In the Starbucks by Vauxhall station, Errol McGlashan is a ball of focused energy. At 61, he has the restless intensity of someone half his age – ideas tumbling out, plans forming, constant eye contact that’s relaxed but absolute.
We’ve been talking for over an hour – about his decades cycling through Wandsworth Prison, why scared-straight programmes backfire, how a watermelon and a battery in a sock became a rite of passage, why rehabilitation organisations often fail the people they claim to serve, what actually changed him (not therapy, not meditation, but writing and faith), and his next project: touring churches in a camper van performing the Gospel of Mark from memory. As the interview winds down, we ask for a photo.
Something shifts. The expressiveness goes from his face. He sits dead straight, face blank, and for the first time looks like a man in his 60s who’s had it hard. Like a prison photo. The camera goes down and his eyes light up. He’s back – talking, animated, alive.
That brief transformation – the system’s imprint, the man’s transcendence of it – contains everything about what McGlashan will share on Wednesday in Wandsworth, when he performs his one-man show “Something to Take Off the Edge” with all proceeds supporting the Wandsworth Prison Welfare Trust’s improvement campaign.
One final reckoning
The show depicts two mismatched cellmates in 1980s Bristol – one Black Londoner (loosely based on McGlashan), one Irish traveller – navigating survival, heroin, Shakespeare, and an unlikely friendship behind bars. It’s drawn from McGlashan’s own time at Wandsworth, where he served most of his longest sentence: four years imposed in the late 1980s.
“It’s called ‘Something to Take Off the Edge,’ which is a phrase from Shakespeare,” McGlashan explains. “Back in the 80s, you couldn’t go to the education centre without someone coming in and shoving Shakespeare at you. There’s something about studying Shakespeare – straight away it’s not accessible, but when you study it, it comes alive.”
The show has earned recognition – the Royal Shakespeare Company selected it for their “37 Plays” initiative, praising “the authenticity of the voice and a voice that we just never, ever get to hear.” McGlashan’s journey from Koestler Arts award winner to judge speaks to the transformation he embodies.
The show is touring 44 confirmed venues from October through December – prisons, hostels, approved premises, probation offices across England. Wednesday’s performance is number 15 on that schedule, with shows continuing through mid-December before McGlashan walks away from rehabilitation work entirely.
“I’ve come to the end of my relationship with prison rehabilitation,” he says. “After this tour, I won’t be doing the show anymore unless there’s really strong demand. I’m moving on.”
Next year: a camper van, the Gospel of Mark memorised (he’s got seven of sixteen chapters down), and a tour – both secular and sacred – of community centres, churches, and, yes, prisons.
But first: one final tour. One final reckoning with the system that couldn’t save him, and the place that marked him most.
“It feels like forever I’ve been trying to get my shit together”
McGlashan’s relationship with Wandsworth runs deep. His longest sentence was served mostly there – “two years, eight months, but it’s as if it went on for 20 years. It’s always been in my mind. It’s really left an imprint.”
He wasn’t only there once. “I’d done a couple of short sentences there before. I was in and out, in and out. If you look at my criminal record, it’s just ridiculous. It just goes on for pages – petty, stupid shit.”
At Wandsworth, he studied GCSE Law, English, and became a member of the Heathfield powerlifting team. “They were letting me out unsupervised to go and powerlift against some firefighters. I did stuff with the church – they let me out to go to other churches. I was kind of trusted.”
At the same time: “I had loads of officers who hated me. There was a set of officers out to dig me out. Then I had officers who loved me and wanted to give me everything.”
The regime was basic by today’s standards. “No TVs in cells. Showers once a week on Fridays” – but, he says, even though the regime was harsh, there was a regime. “You’d get it without fail. If you were due a visit, you’d get it. Nowadays it seems to be all over the place, totally unorganised.”
The pattern continued for decades. “I’ve got a poem somewhere: ‘It feels like forever I’ve been trying to get my shit together, trying to get my shit together, I’ve been at it forever.’ It’s very true. I’ve done everything – yoga, Vipassana meditation, neurolinguistic processing, transactional analysis. I thought there’s something wrong with my thinking, I’ve got to sort it out.”
