​Darren McGarvey takes a tough but compassionate look at the state of Britain today

And over the past few years he has written and spoken powerfully about growing up in poverty and being exposed to addiction and violence.

As well as presenting programmes on social deprivation for BBC Radio Scotland, Darren, perhaps better known by his stage name DJ Loki, has been a regular contributor on BBC and STV, appeared in the independent film The Divide, presented a Reith Lecture based on US President Franklin D Roosevelt’s ‘Four Freedoms’ , and wrote a weekly column in The Scotsman.

McGarvey describes himself as a “cultural terrorist” who has “learned to use his traumatic past as a Trojan horse in which to smuggle unorthodox opinions past establishment gatekeepers.”

In this new three-part series, he takes a tough but compassionate look at the state of Britain today, delving into the justice system, education and the health service.

With access to prisons, schools and hospitals, Darren analyses the UK’s public services and visits some radical and ground-breaking examples – which could offer inspiration on different ways for state services to evolve – in Britain and beyond in Scandinavia.

In the first edition, Darren sets out to explore our justice system which, he says, appears to serve neither victim nor criminal.

It takes years for many cases to reach court in the UK, prisons are overcrowded and knife and gun crime dominate the headlines, while public trust in the police is at an all-time low.

Spending the day with a rookie police officer on her first day on the job in High Wycombe, Darren wants to find out how the force can begin to repair their relationship with communities.

In Liverpool, he sees first-hand the reality of the city’s knife-crime epidemic when he meets the devastated mother of Ava White who was stabbed to death in 2021, aged 12.

Fortunately, Ava’s family were able to see her killer sentenced within just a few months, but for many victims, the wait for justice stretches into years.

To find out about Britain’s court backlog, Darren meets high-flying London barrister Joanna Hardy-Susskind, who has given him a privileged peek behind the wigs and gowns.

For those who do face their day in court and receive a sentence, serving time could be in an overcrowded Victorian prison where officers spend so long getting the inmates fed that there is little time for anything else.

Spending a day in Barlinnie, Scotland’s oldest and biggest prison, Darren faces the realities of a 21st-century British jail.

He then heads to Norway, where in stark contrast, prisoners receive shorter sentences and the focus is on rehabilitation – all in the name of releasing them back to society as the sort of person you’d want living next door. And he asks could the UK ever follow a similar approach.