Hitting television screens this weekend is the second series of the BBC prison drama, Time, the product of the pen of Helen Black, a solicitor turned award-winning novelist and screenwriter.
The drama was a hit in its first series — which featured Sean Bean behind bars — and this time round it is set in a women’s prison with creator Jimmy McGovern having insisted on a female co-writer.
Black admits that she was nervous, but says McGovern was “nothing but generous, funny, supportive and respectful”.
The drama, explains Black, demonstrates the harm done to mothers and their children by sending them to jail for short sentences. “A line in the first episode by Jodie Whittaker is ‘I’m in here but it’s my kids that are doing the sentence’,” says Black.
She is adamant that most women in jail ought never to have been sent to prison and that there is a better way to sentence them to prevent their entire lives being ruined. Some women, she says, are jailed miles away from their families, while others feel shame and do not want their children to visit.
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“Massive understaffing means that women aren’t getting their legal or medical appointments,” says Black, highlighting one woman she met who had been unable to complete her chemotherapy. Two officers have to accompany prisoners to hospital appointments, she explains, and women cannot attend treatment sessions if there are not enough staff.
Staff shortages, says Black, also mean women do not get the education or work to prepare them for release — and when they leave prison, they are sent out with only one night’s accommodation and a tiny sum of money.
While she supports the government’s proposals to cut the prison population by reducing the use of short sentences, Black says the policy should have been introduced years ago, not just now when there is “literally no room in the inn”.
Born in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, in 1968, Black is an only child from a “solidly working-class background”. Her father was a coal miner, her mother worked on a supermarket checkout, and she grew up on a council estate.
In 1985, as she was going into the lower sixth, her father had been on strike for a year. Casting around for a job with stability where “no one could ever make me redundant and where there would always be work”, Black thought of qualifying as a lawyer.
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Her parents both left school at 15 and she was the first person in her family to go to university, studying law at Hull, where she had a “great time”. But as one of only a few working-class students, Black “felt a bit like a fish out of water”.
In the days before law firms shouted about increasing diversity by recruiting students from economically less advantaged backgrounds, Black’s ability shone and she was offered a training contract with the City law firm McKenna & Co (now CMS), which came with a subsidy.
But she quit on the day that she qualified, stating: “It was a mutual decision. I don’t think they wanted me and I was not interested in commercial work.” She moved to a job at St Luce & Co, a legal aid firm in Peckham, south London.
One of her early clients was a young homeless boy charged with murder, which meant that she had to get to grips with care proceedings as well as criminal law. As a result, Black built a client base of children in care, who she says are hugely over-represented in the criminal justice system.
She says that the work was harrowing, but representing her teenage clients, who were “not yet hardened to a life of crime and prison”, gave her a sense of purpose and hope that “there was still a possibility of change”.
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In 2003, “in the chinks of the legal day — at lunchtime and waiting around at court”, she wrote her first novel. Having had twins in 1999, Black explains: “I’d always fancied writing a book and didn’t want to be one of those mothers who tell their children that they can do anything, but don’t do it themselves.”
Drawing on her experience, the main character in the book, Lilly Valentine, was “a female lawyer from West Yorkshire who represented children in the care system”, she relates now, laughing at a lack of imagination.
The novel was published in 2004 and Black was offered a three and then six-book deal, meaning that she did not return to legal practice. But it was several years before she could think of herself as a writer. “I kept paying my practising certificate fee for ages as I was nervous about being out of work.”
In addition, she says: “I trained very hard for it. No one in my family had ever worked in a profession before. I was very proud of it and didn’t want to give it all up.” But she finally accepted her new role and says: “There comes a point when you have to say ‘I’m not a lawyer any more; I’m a writer’.”
Her next book series, Taking Liberties, drew on some of her experience at a City law firm. It centred around a female corporate lawyer from a family of gangsters who gets drawn into a crime.
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Her first attempt at writing for television won a BBC Writersroom competition and she went on to write episodes of shows including Grantchester and Death in Paradise.
Last year, her television drama film, Life and Death in the Warehouse, inspired by stories of the poor conditions of workers in a large distribution centre, won an RTS award and was nominated for a Bafta.
Black has several projects on the go, including a film and two true stories. A fan of Liverpool Football Club, she also enjoys reading and watching television.