None of it worked. Not the programmes, not the therapy, not ten-day silent meditation retreats where you sit for ten hours a day working through bodily sensations. What finally worked? “Getting baptised at my church, reading my Bible. For me, it gives me that assurance that it’s all going to get sorted in the wash. When Jesus is the head of my life, then everything gets sorted.”
He didn’t “grow up” – by his definition – until he was about 55. He’s 61 now.
The Watermelon and the Battery
McGlashan understands something crucial about young men that most prevention programmes miss. He remembers a talk at his children’s home, Denham Court in Buckinghamshire – an intervention meant to scare them straight.
An older ex-prisoner came in. Put a watermelon on a stand. Explained the weapon: a PP9 battery in a sock. Then smashed the watermelon – demonstrating the first act of violence he’d witnessed in prison.
The intended message: prison is terrifying. Stay away.
The message McGlashan received was very different: “It wasn’t off-putting. It was that scared excitement you get watching a horror movie. I still remember his accent – he was from Liverpool. I remember thinking: would I survive it? Would I sit with my back to the door?” He laughs at the memory. “It introduced a fear to me and made me want to overcome the fear.”
This is the gap between intention and reception that dooms most prevention work. Adults see deterrence. Young men see challenge.
“I think one of the things we do as humans is overcome our fears,” McGlashan explains. “So if going to prison is fearful, then surely it’s for me to get over that fear. By my 20s, I used to say, ‘I’ll do a ten, I’ll do a ten.’ I was convinced I could do a ten-year sentence.”
He pauses. “That is mental. But there’s lots of people who think like that.”
McGlashan knew prison was coming. “My mum used to say, ‘You little thief, you’re going to end up in prison.’ Then I went into care and some of the older boys had already been to jail. I knew I was going. To me, it was a rite of passage. I was looking forward to going to detention centre. I thought it was part of growing up.”
So what works instead of fear-based prevention?
“Don’t have long conversations with young people about prison and crime and stabbing people and carrying knives,” McGlashan says firmly. “Get people who can speak passionately about what they’re doing – whether it’s snooker, or running, or fixing cars, or music – in a way which is engaging, which excites the audience. So young people’s hearts are beating slightly because somebody’s talking about their thing with passion.”
Not scared straight. Inspired forward.
“You’ve got to have a project. Your project is your hobby, your passion, that thing that you do which is legal, which gives you a buzz. When you have your project, you haven’t got time to be committing crime because you’re proper into this. You’re not going to stay up late at that party taking charlie if you’ve got that audition at 11am which might get you work.”
He learned this the hard way. His own project became performance – first spoken word (performing as “Uncle Errol”), then playwriting. He applied for Arts Council funding three times before succeeding. Before that, he did it himself.
“I went on LinkedIn, made a profile, started messaging people. I said: I’ve got this one-man show, I’m pretty sure people would like it, when are you free? I’d love to come and perform it. That’s all. I said nothing about money.”
He’d get interest. Someone would eventually ask about fees. “I’d say, if you’ve got some funding then fine, if you’re outside London I’ll need a train ticket. Some people would say they haven’t got budget. Totally up to me whether I want to do it for free. Other people would say, ‘We wouldn’t dream of not paying you.'”
He did 23 free shows before anything happened. “Then it started. People started paying.” When the show ran at Camden Fringe in 2023, Everything Theatre called it “raw, funny and unforgettable.” The work spoke for itself.
The lesson: “Take personal responsibility. This idea that someone’s meant to be looking after you – no. Look after yourself. And then when people see that you are doing it yourself, getting on with it, they will come and they will want to help you.”
What the system gets wrong
McGlashan is blunt about what he’s observed in the rehabilitation sector. “Too many organisations exist primarily to provide wages to the people who work for it,” he says. “You can spend the next ten years going to workshops and masterclasses. You sit there, you listen to someone waffling about what they do, you ask a few questions, you fill in the evaluation form saying you feel more confident, you give it seven or eight out of ten because you know what they want. And then what the hell’s happened?”
