Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank, Arm Wrestling with Chas and Dave and Richard Madeley: Inside the World’s Mega Prison. They all sound like Alan Partridge’s TV pitches and yet, just two of them are. The third is an actual programme that aired on Channel 5 last night, presented by the closest real-life presenter we have to Steve Coogan’s comedy creation: Richard Madeley.
The gloriously gaffe-prone broadcaster, who once told Russell Watson he thought his music was “a bit crap” and said “there are not many better things than seeing an older woman skipping”, headed to El Salvador for the documentary to visit CECOT – a 57-acre prison that’s considered to be the harshest and most controversial in the world.
The largest maximum security prison in Latin America, CECOT can hold up to 40,000 inmates, all of whom will spend the rest of their lives inside. Human rights groups have criticised the prison following allegations of physical assaults, torture and sexual violence, while in March last year, 238 illegal immigrants from Venezuela were deported and imprisoned without trial at CECOT before being returned to Venezuela four months later.
When it came to choosing the journalist who was prepared to show what life is really like inside the world’s most chilling prison, Channel 5 went with the obvious choice of tactless TV wonder Richard Madeley – and the Good Morning Britain host got stuck in when it came to delivering Partridge-isms.
“It is actually quite intimidating,” he remarks upon seeing CECOT for the first time, having sauntered out of his SUV as though it had arrived at a service station off the M4 and not a maximum-security prison.
“Holy cow. This is full-on.”
Madeley meets the prison’s no-nonsense director Belarmino García – who reportedly greets new inmates with “welcome to hell” – and they briefly hit it off. “Can he come back to England, please?” Madeley asks his translator after learning that García has made it impossible to smuggle drugs and phones into the prison.
However, things quickly turn sour when Madeley sees the “harrowing” conditions that the prisoners live in. Over 3,000 inmates are kept in close proximity on steel bunk beds for 23 and a half hours per day, with no mattresses, no reading material and no speaking allowed.
“This is their present and their future and their death,” he says. “I’ve never seen anything like this in my entire life.”
When Madeley begins asking García whether he thinks the conditions are “cruel”, the El Salvadorian director isn’t impressed and asks the presenter and his crew to leave the property – just 15 minutes into the episode.
“I think I may have overstepped the mark,” Madeley sheepishly tells the viewers. “My questioning led to some questioning. I’m still hoping to see much more of the prison but for now, we’ve been shown the door.”
Luckily (or unluckily) for Madeley, he’s let back in the next morning at 4am – and his sympathy for the prisoners, many of whom were members of dangerous gangs, soon disappears when he’s informed of their crimes. After trying, but failing, to get permission to speak to one of the inmates (“I’m exchanging looks with these men – am I allowed to speak to them?” he asks an uncompromising García), he’s shown a video online of that particular individual murdering a group of workers for being on his gang’s patch. They had been there to fix cables, but were killed with machetes.
“He chopped them to death, alive?” Madeley asks, hands-on-hips, just metres away from the criminal. “Holy cow. You don’t want to see this.”
“I wasn’t expecting to see the video that was posted of the machete murders,” a shaken Madeley tells the camera. “It was the most graphic thing I’ve ever seen in my life but I think it was important that I did because there is no question that these guys are dangerous and ruthless.”
It’s not long before Madeley is taken to an isolation cell – a small, pitch-black room where prisoners who misbehave must spend 30 days in solitary confinement. “There she goes,” a night vision camera-wearing Madeley nervously utters as he’s shut in the room.
“You have to grope your way to the stone sink here and you have to grope your way to the toilet and somehow find the bowl that you need to flush it,” he tells the camera in a characteristically Madeley way.
“This is the one place in this jail that does have an odour. There’s a certain odour here I can’t really describe,” he adds, before looking down the lens of the camera to unironically state: “It’s fear.”
Madeley manages to find one positive in the controversial prison when he’s given a typical prisoner’s meal of rice and beans to try. “I’m not gonna lie, the beans are quite tasty,” he admits, which isn’t a huge surprise considering he lived off similar grub while on I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here! in 2021.
Towards the end of his short prison stay, he’s finally allowed to speak to one inmate “formerly known on the streets as Psycho” – and he doesn’t waste any time on pleasantries with the mass murderer. “What did you do?” he asks sternly, like a disappointed dad, before learning that Psycho committed 30 homicides while part of a gang and that he would likely return to his ways if he were released.
“I’m full of conflicting thoughts,” a pensive Madeley says in a voiceover as we watch him walk through the prison in slow motion. “Brutal, bleak, barren. It’s unsettled me to the core.”
By the end of the documentary, Madeley comes round to CECOT’s extreme methods after speaking to a number of El Salvadorian residents in society outside the prison, whose lives have changed after the country’s crime crackdown. “I can’t help but wonder if there really are gang members hiding among such a grateful public,” Madeley – Central America’s answer to Carrie Bradshaw – muses while wandering through the country’s streets with an armed guard.
“Look, it’s obvious that CECOT breaches human rights as we understand them – it’s a shocking, extreme corner of humanity,” he nonchalantly says. “But El Salvadorians were writhing under the thumb of the psychotic, psychopathic sadists.
“I wonder if sacrificing civil liberties for the common good is something others would ever be prepared to embrace.”
With his first hard-hitting documentary out of the way, what should Madeley explore next after escaping the world’s mega prison? Youth hostelling? Arm Wrestling? Louis Theroux, watch out.
