Waiting for the Out author reveals new BBC drama doesn’t avoid the "moral complexity" of characters in prison

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Andy West has spent much of his 30s in prisons – no surprise perhaps, given his father, brother and uncle all served time when he was a child. Yet West himself has nothing more criminal on his record than a ticket for cycling through a red light.

Instead, he is a philosopher who teaches in prisons across the UK, leading classes for men and women, young and old, including lifers, addicts and sex offenders. His traumatic and fascinating experiences were first brought to life in his 2022 memoir The Life Inside: a Memoir of Prison, Family and Philosophy and now form the basis of Waiting for the Out, a new six-part BBC One drama written by Dennis Kelly (Utopia, Together).

The adaptation ramps up the book's drama and humour but never soft-pedals its fundamental truths or humanity. "I didn't want it to be a standard, gritty shankings-in-the-shower prison drama," says West, a softly spoken, thoughtful and engaging figure, the ideal combination of intellect and empathy in regulation thick-rimmed glasses and turtleneck. "There are great versions of that, but prison isn't violent every day. It's much drearier: daytime TV, body odour, unwashed socks, another afternoon gone.

"I'm not going to say, 'Please watch my show, it's very boring', but it catches something of the way time changes and drifts. We wanted something honest and humorous, not an earnest show about survival. Importantly, the people in our show have also committed crimes. Things like The Shawshank Redemption, where the lead is effectively innocent, are a bit of a cop-out because they sidestep a lot of moral complexity."

That's not something that could be said of either his book or the series. Josh Finan (The Responder) plays Dan, a prison philosopher haunted by thoughts of his violent, mercurial father (Gerard Kearns), amiably enduring his uncle's (Phil Daniels) well-worn anecdotes of a criminal past and cautiously reconfiguring his relationship with his brother (Stephen Wight), a recovering heroin addict and now a devoted dad.

These situations and characters are very familiar to West. "I grew up in a few different places, in two chapters," he says. "There was childhood with my dad, who I haven't had contact with since he went away [to prison] when I was 12. That upbringing felt chaotic, dangerous and economically hairy – bailiffs at the door, trouble with the police. Later, I was with my mum and my stepfather, a double-glazing salesman. I could live my teenage years with a bit of breathing space, where the bills were being paid." West remains close to his mother and brother; his uncle died in 2023.

After leaving school with two GCSEs, West was taken under the wing of a philosophy teacher at sixth-form college and ended up with a degree. "I'd heard about these people doing philosophy in prisons and felt envy, because a lot of my journey involved letting go of parts of my identity," he recalls. "That wisdom I'd accumulated from my childhood wasn't really relevant in a lecture hall, and these people were reclaiming it – so my motivations weren't totally wholesome!

"But the more I've taught in prison, the more I've realised the questions that drive me came because I'd visited my brother in prison, or because my dad was going away. Rather than outreach, it was 'inreach'. I was going to the source of these questions."

A key question seems to be: how did he avoid falling into the same traps as his dad, uncle or brother? "That's such a philosophical question!" he says, delighted. "A big part was my father going away, but also age gaps: my brother is over a decade older, so I'd seen his path and was able to consider others to take. After seeing how demonised he was in the family and in society, I was desperate to be the golden child. Or it may be that some people have more propensity for addiction or risk. We just have to be relatively humble about why we believe someone's done bad things."

Although the prisoners' engagement with Beckett, Socrates, Descartes or Malcolm X fluctuates in both the book and the series, their observations are keen, unexpected and valuable – philosophy as emotional engagement, not logical problem solving. How could it be otherwise when they address freedom and guilt, hope and shame, luck and desire?

"A lot of prison life is about becoming cattle: being 'shipped out', 'feeding time', then back in your cell. I think of two guys in the book. One of them, serving a long sentence, left a note on my desk that just said: 'two-hour holiday' – while he's in the class, he's somewhere else. Another guy told me, 'Philosophy is all right', which in prison is tantamount to saying it's brilliant. There's an atrophy of the human spirit in prison, so to be reminded you have a mind, to go somewhere you can think, reflect and have your inner world taken seriously means something."

Britain's prison system is overcrowded, underfunded and understaffed: prisoners are often confined for 23 hours a day, while prison officers can begin work after only two months of training, compared with two years for their counterparts in Norway. It's small wonder West regards it as "an embarrassment".

"Most people think of prisons the way they think of sewers: necessary but unpleasant to think about, a place where we can build a wall between 'us' and 'them' and hold the idea that chaos and violence exist behind it, rather than within all of us. Until people, who have often come from chaotic, abusive and financially precarious backgrounds, have their basic needs met, it's a lot to ask them to change. I glimpsed the edges of that world from a young age and it left me with a sense of responsibility: this is something that I should attend to, because other people probably won't."

Attending to it has included telling stories removing that wall – a process with tangible benefits not only for the open-minded reader or viewer, but for West himself. Like Dan in Waiting for the Out, West has been tormented by "the executioner" – his term for corrosive shame, intrusive thoughts and "OCD-like" behaviours that he continues to manage.

"I learned over time that the executioner wants to make sure you're OK and fusses all the time," he explains. "A lot of dealing with it is having the thought without moving it to the top of my to-do list: OK, you're afraid, you're having catastrophic thoughts, let's deal with that in five minutes. By which time, inevitably, it's not there. There's a grief for all the time I wasted worrying about stuff that never came to be or wasn't even remotely possible, but when I go back to the book or watch the show, I'm struck by how much more cheerful and relaxed I am these days."

Using words like "catharsis" in conversation with a philosopher is a perilous business but, in the spirit of fearlessness, I go for it anyway. Was writing the book cathartic?

West smiles kindly. "Not exactly, but it took me forward somehow. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips paraphrased Freud when he said, 'My patients don't recover, they just become bored of their symptoms.' There's something about writing your interior world for three years and 300 pages where you become bored of yourself. It allowed me to speak about what I felt. For so long, that was unspeakable, so it was very necessary to do that digging. But that corner has been charted now. What's the rest of life about?"

West is looking to the future: a psychotherapy qualification, a new book attempting a moral rather than psychological reckoning with human nature, perhaps even the further televised adventures of Dan. First, though, he's running a half-marathon. "Two weeks before I turn 40," he laughs. "If that's not a cry for help…"

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

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