Snowflake day 9

Challenge #9

Rec Us Your Newest Thing. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Content warning: Discussion of prison, abuse of prisoners, sexual assault, IRA hunger strikes, homophobia (including internalised homophobia), queerness being closeted/repressed, racism, and systemic injustic (especially classism).

This is, um, about a lighthearted sitcom, lol. Oh, which one?

Porridge

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Intro

So my 'new' thing is not really new, either to me or in general, but I have been revisiting the 1970s British sitcom Porridge recently and, having had a lovely windfall of Yuletide gifts and written a couple of my own fics, am now absolutely in its thrall with no clear endpoint in sight. The show is generally remembered fondly by people in the UK and Ireland (and, I think, some other Anglophone countries) who are of an age to have seen it, but there is not much of a transformative fandom presence per se, which, of course, means that I have to do my level best to drag a few of you, who it may or may not be new to, down with me 😉

Porridge stars the late Ronnie Barker in the lead role of Norman Stanley Fletcher, a small-time career criminal who has been sent to serve a five year prison sentence in Slade Prison. This is far from his first time on the inside and, as an old hand, he takes the other lead, Lennie Godber, a young first-offender from Birmingham, played by the late Richard Beckinsale (father of Kate and Samantha Beckinsale), under his wing. Fletch and Godber are cellmates for most of the show, despite Fletch's attempts to finagle a single cell, and many of the scenes are set in their cell and mostly, or only, feature them.

Click for more background on the show

Other characters include:

• Mr Barrowclough, an easily taken advantage of and ineffectual prison officer.
• Mr McKay, a more punitive and harsh prison officer.
• Mr Venables, Slade prison's governor, a tropical fish enthusiast who likes to think of himself as enlightened in his approach, a belief which may or may not be justified.
• Lukewarm, an affable gay trusty^* who knits and lends his dubious cooking skills to the prison kitchen. Jokes are often made about his sexuality, but they are generally not meanspirited, especially when compared with other casually homophobic jokes and language in the show, but this is something to be aware of.
• Jim "Jock" McLaren, played by a young Tony Osoba, a cagey prisoner who hasn't had many breaks other than the fractured bones he's inflicted on others, but who is generally on good terms with Fletch and Godber and who, under his defensiveness, is pretty easy going. Just to flag this as a 'buyer beware' thing, there are a number of jokes made about McLaren's ethnicity, nationality, and race (his is Black and Scottish, his biological parents being a West Indian woman and a white Scottish man, although he did not grow up with either of them and was "found wrapped up in a copy of the Glasgow Herald in a Greenock housing estate" and grew up in an orphange) which would not fly today and shouldn't have then, as well as outdated terminology that is not (usually) intended offensively, but which is by almost universal consensus considered racist today. Although some of the homophobic language in the show is, arguably, harsher, as they were used as slurs then as well as now, I think the racism in Porridge, both in its treatment of McLaren and in other incidental dialogue, is more overt and harsh than the homophobia.
• "Bunny" Warren, a prisoner who often goes in on schemes with Fletch and who gets him to read his letters from his wife for cigarettes, since he himself is illiterate.
• "Genial" Harry Grout, a prisoner who the rest of Slade, inmates and staff alike, lives in terror of and has fingers in many pies relating to blackmarket goods and gambling.
• Ives, a horrible little man and frequent antagonist who, among other offenses, commits the cardinal sin of stealing from other prisoners.
• Cyril Heslop, a prisoner who came in with Godber and Fletch who is slow and thoughtful, but not one of nature's great intellectuals, and often several steps behind in a conversation when he chimes in with a contribution.
• Blanco Webb, a 63 year old prisoner serving a long sentence who is old before his time and who Fletch is very caring toward and reserves most of his sarcasm from.
• Harris, another horrible little man along similar lines to Ives. As far as I know, the same actor played an almost identical character "Norris" in one of the other episodes, but I may be conflating two different actors.
• Ingrid Fletcher, Fletch's daughter, who he conceived out of wedlock in Highgate Cemetary on the grave of Karl Marx (he was going through a political phase, and it was as handy a place as any). Ingrid is friendly and cheerful, but a little flakey.

Most of the plots involve harebrained schemes that go awry, like an underground high-stakes game of snakes and ladders, or a pineapple chunks heist. It is very silly and, while aspects of the humour are now dated, a lot of it stands up and I enjoy it a lot. Something I really like about it is that Fletch often repeats jokes in a nudge-nudge-did-you-get-it way, or looks around to see if people are laughing at them, which feels very true to his character, who is very prone to off-the-cuff wordplay and holding forth, and not a little show offish about it. He's very charming and funny and well-spoken, albeit in a way that includes frequent malapropisms, and he clearly bases a lot of his self-esteem on being seen as such. Also, being funny and irreverent is a large part of how he keeps the bastards from grinding him down.

