Waiting for the Out

Dennis Kelly wrote Utopia, Pulling and the book for Matilda the Musical, a range that makes him difficult to place and reliably worth following. His BBC series Waiting for the Out, adapted from Andy West's memoir The Life Inside, won Best Writing at Series Mania in 2026, in a competition where the jury gave the top prize to a Polish drama and the screenplay award to this.

Josh Finan plays Dan, a philosopher teaching a weekly seminar to a class of men inside a British prison. Each episode takes a topic — dominance, freedom, luck, the ones philosophy has been circling for millennia — and lets it be argued by people for whom the stakes are concrete. Stephen Wight, Phil Daniels, Gerard Kearns and Francis Lovehall lead the class, with Jeanette Nordahl and Ben Palmer directing, and the series is largely six conversations in a room, staged with the confidence to let them run.

Kelly's gift has always been for dialogue that sounds like people scoring points off each other while saying something true, and the prison-classroom format concentrates it. It is also, unusually for British prison drama, uninterested in violence as a plot engine: the pressure here is intellectual and social, which turns out to be more than enough.