LIFE BEHIND BARS: VISITING HOUR, C4, 9pm
GLASGOW has been home to several infamous jails, including the appalling old Duke Street Prison where murderers were hanged, and everyone knows the name of Barlinnie. But HMP Low Moss, just outside the city, is less recognised.
It’s a new prison, having been demolished, rebuilt and re-opened in 2012. From the outside it looks like a modern school or community centre, and it holds every category of male prisoner from those on remand to lifers.
This documentary sends its cameras into the visiting area and focuses on family, friends and patient girlfriends as they visit their loved ones.
Charley visits her convict boyfriend and insists on planning their wedding even though the prospective groom has no release date. Is she being desperately optimistic or just trying to give him something to hope for?
And David ponders how he ended up in jail: “If I’m happy I’ll drink. If I’m sad I’ll drink.”
BROKEN, BBC1, 9pm
I’M glad this melancholy series is ending tonight. Watching it has been like eating a Black Forest gateau: it’s just crammed full of stuff and it’s all a bit too much, and this particular gateau gets served with a clump of heavy-handed lectures on the state of Austerity Britain.
I’d have preferred something a bit more subtle.
This is a drama done in the style of a public information film, and it often feels like we’re being lectured to.
In tonight’s finale, poor old Father Michael is feeling the same wearisome strain we all are, after sitting through weeks of police shootings, suicides, hungry weans and dead grannies left under the duvet.
He is called to attend the inquest into Vernon’s death and is placed under oath, which will be difficult for a man burdened with a thousand secrets from the confessional and his own past.
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