Vintage Viewing: My Guilty Pleasure

"Prisoner Cell Block H" brings you an image scarier than Jack Nicholson in "The Shining".

The still above is from episode 272. Evidently, this Australian public television show aired up to twice a week, so I am not even 1/3 of the way through my classic "women's prison genre" binge/cringeworthy Ytubing.

The maniacal lady shown is a narcissistic psychopath doctor. As per usual in "Prisoner", characters and plots depict all of the psychology and sociology basics I remember from undergrad studies. The series begins in 1979, when I was barely 10, and I recollect vaguely how taboo it was at the time. Worse to my parents' sensibilities than even "The Young Ones" UK punk dadaism of the mid-eighties.

All of that raw anger, sexuality, protectiveness, jealousy, vanity, and tenderness that only women confined can provide.

This program spawned the hugely popular shows "Orange Is the New Black" and, more directly, the current Australian drama, "Wentworth". I plumbed the depths of the shadow feminine watching these archetypal pageants of women with backstories and tragic heroism and comic anti-heroism. Shows full of all description of ladies, from frail to ferocious, refined to profane, with hearts of gold gone wrong--to wrong gone golden, and bad gone worse.

I ran out of patience with flippant "Orange" when the opener to season 6 had a snide jab about the San Bernardino massacre, and seemed to devolve into gratuitous spectacles of sadism.

I just plain ran out of episodes of the more humane and serious character development in the reboot "Wentworth"...so I turned to that dusty old public tv series of my tender years...

PRISONER

I figured it would be hokey, just as I accepted the papier mache sets of OG "Dr. Who". What I didn't expect was the richness of the Australian Gothic gold it possesses.

Soundtrack: "Australia", by The Kinks (1969)

The Kinks sing in 1969

Australia, no class distinction! No drug addiction!...Everyone walks around...with a perpetual smile across their face."

With typical irony.

1979 Australian Gothic "Prisoner" features class stratification, stigma, women's lib, educational opportunity or lack thereof...all of the budding conflicts which spawned what people now sneer at as "social justice".

I can't promise you won't start uttering irresistible phrases from Lizzie Birdsworth, like "S'truth!" Or perhaps "Ya bloody ripper!". I save some of her lines for special occasions, for example, "Bugger me gently!"

Here is a link to episode 1. As the saying goes, "the first hit's always free."

Vinegar Tits film noire

Happy Halloween! In JAIL!!!

Love,cat

@creationofcare