Could the Danes show us how to run a modern prison? Don't be so naffing daft!

Just for a moment we could be deceived into thinking Prisoner (BBC 4) will provide British viewers with an insight into an enlightened Scandinavian prison service.? Yes, the opening shots showed prison officers preparing for a riot, but it turned out to be a botched practice, so no one was hurt. The prison building is modern, airy with good sized cells, each housing just one prisoner. Surely the Danes can show us one or two things about giving criminals a decent environment and an opportunity to start afresh? As Norman Fletcher, Ronnie Barker’s character in the much-loved 1974 comedy “Porridge” (BBC1) about a fictional British prison, HMP Slade, would say: “don’t be so naffing daft”.

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We see the arrival and initiation of a recently trained prison guard called Sammi. He comes with high hopes that he will ‘make a difference’ to the lives of the inmates. He is quickly disabused: first by the prison officers and then by the prisoners. He is encouraged to turn a blind eye to the ready market in drugs because, among other things, it keeps the inmates dozy. Then he sees how various parts of the prison are actually controlled by gangs, who extract money from relatives on the outside in return for the “protection” of their loved ones. There is an air of tension throughout, which is cleverly exploited as we are taken into the broken and disrupted home lives of the prison guards.

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To anyone who has enjoyed the continually repeated episodes of “Porridge”, it may come as a surprise that a modern Danish thriller can pick up the same themes as the aging British comedy. The most obvious similarity is the ever present and menacing Grouty, who runs the rackets at HMP Slade. Probably a bit heavy for a Saturday evening. There is some nudity, very bad language and violence in “Prisone”r and it’s entirely in Danish with English sub-titles.

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How people get into a British prison was tested in The Jury: Murder Trial (Channel 4), a creative attempt to see how two separate juries reacted to the same evidence. The transcript of a real murder trial provides the actors’ scripts but the two juries, each assuming they were the only jury, replicating a real panel drawn from public. The case for the “trial” had been cleverly chosen. The juries had to decide whether the defendant was guilty of murder, which he denied, or manslaughter, which he admitted. We were able to hear the jurors discussing the case during breaks and there is a lurking suspicion that some of the jurors weren’t quite as randomly picked as claimed. I suspect that many of them did exactly what the viewers were doing as the facts unfolded, just search “sculptor + manslaughter” to find the real case.

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With spring just a few weeks away, This Farming Life (BBC 2) offers us a taste of a life very different from the ones that most of us lead. In each episode, we drop into five farming families who are working to keep their farms profitable. The stars are probably the Barclay family in Lanarkshire, where Dad is supported by three young sons, each absolutely committed to their farm and animals. It was evident very early on how working with their father, seeing him make decisions, and themselves being given responsibility, gave them a maturity that many of their contemporaries, lack.

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Postal services are essential to people in both town and country but, since privatisation in 2013, Royal Mail has increasingly failed to meet its universal service obligation for delivery of letters. Panorama’s Royal Mail: Where’s My Post? (BBC 1) charted the decline in detail and showed that even when an MP complained, a visit to her local sorting office was rigged to hide the truth. Despite sending some letters first class, the producers found that fewer than half arrived the next day, two took three weeks. A second test, using tracking devices, showed that some letters spent up to ten days at the local sorting office. ?Whenever senior staff were confronted by evidence that it was now policy to prioritise parcels over letters, local managers were always blamed. Royal Mail is now a mess, it ought to be taken back into public ownership without compensation and the shareholders sued for damages to a beloved national institution.

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When I worked at a BBC local radio station we were always encouraged to make sure that every package had “wild track” wherever possible. For example, if a report came from a factory, it gave the listener additional contrast to have the sound of a machine humming in the background. Slow Radio: Sleeper Train (Radio 3) consists only of wild track collected by an audio producer during a visit to ?peacetime Ukraine in 2017. It makes fascinating listening, leaving us to work out the train’s progress from the collection of sounds. Only the BBC could do anything as creative.?

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The first episode of a new series ofStuart Mitchell’s Cost of Living(Radio 4) certainly provides some laugh-out -oud moments. He and his wife go to Gordon Ramsey’s fancy restaurant for lunch. Within seconds he realises that he is more likely to meet the Colonel at KFC than Gordon at his own eatery. He describes the wine selection and the meagre portions. Poor lad had to pawn his wife’s shoes on EBay to meet the whacking ￡640.49 bill.

Methodist Recorder, 8th March, 2024