Ann Way Season: Within These Walls - Get the Glory Down
As I commented before, doing a series of posts about an actor encourages me to see shows that I have never seen before, and this is one that you won't have seen on this blog before. The reason is that I don't tend to enjoy prison dramas because I see the subject matter as unremittingly dreary and in my cynical way I see prison dramas as a cheap option for TV companies because in their nature you just need one set and a lot of grey paint.
Within these Walls was broadcast from 1974 to 1978 and is unusual for two things. The first is that despite being broadcast at the height of wiping, there is only one episode missing. The other is that it gives much more attention to the staff of the women's prison it features than to the lives of the prisoners. It has been commercially released in its entirety if you're interested but luckily this episode has found its was on to YouTube. It's also famous for starring legendary actress Googie Withers, who unfortunately won't ever have one of these seasons dedicated to her because of the relative paucity of her television work.
The subject of Get the Glory Down is a very interesting one to me. The first part is about how one prisoner puts a curse on another prisoner who subsequently dies. The second half recounts how the prisoner who did the curse is so remorseful that she has a religious conversion, and given that she was very much top dog in the prison, the prisoners who always did do what she told them, then follow her in her religious beliefs and practices.
You would be correct if you jumped to the conclusion that the first part about the curse, sounds very much like the plot of one of those old horror films that take place in some far-flung part of the Empire where the primitives are dead primitive and there are endless zombies. This is an incredibly difficult thing to transplant to 1970s Britain, and an integral part of the plot is that the victim of the curse has not long come from Africa and the prisoner who cursed her is of African-Caribbean/Black British descent. The racial overtones of this make this a difficult episode because Black people are clearly depicted as naive, credulous, and so on. There's a lot of '"You people" have a different way of looking at things'.
As it happens Ann Way plays one of the characters who are obviously intended to stop the show being only a depiction of Black people as credulous, because she plays a white person who's credulous. It's a bit different from the other roles I've seen her in because it's not so dotty. She has the misfortune to being the cellmate to Luella who laid the curse, and obviously does all the work, but asks to be moved to another cell after it comes out about the curse. Ann's character is frightened of the curse and runs away.
It may be because of the show's focus on the staff (although they also seem to take everything the prisoners say at face value) but I have a criticism of this episode. This is that I'm surprised that an entire prison full of women take the word of a convicted conwoman at face value. Even the screws are more cynical about Luella than the prisoners are, and you'd really think they'd be more suspicious. But as I say this may be for narrative reasons. As it happens this episode was written by Peter Wildeblood, a journalist who was in a position to know about (admittedly men's) prisons because his imprisonment in 1954 for 'conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons' was one of the cases which ultimately led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in Britain. The idea of punishing a man for being sexually attracted to other men, by locking him up in a building full of other men who couldn't escape and hadn't even seen another woman in months or even years, muct have meant sense to somebody, but I expect that strange experience would affect subsequent writings about prison.
In fact I do really like the way the staff entirely hold the discussion of what is happening. There is quite a lot of discussion about the subject of the curse, the responsibility of the prison to the prisoners, ethical questions about the religious revival suddenly happening in their midst, what they can or should do about it given that it's being run by a convicted conwoman, and so on. In fact there is a lot in this episode to interest me, it's just that it is in a setting which I really don't like.
It also gives a slightly different role to our friend Ann Way, and honestly I really just wish we were told what she was in prison for, because it would make the character perfect!
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