Film tells true story of love behind bars

Press, 13 February 1988, Page 22

Film tells true story of love behind bars

The new two-part drama “Knockback” is the true story of how a jailed murderer and his prison visitor kept their love alive for seven years. Screening tomorrow (Sunday) at 10.30 p.m. on One. It is a powerful, unsentimental love story about Alan Ackland and Sylvia Baker — he in prison serving a life sentence for the murder of his former business partner, she a middle-class housewife bringing up her two children alone after her divorce. Looking for a new direction and for something to lift her out of herself, Sylvia joins

whose members visit prisoners as voluntary associates. “Knockback” is based on the autobiography of the same name co-written by Peter Adams, the first man to be sentenced for murder after the abolition of capital punishment, and Shirley Cooklin, the actress and radio playwright turned voluntary associate who met and married him. Everyone involved with the production of “Knockback” sees it first and foremost as a drama. “When we wrote the book, what I wanted to do was let people see inside the system, not inside me, so

in it,” says Peter Adams. Shirley Cooklin agrees: “In the discussions I had with the playwright, even before the names were changed, I talked about the character as ‘her,’ never ‘me’.” Many of the prison scenes were shot on location in Britain, in a Victorian wing at Greenock Prison. It was a chilling experience for lead actors Derrick O’Conner (‘‘Z Cars,” “The Expert,” “The Bell”) and Pauline Collins (“Upstairs, Downstairs,” “No Honestly,” “Thomas and Sarah”) who play the extraordinary couple. Pauline Collins was 4-PtA nnmnl ntiQ

lack of privacy — “and by little things, like the fact that the windows in the visiting room were so small and so high that no light filtered down to where you had to sit.” “You get a sense of what it must be like to be in prison,” says Derrick O’Conner, “and it’s horrendous. You’re like a rat on a treadmill with no way out. It really did get to me, and by the time we’d finished filming, I was wrecked. It almost felt I’d done 16 years myself.” The second and final part of this drama will screen in the same slot npvt wppk