So what’s missing? “Direct support when someone says: I’ve got this idea, I’ve done this with you, will you support that? They don’t come and do it. There’s no development unless you decide to do it yourself.”
The fundamental problem, McGlashan argues, is that rehabilitation can’t be delivered from outside. “People who sorted out their lives and broke out of cycles of drug addiction and criminal behaviour – they decided they’d had enough, that they’re not going to do it anymore. That’s when organisations can help. But if you haven’t decided, people can literally give you £10,000 and say stay out of trouble for three years, and you won’t be able to, because you haven’t decided.”
He spent years in programmes. Nothing shifted him. “One of the things that sealed it for me was in 2017. I was playing table tennis at Thameside with this 22-year-old. I’m in my early 50s, I’ve been playing since I was in care, I’m mashing everyone. I’m cleaning this kid out, we’ve got snicker bars riding on it.”
The young man got so frustrated he broke the bat on the corner of the table. They argued. “He said to me: ‘Look at you, big old 50-odd-year-old man, still coming to prison.’ Even he knew, as a young man, that eventually you’re meant to grow out of it.”
What changed McGlashan wasn’t a programme. It was getting fed up. “I got fed up of going to jail. It was getting ridiculous.” And then finding something bigger than himself to focus on.
The mindset that had to shift
McGlashan is brutally honest about what drove him. “I had the mindset of a thief. My thinking was: I’ve got to get out of paying for stuff, avoid paying for stuff. But if I’m going to pay for stuff, the money I’m paying is stolen money. Children do this – they just take the toy off another child because they want it.”
Life improved when he started paying for things. “I spent two hours trying to illegally download some film because I didn’t want to pay £4. When I paid for it, I got it in ten seconds. It just seems that when you decide you’re going to pay for stuff – even paying 5p for a plastic bag, which goes against everything – it’s a healthier mindset. Then you’re thinking: okay, I need to make money to pay for stuff.”
Growing up also meant recognising a responsibility to his future self. “I never used to think of the older version of me. I never thought that one of the people I’m responsible for is me in five years, me in ten years.”
And what does he tell prisoners when he visits them now? “Turn off the TV. Daytime TV is for old ladies and children, not young men. Turn it off for a minimum of ten minutes and just write. You hear all these words from when you’re born – all these thoughts and things people tell you. When you start writing it down, keeping a journal, you kind of suss out what it is you actually think, what you actually want to do.”
Putting TVs in cells, he argues, was one of the worst things prisons did. “You’re not thinking if you’re lying on your back watching Jeremy Kyle back to back. If you’re in jail, you want to escape, so you watch TV. But it’s passive entertainment that doesn’t give you anything. You’re not reflecting.”
The van, the gospel, and what comes next
McGlashan has bought a camper van – a Peugeot Partner. He doesn’t have a driving licence. Yet. His daughter thinks he’s lost it. “I know, I should have done that first.” His plan for 2026: pass the theory test, pass the driving test, “then I’m going to chuck a mattress and a bucket and some wet wipes in the back and go touring.”
The bucket and wet wipes – exactly like the cell he lived in during the 1980s, before toilets were installed. But this time: freedom. Choice. Purpose.
He’s memorising the Gospel of Mark: “I started in April but it took a back seat when I was going back and forth to Scotland. Now I’m back on it. I’ve got seven chapters down, sixteen to go.”
In December, he’ll perform a full chapter for his church. Then: “A secular and sacred tour. Churches, community centres, even prisons if they want it. A dramatic recital with a bit of music, a bit of poetry, and the whole gospel of Mark.”
This from a man who once couldn’t imagine life outside the cycle of theft and imprisonment.
Faith, doubt, and thinking for yourself
McGlashan’s faith is central to his transformation, but he’s not uncritical. He’s currently wrestling with Calvinism – the theological position that God has predetermined who will be saved.
