Open All Hours Open All Hours Open All Hours is a British television sitcom created and written by Roy Clarke for the BBC. It ran for 26 episodes in four series, which premiered in 1976, 1981, 1982 and 1985. The programme developed from a television pilot broadcast in Ronnie Barker's comedy anthology series, "Seven of One" (1973). "Open All Hours" ranked eighth in the 2004 Britain's Best Sitcom poll. A sequel, entitled "Still Open All Hours", was created in 2013. The setting is a small grocer's shop in Balby, a suburb of Doncaster in South Yorkshire. The owner, Arkwright (Ronnie Barker), is a
Ronnie Barker by Roy Clarke) and "Prisoner and Escort" (written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais) became series. "Prisoner and Escort" became "Porridge", airing from 1974–1977, with Barker starring as the cynical and cunning prisoner Norman Stanley Fletcher. "Porridge" was the first sitcom to take place in a prison; "The Times" said the show "was about what it took to survive in prison, the little day-to-day triumphs over the system that kept the prisoners sane." The opening sequence of the programme showed Fletcher being directed to his cell, as prison doors are locked behind him, all the while the judge can