Alert – Banged Up review: This prison ‘experiment’ is just a shabby excuse to torment celebs, writes CHRISTOPHER STEVENS

Banged Up

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Rolf Harris: Hiding In Plain Sight

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Ban the E-word. We have to put a stop to shows being billed as ‘experiments’, giving them a spurious justification when really they are devised solely to torment celebrities.

Banged Up (Ch4) is not a sociological experiment, it’s not a psychological investigation, and it’s not any sort of scientific trial. 

It’s the television equivalent of sadistic children pulling the wings off flies and the legs off spiders… and calling it a ‘biology lesson’.

There’s nothing to be learned from watching three men who are vaguely familiar, but not famous, spending a week in a former prison with a bunch of ex-cons pretending to be inmates, watched over by a handful of retired screws. 

The whole thing was a shabby excuse for displays of violence, intimidation, machismo and toilet humour.

It was filmed at the decommissioned HMP Shrewsbury. Actors and extras were crammed into cells along one landing and encouraged to swagger and misbehave but stop short of actual riot.

Sid Owen, an actor who played Rick-ehh! on EastEnders many years ago, at least had the excuse that his dad and brothers had all done time. The old man was a bank robber, and one of the brothers was a drug trafficker. Sid knew he could have gone down the same route himself.

But any pretence of honest inquiry disappeared when, in an obviously scripted moment, Sid suffered a rush of blood to the head and attempted to break out.

He didn’t need to knot his bedsheets and climb out of a window, of course. He could have just buttonholed a warder and said, ‘Call my agent, luvvie, and tell her I’ve decided to do panto instead.’

Since this was all a set-up, Sid discovered a door had been left unlocked, and escaped into the prison yard… before being recaptured and sent to ‘seg’ or solitary confinement. Oh no! How will he cope?

MP Johnny Mercer, now in government as the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, found himself sharing a cell with a prison documentary regular, Kevin Lane.

Lane spent 18 years in prison for a murder he claims he didn’t commit, though he couldn’t stop talking about his criminal life as a kidnapper and an enforcer. Mercer’s role was to ask probing questions but he barely managed to get a word in.

Producing two tins of contraband tuna and mackerel, and some lettuce, Lane prepared a light lunch in their cell. He also demonstrated a jailbird’s trick so disgusting and unhygienic, I will never be able to look at a fish salad again.

Gogglebox star Marcus Luther, who runs a boxing gym and has the heavyweight build to match, was set upon by a gang as soon as he arrived. He kept his cool but wore the bemused expression of a mastiff that finds itself surrounded by yapping puppies in the park.

We learned little about Rolf Harris’s years in prison on the first part of Hiding In Plain Sight (ITV1). This documentary, which was made before his death aged 93 earlier this year, included vivid and distressing accounts of how he used his power as a TV star to get away with assaulting children and young women for decades.

But like the BBC’s Jimmy Savile drama, The Reckoning, it failed to examine the extent to which other people in the industry knew about his behaviour, condoned it or were even complicit in it.

There’s some satisfaction in knowing Harris was caught, that he was disgraced and that he served a partial punishment. His reputation has been destroyed. That at least provides a degree of justice for his victims, whose voices were heard clearly here.

Horror story of the night: Blood and blonde hairs on a saw blade proved to be the evidence that turned the search for a missing woman, 20-year-old Agnes, into a murder hunt, on The Met (BBC1). 

Such a gory death is the worst Halloween nightmare imaginable.