HINTER GITTERN - der Frauenknast
	BACKGROUND CHARACTERS EPISODES 1-25 * 26-50 * 51-75 * 76-100 * 101- PICTURES	Lollo (possibly) with Uschi in the background

From The Sunday Times, 15/06/97

Prisoner: Cell Block H, the compulsively awful Aussie soap, is to be transported to Germany and reincarcerated at Spandau Prison. Zees musst be ein joke, nein? On the contrary: the German network RTL has ordered 52 one-hour episodes from Grundy, its makers, to be shot in the famous retreat that once housed Rudolf Hess as a solitary convict.

Although the very cells in which Rudolf Hess and other Nazis were held have been demolished, the barracks in which his allied British jailers lived are apparently still intact. It is these that will be used for filming, beginning in a few weeks' time. But those who long to see the likes of the Freak - Prisoner: Cell Block H's delightful warder - emerging from a stripy sentry box togged up in SS uniform and jackboots will be disappointed. The show will continue to be set in the present day, and the Australian producer Mike Murphy and his German production team claim to have resisted the temptation to ham up the show's latent lesbianism with any Nazi chic.

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It's currently being broadcast on RTL on Monday nights at 8:15 p.m. (9:15 p.m. in Germany).

RTL is on the Astra satellite at 11.229GHz (V), so if you have a satellite dish you can probably pick it up. I think it may also be available on cable in the UK.

"Prisoner" fans have an advantage - you only need a fairly basic grasp of German to be able to work out what's going on.

But it may help to read through the list of major characters (with notes on the Prisoner characters that seem to have inspired them) and a brief and incomplete account of the story so far...

Since October 1999, RTL have given one of their top rating prorammes the website it deserves:
http://www.rtl.de/redaktionen/Hinter_Gittern/default.htm

And Katy Karrenbauer (who plays Walter) evidently has a huge fan following with both sexes and sexualities and now has her own web site.

Before this site appeared, I used the following websites (all of them are in German) to find out what I could:

TV Serien aus D-produktion helped me to add episode titles and complete the listing of the early episodes I didn't see.

http://www.ufa.de/produktionen/info/Soaps/hinter_gittern.html
The page from the joint production company UFA which gives details of which episodes are currently in production. I have borrowed the logo from here.

http://www.ufa.de/sendetermine/info/Fiction/hinter_gittern.html
UFA's page giving details of the current month's episodes

http://www.eurotv.com/dbsearch.htm
Episode summaries for recent episodes

http://www.tvmovie.de/
Older episode summaries, going back to episode one: the site is no longer online, it seems.

http://www.rtl.de/
RTL's website also has a very detailed summary for the next episode.

http://www.tvmovie.de/aktuelles_heft/thema/hintergrund/schlimmer_als_in_alcatraz
on the same site was an article on the background to the series: it's no longer there. The miserably tiny pictures came from here, too.

http://eurogay.net/magazin/glotze/tv24.html
For the snide reference to Walter as a "Klischee-Lesbe"

http://www.pearsontv.com/pages/library/verboteneon.htm
Information on "Verbotene Liebe" - Grundy's German version of "Sons and Daughters". There is no mention of "Hinter Gittern".....