Porridge

Richard Weight

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781911239369
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica de la televisión

'Norman Stanley Fletcher, you have pleaded guilty to the charges brought by this court and it is now my duty to pass sentence.' Those words, spoken by a judge to the show's hero in the title sequence of every Porridge episode, are among the most famous in British comedy and they remind viewers that this is no ordinary TV sitcom.
The first situation comedy anywhere in the world to be set in a prison, Porridge is about men being punished for crimes committed against the same sort of people who are watching the show. Millions of hard working Britons were fans, many of them anxious about rising crime and worried that burglars would steal the TV set they were watching it on.
Yet they still settled down at 8.30pm on Friday nights between 1974 and 1977 to watch a series that celebrates the sometimes pathetic, often ingenious, recidivism of a group of social misfits who by their own admission are failed citizens. How did such a comedy come to be seen as part of a 'golden age of British sitcom', without ever losing its edge to nostalgia?
Crime, like sex, sells. But Porridge did not romanticise villainy. Written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, it's a satire of class-consciousness and power, warmed by a humanistic celebration of men on the margins of society. Its heroes are weak inadequate misfits, not tough, glamorous gangsters. Porridge was a success because the essence of situation comedy is confinement; characters in this format are people who feel trapped and thwarted by circumstances beyond their control. This, therefore, is the ultimate sitcom.
Richard Weight's entertaining study of this much-loved classic places Porridge in the context of 1970s social upheavals, explores how the series satirises structures of class and authority through Fletch and Godber's battles to outwit the prison officers Mr Mackay and Mr Barrowclough, and traces its influences on TV comedy that followed.

1 ‘New Faces, Old Hands’: The making of Porridge

The writers of Porridge met in London in the spring of 1964 just as Britain’s capital was emerging as the hub of Western modernity. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais were both twenty-six, had much in common and soon hit it off. Born in Essex in 1937, Clement was privately educated and entered the BBC as a studio manager for the World Service before training to be a TV director. La Frenais was born on Tyneside, also privately educated and worked as a market researcher in London.

They wanted to write comedy that reflected modern Britain and were inspired by contemporary ‘New Wave’ cinema, so it’s in that context Porridge should be seen. ‘We both loved these New Wave movies that were coming out like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,’ said La Frenais, ‘they were all our generation; we were so excited about seeing this kind of working class movie.’ His partner added ‘there was a whole new part of Britain that was getting attention for the first time, so we wanted to jump on that bandwagon but use it with comedy as opposed to drama’.¹

They wrote sketches, including early editions of Not Only … But Also (BBC2, 1964–70) starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore which, along with Monty Python, became a template for the satirical sketch show in Britain. They also wrote the screenplay for the film Hannibal Brooks (1969) starring Oliver Reed, which was shown on the BBC a few days before Porridge launched in order to maximize Clement and La Frenais’s exposure.²

One of the first comedy sketches of theirs to be filmed was called ‘Double Date’, and on the strength of that they were commissioned to write The Likely Lads (1964–6), followed by the even more popular Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads? (1973–4). As Phil Wickham has shown in his essential study of this sitcom, it was about a couple of male friends wrestling with changing attitudes to class and gender as well as coping with the anxieties of ageing and marriage. The BBC wanted to capitalize on Clement and La Frenais’s success by moving them on to fresh projects. Porridge was the result.

Porridge was piloted on Comedy Playhouse, the BBC’s launch pad for new work between 1961 and 1975. Originally designed as a vehicle for Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, it was opened out to other writers such as Johnny Speight, Marty Feldman, Roy Clarke and David Croft. Comedy Playhouse was one of the most influential strands ever produced on Western television, running for 15 seasons and 120 episodes and spawning a total of 27 comedy series – including Galton and Simpson’s Steptoe and Son as well as other successes like Till Death Us Do Part, Are You Being Served?, The Liver Birds and Last Of The Summer Wine.

It was a fitting genesis because Clement and La Frenais were inspired by Galton and Simpson’s work. ‘All that depth with just two men in a room – brilliant!’,³ remarked Dick Clement of Steptoe, ‘in that series, there’s a real sense of sadness and frustration, which became something of a trend at the time. Without doubt, the best situation comedy has something more going for it; we wanted that as part of our work too.’⁴

‘Sadness and frustration’ were prevalent in Britain by the time Porridge was launched in 1974 a decade after the writers met amid the optimism of the Sixties. Economic recession intensified disillusionment with British society, which led to industrial strikes, racial violence and terrorist attacks. It was that national mood of disillusionment upon which the writers of Porridge played so cleverly with their cynical, criminal anti-hero, Norman Stanley Fletcher.

