From prisoner to TV actor

The Penned Up festival brings writers and musicians into prison, and now thousands can watch on their in-cell laptops

A group of men are crammed into a not-very-big room. Perhaps as many as 40, standing room filled too. In front of them one man is talking, telling them about his life, his story as he grew up with a drug-dealing mother who was eventually taken into prison. Then he turned down the same path. I am in HMP Erlestoke and the man talking is Michael Balogun – television actor, director, writer, and once resident of this very prison as well as a few others. His story is serious, sad, even tragic, but he tells it with such gusto and so many asides that there’s as much laughter as sympathy. 

His audience knows what he’s talking about. What many of them don’t know, and what he wants to get across, is how he changed from a man whose life brought him to the edge of suicide to a man who has appeared in dramas from Shakespeare’s Macbeth on stage to Top Boy and Sherwood on TV. His story, he hopes, shows that anyone can change if they have the will and find the way as he did through acting. He says, “You’ve got time to think. Time to plan. Time to prepare.”

Prisoners in charge

Michael was speaking as part of the 10th anniversary of the Penned Up Festival. This was founded in HMP Lewes when David Kendall, who had already worked arranging prison events, decided they could and should be better. The secret was to realise that it just wasn’t sensible to arrange a prison event when the men or women inside were not being asked who they wanted to listen to. What he needed was a committee which included prisoners. He told me: “If they’re invested they will come, with their mates, plus only prisoners could give me honest answers to which rooms should be used, which had appalling acoustics, and of course which staff we should put our trust in. That first committee gave us both a name and a method of working, which we have followed for 10 years.”

On the second year he moved to Erlestoke, which has been the festival’s base ever since. This year Michael Balogun was the 10th of 21 speakers, spread over five weeks, including Claire Hammon on classical music, Philip Hammond on self-employment, John Costi (a judge at last year’s Koestler Awards) on art, and Jacob Dunne on restorative justice. Quite a variety of interests, but I doubt if many have Michael’s way with words. I jotted down a few, “If Shakespeare was here, he’d be chilling with you.” “Criminals and actors are very similar people.” “You have a certain charisma other men don’t have. You can all act.”

Michael settled on acting with such a passionate intensity, poring over plays in his cell, that the prison philanthropist, Lady Edwina Grosvenor, offered to pay his fees at RADA, the prestigious London college for actors, if he could get a place there. So, there he was, out of prison, in his late twenties and with a completely different path ahead of him. But he doesn’t forget his past, and describes movingly the night he had his bedclothes twisted into a hangman’s noose, before giving himself until 5am. So he sat on a chair to think about it. 

He tells me before the talk that “no-one’s born a criminal”, but that “birth to seven is the most formative period of life”. That was when his mother went to prison, and after her absence was discovered, he went into care. “I had a different mind then. A mind determines how you look,” he says. “Acting has given me a better understanding of who I am.” Finally, he adds, “I’ve always been passionate about getting people to realise their potential.”

Michael could, and does in his working life, reach many more people than these 40 men in a small room – but a new development has hugely widened the reach of Penned Up. Festival sessions are being filmed and broadcast to the 19 prisons in England and Wales where prisoners have Launchpad laptops in their cells, meaning that 40 enthralled audience become potentially 12,000. And to increase the stretch further, Neil Parsons, Communications Manager, who is doing the filming, will record a podcast after the event.

Erlestoke is one of the prisons with Launchpad laptops. I talked to some of the men in the audience about this development and, without exception, they expressed positive approval. Romell, a Shannon Trust representative who I was sitting next to, told me he checks his laptop every day and looks forward to updates – not enough, in his view. Others in the audience read Inside Time online, a new departure for the paper and again, reaching a wider audience, even though some said they liked the hard copy too. 

David Kendall admits that he never thought Penned Up would last for so many years, but it seems to me he has set a model for prisons to follow. One prisoner, Michael (not Balogun), wrote David a letter recently from which I quote:

“As a committee member I was able to become heavily involved in most aspects of the festival, and from our first meeting I was made to feel like an equal. This has been particularly meaningful in the prison environment, as far too often, we as prisoners are not heard and not included in any form of decision-making … I have also had the opportunity to become actively involved in the events themselves. This has included introducing guests such as musician Nick Cave (a huge hero of mine), opening a number of festivals by playing live with my band, and playing guitar with Billy Bragg on stage… 

‘A rare thing in prison’

“In the 15 years I’ve spent in the prison system, Penned Up is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. It is an idea that is wholly inclusive of everyone, no matter who you are or what background you come from. There are many prisoners at Erlestoke who suffer from a range of complex issues, both diagnosed and undiagnosed. These include those with neurodiverse needs, mental health or behavioural issues, learning difficulties, and/or personality disorders. To find a safe space in which all of these complex characters can come together and respectfully listen, question, take part in, share their own experiences… is a very rare thing in prison. Penned Up has been a shining light in the often long, dark, and difficult road that is a prison sentence.”

I only witnessed one of the Penned Up events, but when I asked David whether Michael Balogun has produced one of his best ever, he insisted that all of them bring in an interested audience. Perhaps one of the key points that Michael made is the importance of childhood and the disadvantage a difficult upbringing imposes on many of the men who find themselves in prison. His mother had been a strong woman – he described her as a god to him – so when she disappeared into prison for 15 years, he was unable to process the situation. How could he survive without her? He changed from being a boy who enjoyed school, was good at maths and sang in choir, to a boy who swapped being loved for being feared. He says, “I wanted people to be afraid of me.” “Why,” he asks in an aside, “do people respect badness?” Soon he started selling weed – after all, if his mother had, why not him? Unsurprisingly, he eventually got thrown out of his secondary school. By then he was selling crack and his path was set. 

Except that it wasn’t forever. Shakespeare is the nearest thing to Balogun’s hero, and he tells us that he’s certain the greatest British playwright also spent time in prison…