When Prisoner began in 1979, no one could have predicted it would go on to air 692 episodes and become a cult classic. In light of Foxtel’s commissioning of Prisoner re-imagining Wentworth, Bob Ellis looks back at the original.
Watching the first episodes of Prisoner today, when Helen Travers (Kerry Armstrong) and Lynn Warner (Pieta Toppano) are ‘settling in’ (one is innocent of burying a baby alive, the other guilty of stabbing an adulterous husband who bullied her into an abortion, his death a scene reminiscent of Psycho) and Bea (Val Lehman) and Mum are released from what Scott Morrison would call ‘luxury accommodation’, we are less drawn into the unfolding stories and characters than we were in 1979.
We are less keen now to accept the bullying, the furniture-smashing violence, the unremarked corruption, the Governor’s piss-elegant Toorak accent, the male doctor’s bad acting, and the, well, imprecise morality at...
Watching the first episodes of Prisoner today, when Helen Travers (Kerry Armstrong) and Lynn Warner (Pieta Toppano) are ‘settling in’ (one is innocent of burying a baby alive, the other guilty of stabbing an adulterous husband who bullied her into an abortion, his death a scene reminiscent of Psycho) and Bea (Val Lehman) and Mum are released from what Scott Morrison would call ‘luxury accommodation’, we are less drawn into the unfolding stories and characters than we were in 1979.
We are less keen now to accept the bullying, the furniture-smashing violence, the unremarked corruption, the Governor’s piss-elegant Toorak accent, the male doctor’s bad acting, and the, well, imprecise morality at...
- 3/6/2012
- by Brooke Hemphill
- Encore Magazine
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