It's
9pm on Thursday in the UK: welcome to HMP (her Majesty’s
prison) Larkhall, a fictitious prison set in the outskirts on
London, England that is the setting for the hit television show
Bad Girls, now in its fifth season (or series, as they
refer to seasons in the UK).
Bad
Girls is a gritty drama that examines the value of incarceration
as a punishment, and the diverse reasons so many women turn to
crime, like poverty, abuse, and abandonment. The show is based
on real-life accounts made by prisoners and officers alike, but
the show incorporates humour in it, as well, to avoid creating
an overly bleak atmosphere.
A show that is centralised around a women’s prison would
be remiss not to show some lesbian/bisexual women’s relationships,
and not to explore how sexual orientation affects the rules while
serving time in prison. Bad Girls has not only tackled
these and other controversial topics, but managed to avoid alienating
or offending its diverse viewer base in the process.
Ethical
dilemmas are encountered routinely in Bad Girls, and
difficult situations are created that rarely involve a right or
wrong answer when it comes to matters of the heart. The differentiation
between ‘goodies’ and ‘badies’ seems like
it would be clear-cut in a prison setting, but when the inmates
are frequently innocent and the officers are often the ones bending,
stretching and snapping the rules, the line between right and
wrong quickly becomes murky.
Bad
Girls could easily have fallen back on stereotyping,
making the lesbian characters shaved-head, biker-boot-wearing
butch caricatures of dykes behind bars--but it somehow manages
to avoid this trap. Instead of avoiding subjects that are normally
taboo on television, the show just ‘tells it as it is,'
and the matter-of-fact presentation of the lesbian content is
refreshing.
So
how has Bad Girls managed to succeed where so many other
shows have failed? It probably has something to do with the fact
that none of the creators, writers, and producers of Bad Girls
(Shed Productions' Maureen Chadwick, Ann McManus, Eileen Gallagher,
and Brian Park) are heterosexual, a rarity for television.
Same-sex
relationships are not pushed to the background in Bad Girls,
but receive as much attention as the heterosexual relationships
and are consistently portrayed in a compassionate manner.
Shows
usually define their characters in a way that influences the audience
to like certain characters and dislike others, but Bad Girls
creates three-dimensional characters that can do horrible things
and still be loved by audiences.
The
lesbian characters and couples on the show over the years have
been numerous, but here are a few of the more
prominent ones:
Nikki and Helen
The first and probably most powerful lesbian love story in Bad
Girls has to be the love story between Nikki Wade (played
by Mandana Jones) and Helen Stewart (played by Simone Lahbib).
This storyline is controversial for two reasons: both of these
characters are women, and Nikki is an inmate and Helen a prison
officer.
Nikki
is an inmate sentenced to life for murdering a policeman who was
trying to rape her girlfriend. Thanks to her passionate, caring
nature but quick temper, she is considered a trouble-maker by
most of the officers, especially Jim Fenner (played by Jack Ellis):
This
all changes, however, when a new Wing Governor, Helen Stewart,
decides that Nikki could become a model prisoner. Helen gives
Nikki more respect and trust, and in time a friendship develops
between the two women which, over the course of Series 1, 2 and
3, turns into attraction and love:
