Time: David Tennant and Siobhan Finneran are stellar in this horrifying and exceptional TV drama

It takes a lot to drag me away from comfort TV in the autumn. Blame the shrinking hours of light or the apocalyptic news cycle but the closest thing I like to get to televisual trauma in October is watching comedians get into their own graves in The Celebrity Traitors. I doubt I’m alone. I don’t want to psychoanalyse the British public but I’d take a punt that collectively we are just about capable right now of looking at Josh Widdicombe trying to find a purpose next to Emma Willis on the Strictly dancefloor (and reportedly, even that’s a struggle).

Enter legendary Jimmy McGovern with a new series of the Bafta-winning prison drama Time (Sunday, 9pm, BBC One) to drag the nation out of its Bake Off-related coma. Having already covered the devastation of men’s and women’s prisons in the first two series, the good news is that McGovern and co-writer Samuel Bailey’s trilogy surely can’t get any more distressing. The new episodes will be set in *checks notes* a youth offending institution for boys. OK great. It’s about children in prison. Thank you, Jimmy! I hope you’re happy! No one else is going to be.

Of course, McGovern – long known for tackling social realism and institutional injustice in iconic shows such as Cracker, The Lakes and Hillsborough – is not going to put the viewer through the wringer without proper reason. As prison overcrowding dominates the headlines, alongside the multifaceted crisis among young men, Time series three is so urgent and prescient that you wonder if the BBC were tempted to change the title to Time(ly).

Still, best brace yourself before going in. Within 90 seconds, a teenage boy is being dragged horizontally by five adult guards to his cell; a hand half-covering his jaw as he screams obscenities. That hand belongs to David Tennant, playing veteran prison officer Bobby Bailey. Tennant is an impressively blank slate as Bailey: a figure who is almost always on screen but has such sparse dialogue and emotion that at times he is – in classic McGovern fashion – defined by his ordinariness and hard to box as “goody” or “baddy.”

He’s joined by Happy Valley’s Siobhan Finneran who returns as prison chaplain Marie-Louise – the only common thread through all three series and a rare merciful sign of, dare I say it, hope.

Tennant and Finneran both give stellar performances but it’s the three young actors playing new offenders who will surely be stars of the future. There’s Peter (Ollie McNulty), caught between the death of an innocent man and loyalty to his community, and James (Louis McCartney), struggling to face his broken parents after a life-changing act of violence. Then there’s Christopher (a heartbreaking Chukwubuikem Molokwu) battling a stammer and reconnecting with his birth mother.

One of Time’s strengths is its exceptional writing, but it is not afraid to say plenty without a word. The white vans that transport the boys to jail with tiny square black windows for pockets of light. The gates in D-wing that are rarely opened and keep its violent not-yet-men apart (“Gates are dangerous,” Tennant tells Finneran ominously). Cells named “Room 29”, as if the boys are on a hostel break for the week – an illusion that’s only broken when you realise there’s not a scene that takes place in the wing that’s not accompanied by the sound of screaming.

The whole thing is a lesson in tension, each minute in the prison dragging the viewer further into the claustrophobia of dread and despair.

I won’t give any spoilers but I will say you will be thinking about a moment in the first episode for days. This is not easy viewing but nor should it be. McGovern is not delivering content that plays in the background while you’re scrolling Instagram. It grabs you by the throat, asking you to question whether it’s possible to change or if the horrors of the human-made system dooms certain people – certain children – before they ever really get a chance. All of us should watch it, not least politicians across the political spectrum. Just maybe stick Bake Off on afterwards to decompress.