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Article by David Swift
David Swift tells us some little known facts about one of
the most popular TV shows worldwide, PRISONER CELL BLOCK H....
1. Prisoner began on 4th August 1978.
2. It went on air in Australia on Tuesday, 27th February 1979.
3. Prisoner run for 8 years.
4. It had 692 episodes in total.
5. Worldwide viewers total 100 million.
6. 40 Television stations have screened the show.
7. Prisoner won 21 awards and 8 logies (?).
8. The show was created in 1977, which was the "National Year of
the woman"
9. It was filmed in studio B, 10 Television Melbourne Studios.
10. Val Lehman (Queen Bea Smith) appeared in the first 400 episodes.
11. Shella Florence (Lizzie Birdsworth) was in the first 414 episodes.
12. Elspeth Ballantyne (Meg Jackson/Morris) appeared in ALL 692 episodes.
13. 6480 Actors worked on the show.
14. The lighting system cost 1.5 million Australian dollars.
15. America had 39,000,000 viewers.
16. The UK had 11,000,000 viewers.
17. Each episode lasted 48 minutes and cost $35,000.
18. Total production cost $37,000,000.
19. Filming took 25,000 hours.
20. The show's final episode was shown in Melbourne, on 16th December
1986.
21. In the central T.V. region it was broadcast on 16th December 1991.
22. Prisoner ended filming on 5th September 1986.
23. Prisoner is the most video recorded show in New Zealand and England.
24. Over 1,000,000 cigarettes were smoked by the shows actresses during
filming.
25. 40 Miles of video tape were used on the show.
26. 3,500 adverts were shown on Central TV during the transmission.
27. 2,500,000 Adverts were shown world-wide during Prisoner.
28. There were 21,000 scenes.
29. 1,500 pages of script were used on the show.
30. 6,000,000 words were spoken on the show.
31. Prisoner lasted 33,216 minutes.
Cheer's David! | 
