UFO Info Week-End

But why I asked production designer Mike Oxley was HMP Larkhall based

But why, I asked production designer Mike Oxley, was HMP Larkhall based on a male prison? The only female jail with landings and low-ceilinged cells was Risley women’s unit, which has closed. “We visited Winchester jail, but the women’s unit there is modern, not like a prison at all,” explains Oxley. “We needed to create something like viewers would imagine a prison to be so we based the set on elements of Winchester men’s prison and on the decommissioned Oxford jail – all the outside scenes are shot there.”The costumes looked wrong too: Debra Stephenson, playing prison bully Shell Dockley, was wearing a leopardskin top and a tiny mini-skirt: “When I went to Winchester prison the women were all in jogging pants and sweatshirts but I suppose you need dramatic licence,” said Stephenson “The character I play is pure evil. I spoke to one of the prisoners and she said, `Please don’t make us too nasty, because it really isn’t like that. Women are supportive to each other.’ But obviously we have to beef it up to get the drama.”As I left the set, alarm bells were ringing. They rang even louder when the marketing hype started to appear, showing a scantily clad Stephenson under the headline “Sex in the Nick: TV’s frankest and steamiest prison drama ever”. The working title, Jailbirds, had to be dropped when the BBC appropriated it for its spring documentary, and McManus and Chadwick hoped viewers would recognise the Bad Girls tag as subtly ironic, because the series would explode public misconceptions that female prisoners are a bunch of Myra Hindleys.Any sense of irony was lost on prisoners and prison officers who watched the first two episodes.

I asked staff and inmates with personal experience of nine of the 16 women’s jails for their views.”We just burst out laughing,” says Jane, a Cookham Wood lifer. “All the girls thought it was ridiculous!” A woman officer agreed: “We’ve had a laugh about it ourselves, but actually we think it’s outrageous that they’re claiming this stuff is true to life in a women’s prison, and that the public might believe it.”The prisoners objected most to the overt sexual content: “Women in prison don’t look glamorous,” says Marie (ex-HMP Bullwood Hall) A lot have poor skin and teeth and lank hair. Bad Girls is just playing up to people’s fantasies – that women’s prisons are full of evil temptresses. Of course there are a few lecherous male officers but they’re not `in your face’ like they showed it.”My book exposed the brutal bullying that accompanies prison drug misuse, and Clare (Risley and HMP Drake Hall) and Liz (HMP New Hall) both said this was accurately depicted in Bad Girls. “But then they spoiled it with that melodramatic scene with the scary music, when the drugs squad march in and strip that woman naked!” says Liz “It just doesn’t happen that way. And that scene when they delouse a woman in a bath – ridiculous! That’s going back to Victorian times.”Chadwick and McManus are disappointed at this reaction from prisons.

“To be honest, I felt a twinge of unhappiness because I think we’ve written it from the women’s point of view,” said McManus. “All our sympathies are with them.”Brian Park was encouraged in his plans for a women’s jail drama by the public response when, as Coronation Street producer, he sent Deirdre Rachid to jail. Park’s mission for Shed Productions, the new company he set up with McManus, Chadwick and Eileen Gallagher, former Managing Director of LWT, is “to make strong drama that is unashamedly populistic”. Can this be reconciled with the quest for gritty realism with a social conscience?”Of course ITV is a commercial organisation which is ratings-driven,” agrees McManus. “There is obviously a contradiction between mass viewing and reality – so it has to be heightened reality. We want to hook an audience and we want them to sympathise with our characters. I think we have and they will.”Last week I was in Holloway talking to prisoners about what would help them on release “Take that Bad Girls rubbish off the box!” said one.

“It’s giving us a bad name!”Angela Devlin’s books are published by Waterside Press `Bad Girls’ is on ITV tonight at 9pm. James Brown has risen from the ashes Again. This time, though, the individualistic, iconoclastic, hell-raising former editor of Loaded who went on to prove too hot for the poshest publishing house in town, is following a well-trodden path. As other equally illustrious, if not so notorious, figures from the world of journalism have done before him, he is setting out on the road of mini media magnatedom, becoming publishing director of his own magazine house, gloriously named IFG (for I Feel Good).
Brown first came to prominence as the journalist who, carving Loaded in his own self-destructive image, proved there was indeed a magazine market to be tapped in the beer, tits and trouble-making antics of a new breed of British lads. He was given unprecedented free rein at publisher IPC, took the title to unchartered peaks and was lauded by the industry, only to find himself three years down the line staring upwards at the circulation figures of a brighter young imitator. He had been out-Loaded by Emap’s FHM.Flagging from the frenetic lifestyle that goes with the Loaded territory, Brown last year was offered a graceful way out when Nicholas Coleridge, managing director of Conde Nast, offered him the editorship of GQ.Brown underwent the strangest of transmogrifications. He married his girlfriend, said he was giving up the drink and drugs and was photographed in Savile Row suits looking every inch the smart, clean-living Nineties dude.But those heads which wagged disapprovingly at Coleridge’s brave choice of GQ editor had a point.

Though Brown did manage to halt the decline of the glossy monthly, his previous incarnation proved harder to throw off. A certain laddism crept into GQ and finally Coleridge cracked. Apparently appalled at the naming of the Nazis, and Field Marshal Rommel in particular, in an article listing the “sharpest men in the 20th century”, he gave Brown his marching orders in February.So now it seems, after a period of reflection, Brown has decided he will march to his own tune, and his own tune only. He has rented offices in the media village of Clerkenwell, bought cast-off furniture from troubled trendy publisher Wagadon and teamed up with youth-media companies Harry Monk and Cunning Stunts for his new venture.Leeds Leeds Leeds, the Leeds United title he launched and is passionate about, is expected to kick start IFG. If all goes to plan, other consumer titles, possibly a men’s one among them, will follow.In taking this route, Brown joins the roll-call of top, malcontent journalists deciding to go it alone.