Riveting and titillating: BBC2’s Parole reviewed

There’s a distinct and rather cunning whiff of cakeism about the new documentary series Parole. On the one hand, it can convincingly pass itself off as a sombre BBC2 exploration of the British justice system. On the other, it offers us an undeniably enjoyable, reality TV-style opportunity to compare our opinions with those of the experts.

Monday’s opening episode began with some solid statistical captions stating that 16,000 UK prisoners are considered for parole every year, that 4,000 are granted it and that each decision is made by a small panel drawn from the 346 members of the Parole Board. And with that, the programme got down to the juicier business of showing us two of the hearings.

First up was Colin Stacey, who in 1997 beat and kicked a man to death in a club carpark after a football argument. But 25 years later, was he, as he claimed, a changed man who ‘ain’t no threat to the community’? In charge of the verdict were two respectable chaps whose questioning soon revealed how fluent Colin had become in the language of pop psychology. ‘I had no social skills back then,’ he told them – maybe unnecessarily – but ever since he’s worked hard on his ‘anger management issues’.

Like all the best reality TV, too, Parole structured its narrative in order to keep us guessing. Just as Colin was coming across as a model prisoner, we learned that he’d been paroled in 2017 – but within six months was recalled to jail for assaulting a fellow resident at a probation hostel. There were also two elements of the story that may or may not have been red herrings. (You decide.) One was an account of his terrible childhood with a violent and drunken father.