Catholicism runs right through the writing of Jimmy McGovern. Sometimes it’s a seam of gold, other times it’s poison. The movie Priest (1994) portrayed the Church as a barrier to genuine Christianity: bigotry conspires to defrock a good cleric. In Broken (BBC One, Mondays, 9pm), however, the Church comforts the desperately poor.
Sean Bean plays Fr Michael, a priest drawn into the life of Christina, a jobless single mum who insists that she’s not “in pain” just “skint”.
McGovern has a gift for morally ambivalent characterisation, and often it’s the characters who judge themselves. “Fitz”, the lead in his Nineties cop show Cracker, was a brilliant psychologist but also a gambling addict – a man who was sensitive and smart enough to know that he was ruining the lives of his family. Did this stop him? Nope.