One inspiration for this comedy of confinement was the writers’ experience of National Service: the peacetime conscription of two years’ duration, imposed on young British men between 1948 and 1960 to help fight the Cold War and maintain colonial rule. Clement had served in the Royal Air Force, La Frenais in the army, and that experience helped them to understand how Fletcher’s little platoon of misfits functioned. ‘Ian and I both did national service, which was invaluable training for writing Porridge, being thrown together with people from disparate backgrounds.’⁵

Fletcher’s character was also inspired by literary sources, such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962). The first Russian book that criticized Stalinism to be freely published, it was set in a Soviet labour camp in the 1950s. Its hero gets through another day of icy incarceration with the help of a small band of other inmates. That idea became the most significant theme in Porridge, as Dick Clement remembers: ‘the mental attitude was a little bit like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich; I know that sounds pretentious but nevertheless that book was all about little victories, little tiny things that got you through it so that was the attitude that Fletcher conveyed’.⁶

Another literary influence was Jaroslav Hasek’s The Good Soldier Svejk. Published in 1923, its hero is a Czech soldier in the Austro–Hungarian army during the First World War who is sent to prison for questioning authority. A satire on empire, the military and the Catholic Church, it was one of the first anti-war novels, influencing Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, as well as Dick Clement who said:

I remember The Good Soldier Svejk, which I’d read in paperback and he again was someone who was a survivor who didn’t complain, and I thought that was an important part of Fletcher’s character: ok, he’d been banged up but he had admitted what he had done. He was totally lacking in self-pity … his attitude was ‘I’m here and I’ll now make the best of it.’⁷

When it came to selecting one of the two pilots scripted by Clement and La Frenais, Porridge was not the writers’ first choice. They had wanted to develop I’ll fly You for A Quid, about a family of obsessive Welsh gamblers.⁸ ‘Ronnie said it might be more challenging to make Prisoner and Escort,’ remembered Clement, ‘the trouble was, we couldn’t think how we’d sustain it – after all, how could you make life inside seem funny?’⁹ The BBC’s Head of Comedy, Jimmy Gilbert, agreed with Barker and the decision to commission Porridge was made.

Porridge formed part of the BBC’s long-term response to competition from commercial broadcasting. Launched in 1955, Independent Television (ITV) had exposed the BBC’s paternalistic approach to what Britons should see and hear. ITV’s combination of technical innovation and populist programming enabled it to trounce the BBC in the ratings war, taking three-quarters of its audience within two years of launching.

Under the controversial directorship of Hugh Greene (brother of novelist Graham Greene) the BBC began a successful response to ITV in the 1960s, and crime drama was a beneficiary.¹⁰ Z Cars (BBC, 1962–78) presented a more realistic view of the police and criminals. Previously, the quintessential British cop show was Dixon of Dock Green (BBC, 1955–76). Based on the 1950 film The Blue Lamp, actor Jack Warner’s avuncular bobby on the beat, George Dixon, dispensed justice and morality with a firm but gentle hand. Fletcher made this point in series two of Porridge when he referred to The Blue Lamp as ‘a film glamourising that despicable bunch what put me in here’, and later he complains that he isn’t allowed to watch Z Cars.¹¹

The comedy actor Kenneth Williams was among older viewers who disliked the new style of crime drama. He shared an agent with Barker and when he heard that Porridge had been commissioned Williams was apalled, writing ‘Ronnie Barker is embarked on a disastrous course – comedy set in a prison! It is drab and anachronistic and utterly foolish in conception.’¹²

BBC executives knew they’d picked a winner. When Porridge launched in the summer of 1974, it was the cover feature on the BBC magazine Radio Times. Clement and La Frenais told readers, ‘the casting – that’s the key – if the actors are right, then all your troubles are over’.¹³ Of course that’s true of any comedy or drama. But it mattered more in this case because the flinty authenticity of Porridge had to be softened by the lead role being taken by a well-liked comic actor whom people would not mind entering their homes.

