Is Waiting for the Out based on a true story?

New BBC drama Waiting for the Out stars Josh Finan as Dan, a philosopher who starts teaching a class of man in prison, discussing issues surrounding dominance, freedom, luck and more.

Dan also has his own background with prisons - his brother, father and uncle have all spent time inside, and he begins to worry that he himself will one day be locked away, and not only that, but that he should be.

It's a series full of ideas, which also tells a deeply personal story at its core. But is that story based on a true story, is Dan a real person, and what has writer Dennis Kelly said about the series?

Read on for everything you need to know about the inspiration behind Waiting for the Out.

Is Waiting for the Out based on a true story?

It is. Waiting for the Out has been adapted by writer Dennis Kelly from Andy West's memoir, The Life Inside: A Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy.

The blurb of the book says: "Andy West teaches philosophy in prisons. Every time he steps behind bars, he also confronts his inherited shame: his father, uncle and brother all spent time inside. While Andy has built a different life for himself, he still fears that their fate will also be his.

"Every day he has conversations with prisoners about their lives, discusses their ideas and feelings, and listens as they explore new ways to think about their situation.

"Together they tackle the big questions: Can someone in prison be more free than someone outside? Would we ever be good if we never felt shame? What makes a person worthy of forgiveness? As he discusses pressing questions of truth, identity and hope with his students, Andy searches for his own form of freedom too."

How closely does Waiting for the Out follow Andy West's true story?

Waiting for the Out does stick closely to Andy West's story and experiences in some ways, but in others diverts fairly substantially. This is why the central character, played by Josh Finan, is not named Andy, but instead has been called Dan - to differentiate between the two.

Dennis Kelly, the writer of the show, spoke exclusively with RadioTimes.com, and explained in what ways the story for West's memoir has been changed, how it has been kept similar, and why those decisions were made either way.

"I think the thing that changed most was that there isn't an obvious TV story within the book," Kelly explained. "There are lots of stories in the book, it's a very rich book, but there isn't an obvious TV narrative, and so I had to sort of find a story. So in our version, Dan is much more interested in who his father is - Andy’s not interested at all.

"And we haven't made any attempt to recreate his father. All I did was take the memories from the book. I didn't really even talk to Andy [about it] that much because I actively didn't want to recreate that particular man, it’s a different father, but those memories are Andy’s memories. Those things happened, by and large. I think all the things in the past happened with Andy, or variations of it. So I kept a lot of that.

"There was other stuff that I kept - interestingly, for a book, a lot of the dialogue was really good. There are episodes where we can just grab dialogue from the classroom and use it wholesale. That's kind of unusual. Normally, books, even novelists who think they're really good with dialogue, when you put them on screen, they're not doing the same thing, it's a different type of dialogue we use. But actually, it was really useful, I could use that.

"Things that I didn't include… I think in Andy's book, Andy goes from prison to prison to prison to prison. He goes through a lot of different prisons, and all of the characters are incredibly rich, he draws them really well with one line, you just go, 'That’s a brilliant character'.

"But there's many, many, many, many characters, and I had to amalgamate them and make them one character, one prison, because we wanted to stay with characters."

Kelly also spoke about his conversations with West, who he said was "pretty open" to changes being made in the adaptation process.

"It's a funny thing, Andy’s got several hats on this," Kelly explained. "He's the guy it's about, he's the person who wrote the original book. So that's his work, it’s not just he's the guy, but it’s his actual work. He's also a consultant.

"If we want to know about prison, nine times out of 10, the person we talk to is Andy, because he knows a lot about prison. This will go out on 3rd January, and Andy will probably be working in prison that week. He continues to do this job. And so he knows a lot about prison and working in prison and the whole prison community, really."

Kelly stressed again that the elements surrounding changes made to Dan's family situation, in comparison with West's were the most "difficult for him", as Kelly was taking it "in a slightly different direction".

"The biggest thing was his father," he added. "In the book, he has this device called the executioner, which is that he feels that everything's always going to go wrong. And it’s a brilliant device, it works really well in the book, but I knew I couldn't depict that on screen.

"The executioner in his head always tells him, 'You're going to go to prison, you're going to end up in prison. You've got heroin in your bag', it’s the thing that makes him check his stove compulsively. And to me, the only character it could be [to represent that on-screen] was the father, really. That was not always easy for Andy, because, as I say, he has no desire to meet his father."

Kelly continued: "There are other things as well, like in episode one, Dan wants to be a dad, and Andy has no desire to be a dad. Andy doesn't want to be a dad. But as the series progressed, the more I was working on it, the more I felt like this, as much as anything, is about family."

Waiting for the Out will premiere on Saturday 3rd January at 9:30pm on BBC One.

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