Did you watch Prisoner in the Channel 5 days?

[Almar@Cult Labs]

Did you discover Prisoner on Channel 5? Or did you re-watch the show on there? Just how annoying did you find the announcer links and just how late did you stay up to watch it as hey gradually moved it into increasingly silly times?

[Wilf]

Bill Buckley's continuity links were fantastic! I'd never heard an announcer speak so irreverently before - but always so fondly, too!

I rarely stayed up to see the show - I'd set the timer on the VCR in my bedroom, and watch the episodes as I was getting dressed for werk.

I'd already followed the show on Central some years earlier, but C5 let me fill in the gaps where I'd missed a couple, or from before I started. The whole period that the DVDs are covering at the moment - from the Factory storyline right through to those hideous bloody student protesters - was unknown to me prior to C5 airing them.

Sadly, I also find many of those storylines to be among the show's worst - give me the Barnhurst 5 over Kay, Gail, Tracey, Alison, Linda, Andrea and Ricky anytime.

Blocky at its least impressive was still a damn sight better than most other shows, though, and I loved seeing these for the first time, and then reliving the Ferguson years all over again. Prisoner may have its troughs, but it's never switch-off-able. And especially not when Bill Buckley has viewers' letters to read out, bad jokes to crack, trivia to dispense, and - most bizarrely - fans' Blocky-related dreams to recount.

(Oh, and I got somewhere in the eighties when I played along with the PCBH edition of 100%!)

[Top Dog]

I originally saw Prisoner on TSW and then a year or so later on HTV.

I loved the channel 5 re -runs of the series mainly because of Bill Buckley's comments at the end of the show. I seem to remember him liking some of Nola's nasty remarks to Lizzie! Bill also read out a couple of my emails at the end of a couple of episodes ( I can't remember which one, although I have on VHS somewhere). When they changed the viewing time from late night to the early hours of the morning I started to video the show. Prisoner should have just been shown straight after the 10 o'clock news in my opinion. That's what TSW did when it first started and then they messed around with the time slot like many other regional channels. I had a friend who originally lived in the Central TV region who I would tell not to give away future plot lines. She once let slip what happened to Bea Smith (which I did not believe until I saw the episode for myself nearly 2 years later).