Screw, review: Porridge played straight in new likeable prison drama
Viewers of last year’s BBC prison drama, Time, will have come away with the impression that life behind bars is hideous. Channel 4’s Screw takes a different approach. It’s pitched at the midpoint between Time and Porridge. Bad things almost happen, but then they’re averted in a comic style.
An example. An inmate has spent the episode asking prison officers for help, but they’re too busy or dismissive to find out what he needs. In desperation, he holds a knife to a cellmate’s throat. We finally learn his demand: he wants to know why they’ve taken apple crumble off the menu. The officers roll their eyes.
Writer Rob Williams, whose credits include the excellent 2019 drama The Victim, previously taught art in a prison, and has volunteered in them since. He is making the point that prison life is a mix of the mundane and blackly comic, where blow-ups occur over the smallest of things.
The result is a sanitised drama in which the audience has little emotional investment in the lives of the inmates (contrast this with Time, where even overheard conversations in the visiting room packed a punch) and the tension is far outweighed by the lighter moments.
Much more successful is Williams’s handling of the officers, who are the main focus. Nina Sosanya plays Leigh Henry, senior officer in charge of C Wing at the fictional Long Marsh Prison. She’s married to the job and keeps secrets from her colleagues.
New recruit Rose (Northern Irish actress Jamie-Lee O’Donnell from Derry Girls, doing a faultless English accent) is thrown in at the deep end on her first day. She may also have something to hide. Reframe Screw as a drama about two characters who work in a prison, rather than a reflection of prison life, and it’s good.
The supporting cast of officers includes the objectionable Gary (Stephen Wight), who has no sympathy for the prisoners: “Remember, they put themselves behind these doors.” Leigh, on the other hand, is determined to treat everyone with compassion and respect, to an almost saintly degree. The part that rings true is when officer Ali (Faraz Ayub) and Rose both explain how they ended up there: because it’s a job that hardly requires any training and you don’t need qualifications.
There are plenty of little insights like this. But if Time made prison seem like a descent into hell, Screw portrays it as more akin to a hotel with limited amenities but staff determined that you enjoy your stay.
