Available from all good retailers!

Available from all good retailers!

"Here I am ensconced in my old flowery-dell; that means cell for the uninitiated, contemplating the pros and cons of serving a five stretch."

That's the opening sentence of the novelisation of 'Prisoner and Escort', which quickly establishes that the whole of 'Porridge' in book form will be told to the reader through the eyes of Norman Stanley Fletcher.

Now I can understand why you might want to do it like this, but it sets up some problems later down the line. The Season One scripts are adapted by Jonathan Marshall, but 'Another Stretch Of Porridge' and 'A Further Stir Of Porridge' are the work of Paul Victor, who has to tackle 'The Desperate Hours' where Fletcher is unconscious for crucial parts of the plot due to a mix-up over a drugged mug of coffee.

Fletch even points this out in the narrative, assuring us that he has checked the order of events with Lenny/Lennie (the spelling is variable) Godber and Mr Barrowclough.

The 'Yes Minister' / 'Yes Prime Minister' books tackle this problem head-on and the array of diary entries, notes and memos take full advantage of the inevitable clash viewpoints of different characters, each with their own view of their actions and motivations.

Today, we added a couple more books to our tottering collection, with 'Hi-de-Hi!' by Paul Ableman (published 1983) and the 1971 adaptation of the first 'Dad's Army' film by John Burke.

From first appearances, the latter is a pretty straight-down-the line version, though the fact that it retells some of 'The Man And The Hour' means you have the slight niggle of which was the 'real' series of events.

But the 'Hi-de-Hi!' book takes the strange decision to introduced one Charley Binns, the so-called senior camper, who spends a fair chunk of the first few pages describing Gladys in rather-too-fine anatomical detail.

I always like the blurb they put on these sorts of books. "Now a hilarious Columbia picture" or "based on the popular BBC television series", you know the style.

But if they happened to plug any merchandise on the telly, you'd have the familiar expression "available at all good retailers" - which always leads to us add "and at some rubbish ones, too!" for the sake of balance.

Not sure when we'll get round to reading these, of course. But it's nice to know that they're there!

(By Andrew Trowbridge)