Back in Chokey

Back in prison I am afraid in Shrewsbury. This is under half the size of the prison in Belfast, but the style is very similar as they are both old prisons and now both tourist attractions.

Interestingly Ricky Tomlinson spent two years here for conspiracy to intimidate during a protest in 1973. A great train robber spent some time at Shrewsbury, as did George Riley who ended his days, and is famed for being the last man executed in the UK. You also get to see the execution chamber which was a little odd as well as seeing the cell that the condemned spend their last week. It’s a cell two to three times the size of a usual cell and apparently they wouldn’t know that this was their time. However I disagree, if I was moved to a larger cell with a few more comforts, I think I would suspect something was up, as for the alcohol for breakfast, that would be a dead giveaway (no pun intended). What I never knew is that executions were usually conducted at the same time every week, 8am on a Sunday.

They filmed the BBC drama Time here, which I seem to remember was really good, featuring Sean Bean and the omnipresent Stephen Graham, I could swear that someone is going back through old stuff I used to watch and has started inserting Stephen Graham in them in some sort of weird reverse Nelson Mandella effect. Yes, he’s also in the video for “When the sun goes down” by the Arctic Monkeys, and I don’t remember him in either. I’ll know this is exactly what’s happening when I watch an episode of Rainbow and I hear Bungle talking in a Scouse accent and has lost 2ft of height.