Inside story

After a well-received pilot episode as part of the BBC’S sitcom season last year, the updated version of Porridge arrives on our screens tonight to begin a longer stretch.

If you didn’t catch it before, Kevin Bishop stars as Nigel ‘Fletch’ Fletcher, who is the grandson of Norman Stanley Fletcher from the original series and is currently banged up at HMP Wakeley for cybercrimes.

“It’s a very different dynamic for him,” explains Kevin. “He’s almost 30, so he’s missing out on a very important part of a young man’s life. But you can see him going on the same trajectory as his grandfather, where he’s just learning very, very quickly to do the bare minimum – you could imagine that in 15 years’ time he’ll be much wiser and won’t be getting involved with anybody else’s business at all!”

Performing scene-stealing duties in this revival is Mark Bonnar as the shrewd, strict and steely Officer Meekie, for whom Fletch and his fellow inmates are a constant thorn in his side.

“He runs the whole show, basically,” chuckles Mark. “He’s a hardened, seasoned prison officer who believes that the crims are in there to be punished and not fawned over. He tries to run a tight ship, and I think he feels that it would be a lot better for everyone and it would be a lot more smooth-running if

Fletch wasn’t there!”

This may be a re-imagining of a sitcom that originally ran in the 1970s, but Kevin believes that there’s a timelessness to the central idea behind it.

“Nothing lends itself better to British comedy than being incarcerated,” he muses. “The rules of British sitcom are that the characters need to be trapped, they can’t get out of the situation they’re stuck in – like Del Boy and Rodney in Nelson Mandela House, or Steptoe and son in their junkyard. Prison is the perfect place for that!”