You know you’ve reached the dregs of the summer doldrums when sport is clogging up all the schedules and Wentworth Prison (Channel 5) is the best thing on TV to write about. Or maybe not.

I cheerfully avoided watching all 34 previous episodes of this low-budget Aussie offering – a 21st-century reboot of the schlockily sadistic Seventies prison drama Prisoner: Cell Block H. But while I can’t speak of what’s gone before, this season four opener was an absolute belter, featuring a cast of fabulously strong, variably humane female characters. The series even sports its very own lesbian Hannibal Lecter in the form of mega-manipulative former governor Joan Ferguson (Pamela Rabe) – a triumph of camp, lip-quivering menace in a glass-walled cell.

To be fair, I’m not sure hilarity is what the show was after. But it was a heck of a lot more entertaining than lauded US drama Orange is the New Black, which pales in comparison. We began with the return of a gang of brawny lady lags to the newly rebuilt prison following, I gathered, its destruction by fire at the climax of the last series. Among them was Bea Smith (Danielle Cormack) the prison’s top dog – more pithily rendered as “baddest bitch” – who, I could only surmise, had undergone a change of heart between series, as she was now struggling to maintain her status.