in Northern Ireland in 1972. McGovern’s deeply emotional account, told through the lives of a small group of young men and women and again highlighting themes of family, friendship, and loss, contrasted tellingly with the spare, documentary style of Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday, which was released in the same week.

The chain of grief and recrimination that follows a sudden death runs through The Lakes. As McGovern himself had once done, a young Liverpudlian, Danny, arrives to work in a seemingly peaceful rural community and, when the community is torn apart by the drowning of three young girls, becomes the scapegoat for the guilt and feuding that lurks beneath the surface. At one level, the serial opens up to examination a particular aspect of class conflict in British society; at another, it is concerned with one of McGovern’s most personal themes, the guilt and emotional wreckage produced by addiction. He had written about drug addiction in the early play Needle, but in The Lakes, as in Cracker, the compulsion is gambling, a habit from which McGovern suffered in his early adulthood and which here feeds Danny’s sense of implication in the guilt felt at the loss of the girls and threatens his redemptive relationship with a young woman from the community.

McGovern writes from the depths of his own emotional experience. In the character of Fitz from Cracker, the brilliant but deeply flawed forensic psychologist, he has created one of the most resonant figures of British television drama. Fitz’s intellectual acuity and mordant wit, his obsessiveness, and his instinctive ability to winkle a confession out of his suspect are rooted not only in the ability to identify with the criminal mind but also in a knowledge of his own guilt as gambler, drinker, chauvinist, and liar. Yet there is a political dimension to this lapsed figure, embodied in the idea of what McGovern has described as “post-Hillsborough man” (Day-Lewis, p. 67), a haunting sense of intellectual cynicism born out of the erosion of moral certainty in Britain during the ideologically evacuated period of the 1980s.