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No rude awakening

James Delingpole

Wednesday, 9th July 2008

Banged Up (Channel 4, Monday)

With Bad Lads Army and Brat Camp, you got to see truly repellent kids being transformed over several weeks by tough regimes which it was almost impossible to escape, in the one case because the sergeants in charge just weren’t having it, in the other because the kids were stranded in remote camps run by Nazi-cowboys. I can quite believe that most of them went back to their evil old ways after a few weeks back home with their biddable parents. But for the duration of those programmes, at least, you felt that genuinely useful work was being done. Here were kids who’d been brought up to consider themselves God’s gift, suddenly, brutally being forced to recognise that they were part of a wider community with social responsibilities to fulfil — and actually changing before our eyes.

Banged Up, just like prison itself really, offers no such happy resolutions. Next week, we’ll see the kids being forced to share cells with burly, experienced old lags who will fill them with horror stories of what prison’s really like and attempt to mentor them into lives of righteousness. Unfortunately, you could tell from the kids’ reaction on the preview footage the more likely effect it’s going to have: ‘Wow! Those guys are well hard! If we go on behaving badly enough, maybe we can end up as big and tough and deadpan as them!’