Rack Off Vinegar Tits! : Favourite Prisoner Memories

[Sam@Cult Labs]

There's an official thread elsewhere, this ones for Prisoner fans of a certain vintage who see the show as perfect slacker entertainment.

For me, Prisoner was a show that saw me and my friends gather after the pub to waste the early hours because there was no reason to get up early. These days, ITV is a wash with TV shopping and brain dead phone-in quiz shows, but in the early 90s, in between the odd eccentric film choices, in my region you could watch Cell Block H up to three glorious times a week.

In a late teen/early twenties haze of post-pub otherness, I reveled in the trashy, B-Movie stylings of the show as it lept wildly from one deliriously outrageous storyline to the next, pausing occasionally for a little soapy comedy or a minor domestic drama among the screws, inserted to offer a pause for breath before the inmates shaved a women's head, smuggled drugs under the fence in a remote control car or tried to escape hidden inside a model robot.

In this regard, Prisoner Cell Block H is less a Soap Opera and more a kind of rolling Grindhouse movie, it's exploitation plot lines given room to breathe over an excess of 600+ hour long episodes. Malevolent screws and Bull Dyke warders reigned supreme like in any of the more sexually charged Z-Grade Chicks-in-Chains movies of Jess Franco or Jack Hill. Being a TV show from a very conservative country, most of the more explicit scenes take place conviently off camera, both I think for reasons of good taste and sometimes budget, but the comparison rings true.

MISUNDERSTOOD DYKE FRANKY DOYLE

In some of the earliest episodes, Tough Lesbian Franky escapes with the simple-minded but kind-hearted Doreen and their adventures evading the law have a flat, Z-Grade style that could have shown on any 42nd Street screen with the inclusion of a little more skin and a tad more Sadism.

Likewise, the tragic tale of naive babynapper Lynne Warner is as gritty and downbeat as the fate that befalls so many fallen women in the world of Exploitation, from Thriller... a Cruel Picture to Tarantino's Kill Bill. Raped abused and wrongly convicted, Lynne is set free only to fall for a criminal who loves her but is fatally flawed by his amoral desires. Dragged into a violent robbery by her own pathetic weakness, she winds up back inside, her baby miscarried and her life shattered beyond measure.

FALLEN WOMEN LYNNE WARNER

Sounds like the plot to a cheap, trashy movie if you ask me...