Highlights of Vol. 1
 

This is the place for your favourite scenes, bits of dialogue or just general crazyness of the first volume.

They reckon Franky Doyle was too short lived, but actually her escape tends to drag a bit - of her 20 episodes in the show, she only gets to spend 12 of them inside the prison! As soon as she goes over the fence, her time is up, but it takes another eight episodes for her to get shot down.

Still, whilst she *is* behind bars, she's wonderful fun - wrecking the rec room, taunting Vera in solitary, squaring off against Bea, and then in a wonderfully deft contrast, being sweet and tender when Karen tries to teach her.

A very well-written and well-acted character, who casts a long shadow over this set. and indeed the series as a whole.

The first few episodes are extremely well made indeed, and flit between the various characters each week, showing off Mum, Bea, Meg and Vera to their very best.

Meg's lonely wander down the corridors at the end of episode 4 is heart-wrenching; Vera's relationship with her mother is harrowing; Mum comes across so very sympathetically that you want to tell her that you'll take her in if her daughter doesn't want her; and Bea... she's just Bea at her bolshiest, most swaggering, most vengeful best. What more could you want?

How about a celebrity's wife dousing her husband in acid during a TV interview? Or an ex-officer getting incarcerated and stabbing Bea in the guts before being unwittingly killed by a random act by her supposed protector? And that's just in episode 29...

I haven't even mentioned Lizzie yet, either, with her doomed moggie and her thtolen falthe teeth! Come on, writers, get rid of that dreadful Lynn Warner woman and start putting Lizzie front and centre - even at the start, it's crystal clear who the real star of this show is going to be!

Blocky gets off to a flying start with a fascinating, if slightly atypical, run of episodes, during which the show starts to settle down from a set of character dramas into a truly unique soap opera.

I was given a the first volume of the DVD as a present, a bit of a practical joke but it got me hooked. I find the first episode striking when the young prisoner is chased by Meg and Vera down a corridor and later hangs herself in her cell. This is quite a realistic portrayal and made me think quite a lot. Over 30 years later the same things are still going on in prisons on a weekly basis. Quite a sobering realisation.