Prison drama is punishing

David Wenham as Governor Arthur Phillip in Banished. Photo / Supplied

Screenwriter smudges his brilliant copybook with stagey histrionics

If the name Jimmy McGovern means anything to you, Banished (8.30pm, Fridays, UKTV) might seem something like manna from heaven: McGovern doesn't make much television, but when he does you tune in.

For fans, the British screenwriter is one of those rarities: a writer with a fierce political point of view who creates television that says important things, but not without a bloody ripping yarn as well.

Cracker, a drama about a boozy, sarcastic, crime solving psychologist called Fitz (played by Robbie Coltrane like his life depended on it) is his most memorable of course. But most of his work (well what I've seen of it) - The Lakes, Accused, Hillsborough - is as good as television gets.

Which is partly why Banished, a fictionalisation of the very first days of Australia's first penal colony, is just so disappointing.

And not because it messes with history and ignores the locals.

The seven-part series drew trenchant criticism across the Ditch before it screened there for its historical inaccuracies and its complete exclusion of Aborigines from the narrative. McGovern has defended this - budget was part of the reason, the tightly compressed narrative was another - but on the evidence of the first episode, it is far from Banished's main problem.

Its major sin is that, despite the horrors of first settlement, it's more shrill melodrama than grunty, intelligent drama.

As the episode opened, the rules of the formative penal colony are challenged by a prisoner called Elizabeth who is sleeping in the men's quarters with the convict bloke she loves. Under the appalling house rules, the women prisoners are only for the guards, who are Her Majesty's soldiers, to use and abuse, and not for other prisoners unless they are married. Governor Phillip (David Wenham) has a dilemma: to maintain order, he either lets Elizabeth marry Tommy, the male prisoner she loves, or he hangs Tommy. In the end, like a true politician, the Governor sidesteps by deciding on hanging Tommy but giving the job to the prissy Reverend Johnson (Ewen Bremner) because he has refused to annul Tommy and Elizabeth's previous marriages to let them wed again and thereby solve everyone's problem.

High drama? Not really. It played as overwrought with a story built around two-dimensional "bad" characters and two-dimensional "good" characters faced with a series of plodding moral and ethical dilemmas: should a female convict be flogged for sleeping with the male convict she loves? Should he be hanged for love? Should their marriages be annulled to allow them to marry even though God will be angry? Should the guards be allowed to use the women for sex? Should a convict grass up another for stealing his food and threatening his life due to starvation?

We get it, Jimmy: you want us to see the prisoners and jailers as complex people full of good and bad, dependent on each other, making difficult choices in a land that is not their own. But what you've delivered has too little of Accused or Hillsborough about it and too much of Home and Away. It's all stagy histrionics by the seaside with a cast, including Julian Rhind-Tutt and Russell Tovey, playing soap like its Shakespeare.

McGovern has said that good TV writing has narrative simplicity and emotional complexity. On the evidence of its first instalment, Banished has neither.

- TimeOut