“I’ve got a problem with that,” he says. “It challenges everything about personal responsibility and choice.” He discovered that a pastor he’d been following for years – John Piper – is a Calvinist. “I’m finding myself disagreeing with everything he’s saying. But he’s coming from a different place, and I believe he’s got it wrong.”
The lesson? “No matter how learned someone is, you’ve got to do your own learning. You cannot piggyback on someone else’s learning. You’ve got to figure it out yourself.”
This intellectual engagement – questioning, testing, thinking critically even about faith – is what makes McGlashan’s transformation credible. He hasn’t swapped one dogma for another.
Wednesday: full circle
Which brings us back to Wednesday. To Wandsworth. To the place that marked McGlashan most deeply.
“I really want to get in there and do my show at Wandsworth Prison,” he says. “I’ve run workshops there, but I haven’t performed the show there yet. Many prisons are so all over the place they can’t even respond, or they respond positive then you never hear anything.”
So instead, he’s performing at The County Arms, a pub just yards from the prison’s main entrance a common stopping off spot for those going into and coming out of the prison. It’s for the Wandsworth Prison Welfare Trust and Wandsworth Prison Improvement Committee – organisations campaigning to improve conditions at the prison where he served his longest sentence, where officers both loved and hated him, where he was trusted enough to be let out unsupervised while still having months left to serve.
The show is frank. “It’s not for kids,” McGlashan warns. “Unless they’re okay with talking about sticking drugs up the bum and all the rest.”
It’s about two cellmates who shouldn’t get along but do, because one likes weed and the other gets regular visits. “Ezra puts up with Terry because Terry gets regular visits, which means he gets puff. Then Ezra finds his compassion when Terry starts to suffer.”
The title comes from Shakespeare – something to take the edge off being in prison. “That could be taking heroin, smoking weed, banging out press-ups, drinking two litres of water a day, getting a routine, finding your faith. Anything that helps you survive.”
Terry – a composite of several people McGlashan met – represents one of the show’s most challenging storylines: people who came into prison clean, got introduced to heroin inside, then faced the dangerous reality that street heroin is 30 times stronger than prison heroin after release. “In the 80s, every police station had messages stamped on the ceiling and walls: don’t do drugs for the first time in prison because you’ll do it when you get out and you’ll overdose.”
The message isn’t ‘don’t take drugs’, it is: “Write your stories. This is my story, which I’ve written.”
After Wednesday, after the final venues in December, McGlashan will stop telling this story. He’ll have said what he came to say about prison, about rehabilitation, about what actually works.
Then: the open road. The gospel. Churches across England.
“People ask me about the future,” he says. “I tell them: have a project. Something legal that gives you a buzz. That thing you’re obsessed with, that you want to talk about to everyone. When you have that, you haven’t got time for the other stuff.”
At 61, Errol McGlashan has finally found his. And he bought a van to prove it.
“Something to Take Off the Edge” performs Wednesday 12 November, 7:30-9:30pm, at The County Arms, 345 Trinity Road SW18 3SH. Tickets £5 on the door, all proceeds to Wandsworth Prison Welfare Trust’s improvement campaign.
McGlashan’s tour continues through December, taking the show from Wakefield to Exeter, Newcastle to Bristol. London venues include multiple performances at HMP Brixton for Black History Month, Belmarsh Prison, and various approved premises and recovery centres, concluding with a final performance on 15 December at Brixton Library.
Correction: In an earlier version of this article, we stated that Errol had bought a Peugeot Boxer campervan for his planned 2026 tour and illustrated it with a rather swanky new Boxer. Errol got in touch to gently point out that reality is somewhat less Instagram-worthy: it’s actually a far humbler Peugeot Partner currently taking up space on his daughter’s drive. We’ve updated the article to reflect his rather more modest sleeping arrangements.
An excellent article that really captured the wisdom, humour and spirit of Errol. I urge anyone who missed his performance at the County Arms to get to Brixton Library on 15th December. ‘Something to take off the Edge ‘is an intensive , heartfelt and heartbreaking story based on lived experience.