CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Unforgivable on BBC2: Shocking but powerful, this was even tougher to watch than Adolescence

Daily Mail​

25-07-2025

Don't say you weren't warned. As if the title weren't stark enough, the opening scene of Unforgivable served notice that writer Jimmy McGovern was intent on piling horrors upon miseries.
Anna Friel, as harassed single mother Anna McKinney, arrived at her teenage son's school to be informed the boy had broken another pupil's jaw. We never learned why, because Tom was refusing to speak.
While she was pleading with the head teacher not to suspend her son, Anna's father phoned to say her mother had just died.
Far worse was to come, as she discovered her estranged brother, Joe, was about to be released from prison on probation - after serving his sentence for sexually abusing Tom.
Traumatic family dramas that tackle deeply upsetting, taboo topics are dominating the market for serious television this year, following the success of Adolescence on Netflix.
But Adolescence featured the familiar elements of a police thriller, with gripping interviews that slowly led us to a shocking truth.
Anna Maxwell Martin, pictured, played a nun, Katherine, who gave Joe a room in a hostel for repentant sex offenders, and tried to help him come to terms with his past
Unforgivable was much more difficult to watch. We discovered early on that Joe (Bobby Schofield) really had groomed and assaulted the boy, and that the grief and shame of it had driven his mother to an early grave.
Bare backside of the night
It's been quite a week for naked behinds on telly.
After the acres of rear ends in BBC1's The Narrow Road To The Deep North, Danny Dyer discarded his bath towel on Mr Bigstuff (Sky Max).
But did he use a stand-in?
Was that a stunt bottom?
The courage Schofield must have needed to play this part is remarkable.
Gradually, we realised Joe had experienced abuse himself as a boy, at the hands of the local football coach who was also a family friend.
As he unburdened himself of this secret to therapists, he wept and shook with self-loathing - earning a degree of sympathy, but never becoming likeable.
It was a powerfully brave performance, but Joe remained sullen, self-pitying, manipulative and disloyal, unable to think of anything but the suffering he had both caused and endured.
Anna Maxwell Martin played a nun, Katherine, who gave him a room in a hostel for repentant sex offenders, and tried to help him come to terms with his past. When she revealed she had breast cancer, he seemed barely interested.
McGovern didn't seem to care that much either: we learned next to nothing about her treatment or her prognosis.
Given the general tone of despair throughout the hour-and-three-quarters of the one-off episode, I suspect it didn't end well for her.
The only note of hope was that Joe's father, Brian (David Threlfall), lived to the end of the story.
That never seemed likely: grey-faced and breathless, he looked like a heart attack dressed up in a shirt and trousers.
Threlfall is used to making himself look ill for roles. For nine years, he played the walking cadaver Frank Gallagher in Shameless.
It's an odd thing that, however sick and seedy his characters appear, Threlfall always survives to the credits... whereas Sean Bean, the epitome of burly Northern health, is invariably killed off. Work that one out.