‘I’m Making a TV Programme Here!’: Reality TV’s Banged Up and Public Criminology DAVID WILSON and NIC GROOMBRIDGE David Wilson is Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Birmingham City University; Nic Groombridge is Senior Lecturer in Media Arts and Sociology, St Mary’s University College, London Abstract: This article examines the TV series Banged Up and media reactions to it. In doing so it seeks to argue that it served a wider public service purpose, or public criminology, than simply entertainment. A number of other ‘experiments’ and the crossover between those and reality TV are also explored. The series was not universally admired and no attempt is made to hide this. In addition to engaging with theoretical matters the experience of one of the authors of being part of the programme is set out. Keywords: public criminology; reality TV; Banged Up Perhaps the most famous finding in social psychology, derived from Zimbardo’s early 1970s Stanford Prison Experiment, 1 is that college students given sufficient power and a uniform can become tyrants. Less well-known might be the BBC’s rerun of the experiment in 2002, broadcast as The Experiment 2 which called into question Zimbardo’s findings and sparked related academic work (for instance Haslam and Reicher (2003) and interviews with the Guardian and the Psychologist). 3 Banged Up – a series of four, one-hour episodes shown on Britain’s Channel 5 in 2008 – which saw a number of persistent young offenders being temporarily ‘imprisoned’ in a disused jail in England, and who were then filmed as they attempted to come to terms with ‘prison life’, also laid claims to being an ‘experiment’. Thus David Blunkett, the former Home Secretary (2001– 2004) who chaired the prison’s ‘parole board’ on screen, explained to Decca Aitkenhead (the Guardian, 7 July 2008) that Banged Up was an ‘opportunity to conduct an experiment I failed to complete while in office’. One aspect of this ‘experiment’ – to scare offenders away from crime – has been attempted in the USA but this was a first for British television. But how far can we say that this experiment succeeded, and to what extent did the practicalities of making the programme shape how it progressed? More importantly, did the series create a better understanding of the issues that The Howard Journal Vol 49 No 1. February 2010 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2311.2009.00584.x ISSN 0265-5527, pp. 1–17 1 r 2010 The Authors Journal compilation r 2010 The Howard League and Blackwell Publishing Ltd Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK