THE BBC’s production of its six-part series Waiting For The Out (★★☆☆☆) seems to address not only its past failings in terms of prison series but also to further the new obsession with working-class life as evidenced in the Emmy and Golden Globe-winning Adolescence.

The series centres around a supposedly solidly working-class young adult, Dan, who begins his day job as a teacher of philosophy at a maximum-security prison.

Dan is focused on paternity. Would he make a good father like his brother? Would his girlfriend, whom he barely knows, forego artificial insemination so he could instead be the daddy? And why is one of the inmates obsessed with his own daughter?

Dan seems to be working class, but this is a deception. When he begins teaching philosophy to the rowdy inmates who (rightfully?) can’t find the use in Dan’s reciting the now neoliberal preachings of John Locke, he turns philosophy into a series of cute conundrums. In response, one of the inmates, who knows more philosophy than he does, calls him out and suggests that the philosophy he instead needs to be espousing is that of materialism. Dan ignores him, having no use for Marx’s dictum that philosophers have thus far only interpreted the world, whereas “the point is to change it.”

Dan, whose background is working class, reveals himself to be solidly middle class in his thought and outlook. His gaze on those he would “teach” is solidly that of the BBC itself. He doesn’t recognise the innate knowledge of those victimised by the system but rather attempts to “civilise” them by making them accommodate to middle-class, safe, genteel, modes of thought and being.

Though the series is based on a prison autobiography it has none of the actual, grounded toughness of ‘40s prison films like, say, Brute Force (1947) where the prisoners’ inability to accommodate to the system that oppresses them leads to an attempt to take over the prison. Instead, here we have “characters” performing oddball prison rituals, (smashing the walls, kicking chairs, trying to run out of the classroom) with the teacher’s goal being to sanitise them.

The focus on paternity is part of this. Will Dan learn to accept his father’s cruelty, thus making him a candidate for fatherhood himself? His single-minded obsession with being a parent, which the series wishes us to see as a sign of maturity is, rather, another step toward interpolation into the social order with not a suggestion of protest against it.

What is the BBC up to here? The network tried one prison series, Time (2021), where the focus was not Sean Bean’s prisoner but a prison guard, and which was hardly effective. The station is also acutely aware of having to match Netflix’ Adolescence which portrayed working-class men and boys as villains but which maintained a stolid focus on its working-class characters.

In this case the BBC, as usual, is taking the middle ground. Here the focus is on a middle-class character disguised as working class, set amongst caricatured working-class reprobates whose rebellion, instead of being channelled into actively opposing the system which has exploited them, is instead siphoned off into metaphysical questions about “purpose” and “freedom.” This makes a mockery of their lack of either, instead of addressing the means by which they could both create — through struggle — a genuine purpose and move toward actual not delusional freedom.

Ultimately, (as Hamlet says to Horatio) there is more in heaven and earth — and in the prison setting in which he finds himself — than is dreamt of in Dan’s philosophy.  

Waiting for the Out is on BBC iplayer