Porridge
- 1979 film
Feature film based on the TV sitcom of the same name, featuring Ronnie Barker and the regular cast in the classic prison comedy. Also features Richard Beckinsale, Fulton Mackay, Brian Wilde, Peter Vaughan, Geoffrey Bayldon and more.
Press clippings
The unknown starring role Chelmsford City FC played in Porridge film
Some stars from the Chelmsford City FC team at the time had cameo roles.
Matt Lee, Essex Live, 3rd July 2022Sitcom Season reviewed
If you are meant to leave the best until last, does that mean that you put your worst first? If that's the case, then the BBC is following that rule with its sitcom season.
Shouting At The Telly, 2nd September 2016Not so the British B-movie. Studios making big-screen comedies in the Seventies merrily filched ideas from the big Bakelite box in the corner. Few British comedy stars escaped the pull of the Odeon and with every adaptation came an unusual twist.
Tony Hancock became a Bohemian artist. Morecambe and Wise got mixed up in Soviet spy rings and banana republics. Alf Garnett took LSD. Less controversially, the cast of stars of Are You Being Served? went on holiday to Spain. Many of these films are regarded, quite rightly, as inferior to the programmes which spawned them.
Some of them are still pretty good, though. Porridge: the Movie does the original proud, while the film of Man About the House goes slightly mad towards the end, taking the cast to the Thames Television studios for strange encounters with Spike Milligan and, confusingly, the real life stars of fellow sitcom Love Thy Neighbour.
Phil Norman, The Daily Express, 28th May 2007