"McGovern is back this week with a cracking new six-part drama series for BBC One called The Street. Each episode goes into one of the houses in a working-class street and tells the story found there.
Early in episode one a downtrodden housewife, played by Jane Horrocks, is seen with her knickers round her ankles having a furtive bunk-up with a neighbour while her husband is at work. In a later horrific scene, her lover accidentally runs her child over in his car. The subsequent fall-out as the girl lies in a coma blows two families apart. Never think you can get away with it, is the moral message, there’s always a price to pay. It is raw, heartbreaking stuff.
From this first episode you might assume that here is McGovern in his old stomping ground — illicit sex, comeuppance, guilt, retribution. But the rest of the series takes him to hitherto unexplored pastures. This is partly because McGovern insisted on recruiting non-established writers who would be “hungry and fresh”. He attempted a trawl of dozens of experienced writers but found most of the ideas depressingly hackneyed. One of the newcomers, Alan Field, who ran a Merseyside gym, approached McGovern in the street outside this very pub saying he had a storyline which McGovern saw instantly had “wonderful potential”. Episode two, about a man coming up to his 65th birthday and getting an unpleasant shock, centres on an issue which incenses McGovern — that thousands of people are going to be shafted by the pensions system.
“You realise that if you’ve done the conventional thing and put money into a pension you’re f*ed,” he says. “What you should have done is what all the wide boys did — buy property and get mortgaged up to your neck. To get a decent pension you need half a million. The average person my age must be worried sick.”
But there is humour as well as angst, particularly in an episode starring Timothy Spall as a taxi driver who picks up an asylum seeker and ends up taking him to his own house. Though he can’t speak a word of English, a friendship develops.
The idea for The Street has been percolating inside McGovern’s head for years, loosely based on the street where he grew up in Kensington, Liverpool. He was the fifth of nine children of a betting shop manager and did not speak properly until he was 8, and then with a stutter.
All the writers are Scousers but McGovern did not want the dramas to be filmed in Liverpool, so tired is he of Liverpudlians complaining that they are portrayed in a bad light, so it was made in Manchester. McGovern believes it’s a “f*ing shame” that people here are so sensitive. “I’m sick of it. Every Cracker I’ve done has been based in Manchester. I’ve filled Manchester full of psychopaths, but no one there complains.”
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