Waiting for the Out review – discussing Odysseus with Trevor from EastEnders was not on my bingo card

I’ve been writing a novel for the best part of a year and a half, which sounds very grand doesn’t it? I mean, nobody has asked for it, and I have no idea whether anyone will want it, but I’m sure you’ll agree that ‘novel’ sounds so much better than ‘a very long Word doc I cry about sometimes’. 

One thing I’ve realised throughout what Lord Sugar would call ‘the process’ is that everything that happens in a story has to drive it forward. That’s not easy if, like me, you have a tendency to wang on about a character’s traits rather than showing them through action.

Anyway, it turns out that if you do that, you end up with a lot of people looking in mirrors to tell the reader what their hair colour is – and a plot that’s about as taut as a swimming pool noodle. 

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I bet that kind of thing doesn’t bother award-winning playwright Dennis Kelly, though. He’s an absolute master of the art of ‘show, don’t tell’. In Pulling, co-written with Sharon Horgan, he summed up the entire relationship between Horgan’s character and her idiot boyfriend Karl with a single momentary glimpse of him in a mirrored bathroom cabinet, washing his arse with a flannel. 

Kelly does it again in the first 30 seconds of Waiting for the Out. Dan, the extremely nervy protagonist, is on the phone discussing his upcoming teaching job in a prison. He asks whether there’s a Pret nearby, while intensely checking that all the knobs on the cooker are set to ‘off’. And bam, we are indeed, off. 

At first I thought this six-part series, based on Andy West’s memoir The Life Inside, would be a fish-out-of-water story with lots of comedy potential (hapless bumbling 20-something with OCD tries to teach philosophy to criminals – hilarity ensues). I was waiting for a Godber clone to turn up, perhaps a few lessons learned the hard way, or in the grand tradition of all prison dramas, a nasty screw. 

Read more:

• Waiting for the Out writer Dennis Kelly: ‘In prison, all you can hear is chaos’
• The failures of education in prison are criminal
• How the UK prison system ‘sets people up to fail’

Instead, everyone is kept on their toes, including Dan himself, as he limps into work on his first day wearing a pair of lethally uncomfortable steel-capped boots, bought in a panic in case anyone tries to beat him up. Two minutes into the class, Dan’s bubble is instantly burst by irascible Glaswegian Keith (Alex Ferns, below), who turns out to be more knowledgeable – and outspoken – than he is.

Now you really feel like you’re in a play, but the perfect casting gives Kelly a very entertaining and powerful mouthpiece for all the big ideas and the juicy lines. (“You’re rippling with shame, man!” Keith yells, seeing through him straight away.) I don’t know what I was expecting, but discussing Odysseus with Trevor from EastEnders was not on my regulation prison bingo card. Even so, it’s compelling stuff. 

Equally compelling is the reason that Dan is drawn to working in a prison in the first place. Though he seems painfully ill-equipped to be in such a rough environment, he’s actually the only member of his family who hasn’t done time. His brother cheerfully recounts being stabbed in the leg, and his errant dad starts appearing to him like Hamlet’s ghost with a roll-up. 

Waiting for the Out is stunning, bold TV drama at its best and a masterclass for aspiring writers everywhere. Nobody looks in the mirror and says, “I have brown hair and my name is Susan” and it’s almost exposition-free. Everything works like a machine.

No details are spare and the viewer isn’t spared, either. Even the steel-toe-capped boots are there for a reason. But it also has a seam of coal-black humour going through it that stops it from being one of those universally acclaimed shows that feels like homework.  

As for me, I’m taking notes. Time to go back to the drawing board. Now if I could only stop forgetting what all my characters are called, I might be in with a chance…  

Waiting for the Out is on BBC iPlayer.

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