It's the kind of daytime TV that gives a whole new meaning to Escape To The Country.
Prisoners are being trained to produce their own telly shows in a rehabilitation scheme.
They’re being put to work on a jail TV channel that airs mid-morning staples like cookery shows and health reports.
And lags can even practise their ‘TV voice’ in a recording studio at Category C Buckley Hall, a 450-capacity training prison near Rochdale.
A source said: “There is some real star quality behind prison walls. It’s about inmates tapping into their talents.”
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The course was revealed when a prison watchdog praised the jail for ‘raising the educational bar’ and offering training in work which ‘appeals to a wider audience’.
The move comes after another jail, Berwyn in Wrexham, North Wales, began training prisoners as newsreaders for behind-bars bulletins.
Yesterday a spokesman for the Prison Service said all radio and TV broadcasts were only shown inside the jail and were scrutinised by prison chiefs before being aired.
Content includes information bulletins, cooking, Covid-19 updates, details about online ‘visits’, and ‘prison news’, with the spokesman saying the courses were part of educational rehabilitation courses which would ‘develop new skills’ for the outside world.
Prison inmates who have become presenters include BBC One Show and Panorama reporter Raphael Rowe, who was wrongfully convicted of murder in the M25 Three case in 2000 after 12 years in jail.
Britain’s jails are already home to radio network National Prison Radio, which hosts a daily breakfast show named Porridge.