Aside from the aspects of the show that have not aged well that I mentioned above, I really love the humour of the show and I find it very charming. As well as the wacky sitcom shenanigans, the dialogue has a lot of punning and wordplay, largely from Fletch, and the way Barker performs Fletch is extremely winning. A lot of the time he'll repeat jokes in a nudge-nudge-get-it way, or look around to see if people have reacted to a witticism, and I find that just such a lovely and real layer of characterisation. Fletch is rarely serious, often joking, loves playing with language and often holds forth, all of which he is pretty vain and show-offish about and it's clear that being thought of as funny and well-spoken or clever is a big part of his self-image. His irreverance is also a big part of what keeps him sane and stops the bastards from grinding him down, because, while the show is mostly a light hearted take on incarceration that does not really square with the realities of British prisons in the 1970s, at the height of IRA hunger-strikes and at a time rife with human rights violations of prisoners, it is not entirely rosy and uncynical or uncritical about the criminal justice system and prison. There are a lot of elements that focus on how class and marginalisation plays into who ends up in prison and the show is very much on the side of most of the prisoners in Slade over the system that put them in there even if they are as cheerfully unrepentent as Fletcher, although some crimes are framed less sympathetically than theft, notably white collar crime.

*A trusty is a prisoner with special responsibilities and privileges. Also, per the Wikipedia page on the prison trusty system, apparently trusty rather than trustee is the standard spelling, so the more you know, I guess.
[return to where you left off.]

The show has three series and two Christmas specials, two spin-offs—Going Straight, which follows Fletch immediately after he's released from Slade, and a reboot from 2016 where his grandson is the lead, which I have not seen and don't really intent to—a semi-canonical movie from 1979, and a once-off mockumentary set in-universe—Life Beyond the Box: Norman Stanley Fletcher—which came out in 2003.

My crackpot shippy slant on the dynamic between the leads, which is actually very reasonable, how dare you, I don't have to stand here and be insulted like this

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Godber: I'm fed up with crime. I wanna go straight.
Fletch: How old are you, son?
Godber: Twenty-three.
Fletch: Twenty-three and you wanna go straight? What kind of talk is that, eh? You've got your whole life ahead of you!

So, yeah, I ship Fletch and Godber, because of course I do. Here is a graphic I made and posted on Tumblr in 2023 when I started rewatching the show:

This is not a recent development or a revelation I've only had upon rewatching the show, because I also shipped them a LOT when I saw the show first as a teenager. It was, however, extremely arresting (aha) to revisit it and be hit by the shippiness anew. Given my much-touted love of roguish con-men and crooks, and shipping them with wide-eyed younger men who adore them, this is extremely on-brand behaviour from me, to the point where a friend, after I told her that I was rewatching Porridge and having a great time sexualising Ronnie Barker through the proxy of Richard Beckinsale, said, "That makes total sense as a ship for you." A statement which remains the funniest way I have ever been called out in my entire life.

However! In my own defence, I don't think this is shipping goggles forcing a romantic dynamic that may not exist onto two characters who tick enough boxes for me that I'd like to imagine them kissing. I mean it's not not that, but it's not just that. There is, of course, Godber's general open admiration, sometimes almost to the point of awe, of Fletcher, and Fletch's protectiveness over Godber, and their little domestic squabbles and stuff like Godber darning Fletch's socks and nicking tins of pineapple chunks for him at great personal risk, but the first thing that piqued my interest came from their first scene together.

Godber: Know all the form, don't ya? You been here before?
Fletch: No, never been here. But it’s all the same; porridge is porridge innit?
Godber: First time for me. Don't know how I'll get through.
Fletch: Oh, cheer up, could be worse. State this country's in, you could be free, couldn't you? Stuck outside with no work and a crumbling economy. How horrible that would be. Nothing to do but go to bed early and increase the population.
Godber: Won't be doing that for a while.
Fletch: No, that's true, hmm. No, I shouldn't have said that, it's a tasteless joke, innit?
Godber, with an expression like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth: I'm gonna feel ever so deprived.

Like??? I cannot overstate how easy it is to read a lot of scenes in the first few episodes as Godber trying desperately to signal in every way that he can think of that he's up for it to this older, more experienced man who's done time before and has taken him under his wing. Tragically, Fletch doesn't pick up on these hints. I imagine that he hasn't quite got it right yet, per this quote from the pilot:

Godber: Hey, Fletcher, what does he mean by 'practising homosexual?'
Fletch: One who ain’t quite got it right yet.

Ah well, better blatant than latent, but better latent than never, eh? And, like, again, I feel like it is an extremely small stretch to read Fletch, a man who has spent most of his married life in prison and who got married very young to his also-very-young girlfriend after an unplanned pregnancy, as someone who is gay and just hasn't spent enough time outside prison to reflect much on not being that interested in women sexually/romantically.

