TV Transformations & Transgressive Women

Kim Akass and Sue Turnbull

I then turned to Wentworth, which was near impossible to find on British TV. Maybe it was due to the overwhelming popularity of Orange is the New Black (2013–19), but nobody I knew had seen Wentworth. It was a show that only the most dedicated fans could find as, much like its predecessor in the 1980s, Channel 5 tucked it away late at night and, to be honest, not many people that study TV in the UK watch Channel 5. To my relief, I eventually found it on Amazon Prime and began my great Prisoner and Wentworth viewing marathon.

I wish I could say that I did something other than watch Wentworth and Prisoner for the best part of four months. People often say that watching TV for a living isn’t really a job, but they clearly have never watched a series twelve hours straight, seven days a week. When I discovered that Prisoner had been remade for American TV as Dangerous Women (1981–2), I nearly lost the plot. Luckily there were only fifty-two episodes – I could easily watch them in the space of two weeks, Wentworth and Prisoner not so.

I bare my soul to you in this Foreword because, over the course of those four summer months, curled up on the sofa, pen and notebook in hand (actually laptop but you know what I mean), from nine in the morning until nine at night (only toilet and lunch breaks allowed), I became totally absorbed in the world of Australian prison drama. I learned the lingo and lived the dream. I loved Franky Doyle (both iterations), was in awe of The Freak and cried when [SPOILER ALERT] Bea died at her hands at the end of season four of Wentworth. In truth, over the course of those four months I lost any sense of objectivity and became totally consumed by and obsessed with the women in Wentworth Detention Centre. When the time came for me to get on that plane to Melbourne and address the conference, I was really worried that all pretence of academic cool was lost and I would be exposed for the fangirl that I had become.

The essays in this collection reflect that passion. From the two Craigs recollecting their coming out to Prisoner, Alex Bevan’s celebration of the stone-cold power dame and Alexa Scarlata’s investigation into how Netflix and America changed Wentworth – to name but three – the essays contained within the following pages are excellent examples of the engagement of the aca-fan, or fan scholar, of Prisoner and Wentworth. Embracing the subjective within research, each of the essays demonstrates a love of the series and the medium that reminds me of why I began writing about TV. Every now and again, a series comes along that speaks directly to (and for) the dis-enfranchised – the queer, female, Black and trans members of the audience traditionally excluded from dominant TV narratives – and in response, powerful scholarship emerges.

As everyone in Australia will have, at the time of writing, seen the latest season of Wentworth (and the return of Joan Ferguson), spare a thought for those of us that are still waiting. Until then, watch some re-runs of Prisoner, refresh your memory of Wentworth, put the kettle on and settle down with this book. Reading these essays has not only re-ignited my love affair with Wentworth but also with TV in general. I hope it does the same for you.

– Kim Akass

Professor of Radio, Television and Film

Rowan University, USA

***

Like Kim, I was thrilled to be invited to speak at the Wentworth is the New Prisoner conference, not least because Prisoner was not only the first TV show I ever wrote about as a postgraduate student, but also because it introduced me to the pleasure – and pain – of doing audience research. Let me explain.

At that point, my then supervisor showed me a letter he had found in the Channel Ten archives from the headmaster of a girls’ high school in outer Melbourne, complaining that a group of girls were copying the antisocial behaviours of the inmates, including aggression towards the authority that the school imposed. I specifically recall that the headmaster was most offended by the fact that the students had started referring to the teachers as ‘the screws’. The possibility that, like a prison, the institution of a school imposes regulations on a student’s time, occupation of space and on appropriate dress and behaviour, was clearly lost on the headmaster – though clearly not on the girls. Prisoner, I concluded after interviewing this group of students for myself, served as a metaphor in their resistance to the forces seeking to make them conform to feminine ‘niceness’ and being ‘good girls’. But this wasn’t the whole story. How could it be?

As Alan McKee has suggested, citing Thomas (1980), Palmer (1986), Fiske (1987), Hodge and Tripp (1986), Docker and Curthoys (1997) and my own unpublished research on the show, Prisoner might just be the Australian TV show to have inspired more audience research than any other (McKee 2001: 184). And McKee may well be right, since other successful Australian exports in the 1980s, such as Neighbours (1985–) and Home and Away (1998–), appear to have passed almost unnoticed (though there was a great deal of press speculation about their projected appeal to audiences in the UK).

In the beginning, Prisoner was shown on network TV in Australia, in an early evening family viewing timeslot. Over the years I have encountered many students, now adults, who have told me that they were not allowed to watch Prisoner by their parents because of the ‘violence’ and presumed negative effects. Wentworth, on the other hand, was commissioned by Foxtel (the Australian branch of the Fox Network) in 2012 and launched on the streaming channel SoHo in 2013, before moving across to Fox Showcase in 2017. As executive director Brian Walsh suggested in a press release at the time: ‘Wentworth will be a dynamic and very confronting drama series, developed and stylized specifically for subscription TV audiences. We have told producers to push all boundaries and honestly depict life on the inside as it is in 2012’ (cited by Dallas 2012).

