Prison on Screen in 1970s Britain

Abstract

HMP Slade, which housed Fletch and Godber in Porridge, may be the best-known fictional prison of the decade, but visions of incarceration permeated 1970s film and television in Britain. Porridge’s sanitized portrayal of prison life has been rightly described (Wilson and O’Sullivan) as at odds with the unsettled real prisons of the 1970s. In actuality, the 1970s was an important but also a challenging decade for prisons, as practices changed, faith rehabilitation was lost, the supermax appeared as a possible solution and seemed to change the face of incarceration, and in Britain, prison governors struggled with problem prisoners such as members of the IRA. This chapter examines where the flights of fancy in British telefantasy and drama channeled actual anxieties about the carceral. The concerning innovations of the “new broom” in the Home Office in A Clockwork Orange, the experiments on prisoners’ brains in Doctor Who, and the dystopian prisons in 1990 are mediated visions of a decade which may have been the most defining for carceral theory and practice in the twentieth century.