Fletch, talking to the hens in the prison farm as he steals eggs: Now then, girls. This is what's known as one of the perks of the job. Now, with these eggs I'm smuggling in 'ere, I can get meself a quarter ounce of shag, or two tubes of toothpaste, or... three bars of Fruit 'N Nut! Or I could take them down to E-wing and see Smutty Garland, the king of the porn, exchange 'em for two of his dirty books, yeah, full of full-frontal naked nubiles...
Fletch: I think I'd rather have the Fruit 'N Nut meself.

He also says at various points that 'carnal thoughts' are a bad idea in prison and you should try your absolute best to suppress them—although he also plasters the cell with pictures of topless Page 3 girls, so he's not entirely consistent here, at least on a surface level reading where you do not assume that this choice of decor is performative. I am, however, equally open to readings of him as not gay but otherwise queer and attracted to men, but deeply repressed about it, perhaps in part because of having spent so much time in prison, where there is a lot of homophobic violence and sexual assault, which queer prisoners are disproportionately the victims of. Fletcher himself expresses a lot of casual homophobia, often in the form of jokes about sexual assault, which could just be read at face value as bad-taste homophobic jokes, but could also take on a more sinister undertone if you scratch the surface of it, particularly since Fletch's primary coping mechanism is humour.

Fletch is pretty fond of Lukewarm, who is gay and out, and textually treats Lukewarm's boyfriend on the outside, Trevor, and their relationship as basically equivalent to other prisoners' relationships with their wives, with the only caveat that Trevor also has to worry about Lukewarm having wandering eyes while they're apart, so I don't think he's a unilateral bigot. I do absolutely think he needs some practice to get the hang of one or two things though. As it were.

Where you can watch it

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There are some different options to rent or buy various parts of the canon as well as a few streaming services that have it available in certain regions. What I've been able to find online are the following:

• Porridge S1-3 (TV 1974):
  • DVD
  • Britbox
  • BBC iPlayer
  • Prime
  • Apple TV
• The Christmas specials:
  • No Way Out:
    • DVD
    • Britbox
    • Apple TV
  • The Desperate Hours:
    • DVD
    • Britbox
    • Apple TV
• Going Straight (TV 1978):
  • DVD
  • Apple TV
  • YouTube
• Porridge (Movie 1979):
  • YouTube
  • DVD
• Life Beyond the Box: Norman Stanley Fletcher (TV 2003):
  • YouTube

I also think there were some episodes released on VHS at some point, if you have a VCR. I don't think any part of the canon has been released on BluRay, and as far as I know the 2003 mockumentary is only availabe online on YouTube. It doesn't seem to be on the iPlayer anymore and I don't think it ever got a physical release.

The digital options above may or may not be available in your region and there may be others that I am unaware of.

In terms of the DVDs, you can buy the individual series/seasons by themselves, or in one of a few different boxsets (one with S1-3, one with S1-3 plus the Christmas specials, a few miscellaneous Ronnie Barker DVD boxsets that have some of his other work), but something to bear in mind is the DVDs I've seen online seem to all be Region 2 or Region 4. If you are not in those regions, and you don't have a multiregion DVD player, VLC can usually play DVDs regardless of region if you plug a USB DVD player into a computer in my experience, but I think it depends on the drivers in your DVD player. It may be possible to change the region of your DVD player (although sometimes you can only do this a fixed number of times before it gets locked to one region) or install firmware from the internet that will allow it to play DVDs from any region, or you might also be able to use one of a variety of programs online, such as HandBrake, to rip a region-locked DVD (sometimes with some workarounds if it is not working in a straightforward way, but there are how-to guides that I can put you in the way of it you would like).

For what it's worth though, in my experience a USB DVD drive and VLC will play any DVD I throw at it, which I think is the case for most USB DVD drives and laptop DVD drives, and I've never tried to rip a DVD and then been prevented by region, regardless of the software I used (and I have tried a few), but your mileage may vary and there is a chance you might buy something that you can't play, or can't play without voiding your DVD players warranty or wandering into what you may consider to be legally grey areas (although I believe that ripping DVDs you bought legally for private use is legal in most juridications, which, again, is just my impression and may be wrong). They generally seem to be going fairly cheaply though, so it could be a relatively inexpensive gamble to pick up a single Region 2 DVD to test it out if you felt up for it.

There may be other more dubiously legal methods of seeing Porridge, or its various spin-offs and extended canon, but this is just an observation and not a recommendation, and I certainly would not advise anyone to send me a message asking me to make MP4s from DVDs that I've bought and ripped available to them.

As ever, please let me know if any of the links are broken and I'll fix them