Prisoner:
Cell Block H
1 9 7 9 - 1 9 8 6 (Australia)
692 x 60 minute episodes
Known in the UK as Prisoner: Cell Block H this was an
Australian series telling the story of the all-women prison known
as the Wentworth Detention Centre.
Life at Wentworth was never going to be rosy. There were tears,
body-searches and many a hand slammed in the steam press.
Prisoner was Australia's most successful TV export (it
was syndicated to 16 countries). The series was conceived by the
Grundy Organisation for Network Ten and showed the grim lives of
Wentworth's female inmates and was considered raw, powerful
television in its time.
Reg Watson, in the senior ranks of Grundys, had just returned
from Britain where he had been one of the originators of the
long-running serial Crossroads. In 1978 Watson set out to
devise a serial set in a women's prison, in the context of
considerable public attention being given in Australia to prison
issues generally and to the position of female prisoners in
particular.
The show dealt with lesbianism, incest and other topics new to
the box as the jailbirds fought against the world and among
themselves to be Top Dog, a mantle most memorably grasped by the
tough (but soft-centered) Bea Smith.
Later, fans grew to appreciate the sheer camp value of the
wobbly sets, overwrought delivery and vicious lesbian warden, Joan
'The Freak' Ferguson - one of the great bitch figures of all time.
Part of the attraction of this series were the continuing power
struggles. As the tough, no-nonsense leader of the prisoners, Bea
Smith, Val Lehman in particular won great popularity with
fans.
Australia's longest-serving female prisoner, murderess Sandra
Willson, acted as series advisor, and Watson and his team at
Grundys interviewed women in prison as well as prison officers.
Later some of the actors also visited women's prisons. Notice was
taken of prison reform groups, whose desire for a halfway house
for women was incorporated into the program.
The show did not eschew violence or sensation. The first few
scripts featured a fatal stabbing, a suicide, a hanging and an
assault with a hot iron. Bullying, tattooed lesbian Frankie Doyle
(in for 9 years for armed robbery) regularly slugged it out with
stocky dual-killer Bea Smith and The Freak.
Even the most sweet-natured inmates had terrifying pasts.
Frail, chain-smoking Lizzie Birdsworth had poisoned four sheep
shearers with arsenic when they insulted her cooking, beautiful
schoolteacher Karen Travers had stabbed her husband to death (and
was the unwilling object of Frankie Doyle's desire), and winsome
country girl Lynn Warner had been convicted of kidnapping a baby
and trying to bury him alive.
Doreen Anderson (who sucked her thumb) was in for forgery and
paired off with the rebuffed Frankie.
The staff were almost as colourful, from authoritative and open
minded Governor Erica Davidson to second in charge warder Vera
"Vinegar Tits" Bennett, the head 'screw' who had a hand
of steel and an acid tongue, and kindly warder Meg Morris.
Meg was the only original cast member to last the whole five
years. During that time she suffered a whole series of
ill-treatment including; the fatal stabbing of her husband by
inmate Chrissie Latham, a knifing, a shooting, pack-rape by female
inmates and being locked inside a booby-trapped building about to
explode.
Shot in the ATV Channel 10 studios in Melbourne - with the
exterior shots filmed in the car park and back lots of the station
- critics complained that the serial lacked the realism of the
recent London Weekend series Within These Walls.
This criticism assumed that realism was relevant to the series
. . .
Even though the gates clanged shut for the last time on 11
December 1986, the show still enjoyed a cult following in the UK,
which honoured Prisoner with a West End musical in 1995,
and in Germany, where the high-rating Hinter Gittern
("Behind Bars") recycled Prisoner scripts. I
wonder how "Bugger off, Doreen" translates into German?
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