RTS Programme Awards 2018 in partnership with Audio Network

“A dramatist who has written what is, by any measure, an exceptional body of work – pieces that have challenged audiences, needled authority and had an impact that goes beyond mere critical acclaim or high ratings...though his work has achieved both of those as well.

He’s written for the theatre and film and could doubtless have enjoyed a stellar career in either, but instead chose to focus his attention on television as the best place to tell his stories. And that’s what he says he is - not a writer, but a storyteller. A storyteller from a proud Northern working-class tradition who approaches his craft like a working tradesman, painstakingly building his narratives and characters as a bricklayer might construct a wall…but, as he said, laying words and sentences instead of bricks.
And what stories. Firmly rooted in everyday life as it’s really led, his stories are a delicate balance between the simplicity of his narratives and the complexity of his characters. They’re stories about the messiness of real life; stories about people who struggle - maybe with addiction, adultery, violence, guilt, corruption, debt, revenge, anger or shame. But it’s the completeness and depth of his characters that makes his work so exceptional – the many layers of a man like Fitz in Cracker, so brilliantly brought to life by Robbie Coltrane, or the conflicts within Father Michael Kerrigan, played with real nuance by Sean Bean in Broken.

Jimmy began his writing career in the early Eighties on Channel 4’s ground breaking Merseyside soap Brookside, where he showed how truthfully he could write about working class life in a city socially broken by Thatcherism. His breakout work Cracker followed a decade later, and was a massive hit. But it was being asked by the Hillsborough families in 1996 to write about what happened in the hell of that Sheffield football stadium that would have the greatest impact, both on Jimmy and what was to follow. His Hillsborough dramatisation starkly challenged the officially-reported version of events, telling the story of the families’ ongoing agony in the face of a brutal campaign of police lies, political cover-up and legal obstruction. Perhaps the most important work Jimmy would ever write, it was an early but hugely significant milestone on the families’ journey to seek justice for the 96 fans unlawfully killed that Saturday afternoon. Two decades on from his television film, the truth of what Jimmy wrote is finally – officially - acknowledged.

The difference between justice and the law is a theme Jimmy has returned to more than once. His 2014 drama Common questioned the controversial joint enterprise law, where a person can be jailed for a murder they didn’t physically commit; his two series of Accused told the stories of how people in the dock of a criminal court had found themselves there, awaiting verdicts that would change their lives forever.

His work has also given an authentic voice to people whose stories are rarely told with conviction or realism on television – whether they’re the striking workers on the Liverpool wharf-side in Dockers on Channel 4 in 1999, or the indigenous Australian households of an inner-city suburb of Sydney in Redfern Now for the ABC in 2012.

He writes about big themes – responsibility, accountability, communities that feel trapped. He writes about the people who are overlooked, or lied to, or wilfully ignored. And there is never any doubt whose side he is on.”