Waiting for the Out review: This powerful prison drama is that rare thing - a TV show that allows you to think

As Waiting for the Out (BBC1, Sat, 9.30pm) illustrates, prison perhaps gives you too much time to think, to dwell on things, to worry away out them until you gnaw out the inside of your head – what brought me here, could I have escaped it, what makes me, me?

And it's not just the prisoners – philosophy teacher Dan (Josh Finan) is also wondering what brought him to this point, teaching Cartesian thinking and the theories of John Locke to a group of cons.

Dan has a problem from his past, you see – his dad, the sort of man with a hair-trigger temper and a view of masculinity that we might call problematic these days, is a jailbird who walked out on Dan, his mum and his brother Lee 25 years earlier.

But the lack of answers is driving Dan mad – while his brother spiralled into drug addiction, from which he is now recovering, Dan goes the other way, swearing off drugs completely, seeking answers from the cons in his group, constantly wondering if he is doomed to repeat his father's behaviour.

You'd be forgiven for thinking this all sounds like 45 minutes of agitprop, Brechtian catharsis. But Waiting for the Out – adapted by Dennis Kelly from a memoir, A Life Inside, by Andy West – has a lightness of touch, and a way of leavening the philosophical discourses with moments of creative swearing or a mordant joke.

“They assumed I was gay. I let them,” Dan tells prison officer Stevens (Ronke Adekoluejo). “So you're living as a closeted heterosexual? Smart,” she says.

Dan's quest to work out if he is a product of his father's genes, or if he can escape fate and destiny by working hard to go another way, however, leads him into trouble of different kinds.

He has developed obsessive compulsive behaviour around the gas cooker in his flat, checking, re-checking and then checking again that the burners are off and the oven isn't pumping out gas. This, of course, makes him constantly late for appointments, for work, for dates, and he has to lie, has to make up excuses.

And he sees visions of his father (Gerard Kearns), berating him for his lack of masculinity, telling him he'll be easy meat inside.

The prisoners are rounded individuals for whom time has given them space to think for once, although whether that is a good thing or not is clearly a delicate subject.

Keith (Alex Fearns) is an abrasive autodidact who can argue free will and materialism with Dan all day long. Greg is a nervous, mouse-like man who wants to express himself but doesn't know how.

Waiting for the Out can get a little stagey at times, and you can see it could easily be adapted for the stage – the set-piece discussions with the prisoners' group, a two-hander Dan has with his father's ex-cellmate (Mark Lewis-Jones), a disastrous dinner party where Dan demolishes the middle class view of prison and nature or nurture.

But this is a powerful, moving study of how we can come to terms with our past, and how thinking can set us free, no matter our circumstances.

As Dan says: “People like thinking, even those we deem not be good at it. Thinking is human. My class lets them think for a bit. It lets them feel human.”

It's only 45 minutes an episode, and all six episodes are on iPlayer – take that time out of our ludicrous lives, and have a think.