'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.