The key phrase here is ‘subscription TV audiences’, which signals a perception that Wentworth will cater to a specific ‘niche’ audience, one that can possibly afford what were at the time high subscription fees for Foxtel. In commissioning Wentworth, Foxtel content producers would also be well aware of the global cult following for Prisoner, and how the re-imagined Wentworth might meet the needs of a global niche audience who would be inspired to subscribe to their streaming service in order to watch the show. I know I did.

From the moment in 1980 when fifty female motorbike riders converged on the offices of KTLA-5 on Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, to protest the death of Franky Doyle, the lesbian prisoner who had been shot by police during a riot in episode 20 of Cell Block H; to the enthusiastic online fan reception of Wentworth when it was shown in the United States; it is clear that both shows have inspired the kind of participatory engagement that begs the question ‘why?’.

As this collection clearly demonstrates, Wentworth matters as much today as Prisoner did some forty years ago. Now read on and find out why.

– Sue Turnbull

Senior Professor of Communication and Media

University of Wollongong, Australia

On behalf of our authors, we extend our gratitude to the many industry practitioners and expert informants who generously gave their time and shared their knowledge in interviews conducted by contributors to this volume. Thanks to Martha Ansara, Michael Brindley, Shareena Clanton, Andreas Fuhrman, Marcia Gardner, Pete McTighe, Robynne Murphy, Pollo de Pimentel, Jan Russ, Mark Stiles and Daniela Torsch. Thanks to Cath Moore for her work transcribing and editing the interview with Shareena Clanton.

Additionally, we would like to thank the many academics who acted as peer reviewers for the chapters in this collection. In generously sharing their time, expert knowledge and constructive criticism, they aided immensely in shaping and fine-tuning the research in the chapters that follow.

Thanks also for institutional support provided to the conference and book by Monash University, the School of Culture and Communication in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne, and the University of Technology Sydney. Monash University provided Special Project funds to enable inclusion of an Indigenous Australian perspective. Other university support went towards proofreading and associated costs.

Finally, and most importantly, we acknowledge that our daily work and the work of this book takes place on the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, and on Kaurna Country. We recognize that these are places of age-old ceremonies of celebration, initiation and renewal, and that the local Indigenous Peoples have had – and continue to have – a unique role in the life of these lands. We pay respect to Wurundjeri, Kaurna and other Aboriginal Elders past, present and future for their custodianship of country and culture. We acknowledge that our work at universities around Melbourne and Adelaide benefits from an uncompensated and unreconciled dispossession that began over 230 years ago, but which continues to be resisted today. As we consider televisual fictions of Australian prisons in this book, we must reflect on the twin facts that Indigenous people are vastly overrepresented in Australian prison populations and vastly underrepresented in Australian screen production, facts that are consequences of ongoing colonization. We hope that readers will reflect on this as they read through the pages ahead.

Radha O’Meara, Tessa Dwyer, Stayci Taylor and Craig Batty

Our two keynote speakers Professors Kim Akass and Sue Turnbull (who we are delighted to have as the writers of the Foreword to this book) ‘challenged each of us to see Prisoner and Wentworth as part of a larger discussion about women and television’ (Ford 2018). This emerged as an important aspect of the conference, hence the title of this book not focusing solely on the two shows but instead framing them with the context of feminist TV and the concept of the transgressive female.

Running parallel to the traditional scholarly stream of such a conference was a series of panels with industry professionals from both shows. These comprised actors, producers, writers, art directors, cinematographers and casting directors, including those responsible for the Wentworth VR experience. This was possible partly because the conference was held in Melbourne, where Prisoner was shot in the 1970s and 1980s and where Wentworth was also produced. As Adrian Danks (then Associate Dean, Media with the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University) pointed out when he launched the conference, the host university was:

[A]‌ completely appropriate venue considering that the main building of our School overlooks Melbourne’s and Victoria’s oldest jail – opened in 1845 – as well as the law courts that ‘served’ it, and that the University itself incorporates aspects of the jail into its vast portfolio of buildings and spaces […] But this staging of the conference at RMIT also recognizes the centrality of Melbourne to the production of both Prisoner and Wentworth … the vast space of the city that takes in both the large sets built to house each show and the immediate environs of the suburbs that surround them. We also have to thank another successful show of the period, The Young Doctors, for tying up studio space in Sydney commonly used by [production company] Grundys, and necessitating that the production of Prisoner be carried out at Channel 10’s Nunawading studios […] Both shows traverse the city, making use of its disparate, varied and often-abandoned spaces.

Associate Professor Danks was also able to share with us the story of a friend for whom Prisoner was such an obsession, he procured one of the cell doors from the set of the show after shooting wrapped finally in 1986. As Adrian reminisced:

This was duly delivered, slightly resized and then screwed into place as his bedroom door – we (and, I imagine, he) got some pleasure in sliding back the peephole on the door & shouting: ‘Get back in the cell, Barnes.’ I have no idea what happened to the door, whether he took it with him from house to house or whether it still sits incongruously grafted into place in a suburban backstreet of East Ringwood. I hope it does.