Clement and La Frenais had written the pilot for Ronnie Barker sure in the knowledge he would play the role of Fletcher if Porridge was chosen for development. Born in 1929, Barker was brought up in a lower-middle-class home in Oxfordshire. After a grammar school education and a brief spell as a bank clerk he had made his way into provincial repertory theatre and from there into BBC radio during the 1950s. He got his break on TV in the 1960s thanks to Jimmy Gilbert.

Gilbert devised The Two Ronnies (1971–87), which Barker wrote with his co-star Ronnie Corbett. The three men had also worked together in satire. It’s often assumed that the anti-establishment, sketch-based satirical comedy which emerged in the 1960s was the antithesis of formats like the sitcom – with an Oxbridge elite dominating the former and a legacy of working-class Music Hall entertainment dominating the latter. In fact, the actors and writers of satire and sitcom formed a nucleus of progressive comedy. Barker and Corbett worked on the David Frost current affairs show The Frost Report (co-devised by Gilbert), appearing with John Cleese on the famous ‘Class Sketch’ of 1966 that mocked the British class system; and most of the Monty Python team (Cleese, Idle, Palin and Jones) at various times helped to script The Two Ronnies.

For a popular comic actor like Barker to take on such a daring sitcom was therefore not unusual in the context of how British comedy developed between the 1950s and 80s. It broadened the show’s appeal, not only because Barker was a star but also because he was known to audiences of different social backgrounds with different tastes. He relished the role and later said:

There’s a lot of me in there – not that I break into post offices, of course! There’s plenty of my father in Fletch too. Although the character was a Cockney and I was born in Oxford, he was working class and I could relate to him. He was easy to play and I didn’t have to think much about it – unlike with Arkwright in Open All Hours, where I had to consider a different background entirely.¹⁴

The forty-four year old required no assistance to transform himself into Fletcher, beyond some brown dye sprayed onto his grey hair. David Jason, who played Blanco in the sitcom, recalled Barker’s stagecraft: ‘I was two hours in the make up chair, doubling my age to become Blanco … The way Ronnie turned into Fletcher, by contrast, was breathtakingly effortless. He’d spend a little bit of time in hair and make-up, put the chewing gum in his mouth and he was off. He put on that character like he put on a coat.’¹⁵

Fulton Mackay was fifty when he got the role of Fletcher’s adversary. Mackay’s fellow Scot, Jimmy Gilbert, suggested him to the writers having trained at RADA with him. The show’s director, Sydney Lotterby, oversaw the rest of the casting. By choosing the 26-year-old Richard Beckinsale he made the part of Godber more substantial than the writers originally intended.

Barker had suggested Paul Henry for the part – an actor known to millions as the well-meaning, woolly-hatted simpleton, Benny, in the ITV soap opera Crossroads. But Lotterby showed them all a tape of Beckinsale performing in a sitcom called The Lovers and they agreed he was their man. Born in Nottinghamshire to an Anglo-Burmese father and an English mother, Beckinsale had left school at fifteen and had a series of manual jobs before winning a scholarship to RADA. The Lovers (ITV, 1970–1) had been his first starring role. Written and directed by Jack Rosenthal, Beckinsale played a Mancunian bank clerk called Geoffrey – one half of a mismatched couple alongside Paula Wilcox as Beryl. It was a short-lived but popular show and he won a Best Newcomer Award for the role in 1971.

The fourth member of the leading quartet was 47-year-old Brian Wilde. A RADA-trained, Lancashire-born actor, he was also famous for his role as ‘Foggy’ in the long-running sitcom Last of the Summer Wine (BBC1, 1973–2010), which both Jimmy Gilbert and Sydney Lotterby directed. La Frenais commented:

I think of Brian as the civil servant overlooked for his expected promotion; the man in the rain at the bus stop who’s jostled aside and left standing in the rain … He brought much more to the character of Barrowclough than I think, in truth, Dick and I put on the page. It was too eas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘New Faces, Old Hands’: The making of Porridge
• 2 ‘Rough Justice’: Class and power in Porridge
• 3 ‘Men Without Women’: Sex and family in Porridge
• 4 ‘Ways and Means’: Sexuality, race and nation in Porridge
• 5 On the Rocks: Porridge goes to America
• 6 ‘You can’t buck the system’: Screening Porridge
• 7 Going Straight: Freedom and restraint after Porridge
• 8 ‘I ain’t coming back’: The legacy of Porridge
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Credits
• Index
• Imprint