Ok, I'm starting this topic.

I currently own S1-3 UK box sets. Fairly new ones, since my Series 2 uncut set doesn't erroneously claim to have commentary on "Oh What A Night".

Series one box set: They have Sylvia & Lorna on the front, WTF?! They couldn't have thought that would be a selling point. The picture of Dockley on the back, isn't much better. I guess they're really hoping people will have caught the show on TV or read the back of the box. At least they show better sense with how they decorated the inside. I'd really have preferred to see Mandana or Simone on the outside.

Series two box set: Ok, I can't really complain about them having my favorite Guv'nor on the box. However, why the hell wasn't she on the outside of the Series 1 or 3 box, instead? Out of all three sets they put her on the S2 box?! It's misleading, considering it is the season we get the least Helen. On the other hand, it is very lovely Helen indeed. Karen on the back is fair but that's a goofy pic.

Series 3, they show they've wisened up on the whole outside packaging thing, but really Karen's pin stripe is better than that weird grey faux wood thing. Got to love the expression on Claire King's face, though. Also, I like that they had a big cast shot, but:
-Shell looks a bit undead
-Simone looks like she borrowed Mandana's red shirt. That shirt is too loose.
-speaking of Mandana, she should have been wearing the red shirt!!!
-Buki & Denny are at a bad angle.
We <3 Peckham . . :silly EW! They mostly just annoy me and make me want to smack them. I think they were trying to make Maxi look tough, but she looks more like she has a hangover and someone goosed her. The least they could have done was pick a sexier Maxi with the gang picture.

Actually, I am the least fond of S3 contents. There's the more there than ever before, but I think I actually like the inside of S1 & S2 better. Well, aside from glowering Nikki all in black and Simone and Claire behind the 5th DVD, I could think of lots of better image choices.
Ok, Dockley with the bottle to Fenner, Yvonne tugging at Charlie's tie in leather, & Josh and Crystal looking snuggly in profile (not the one with them in the sheets) were good choices.

US Bad Girls:
No extras, YELLOW PACKAGING! Emphasis on Rachel Hicks of all characters . .are the insides any better? On the other hand, looking at the outside of that box, I get a better sense that the show is about "Bad Girls", lol. On the other hand, that packaging is less serious and more trashy, compared to the minimalist nature of the UK packaging that is more ominous.

Questions:
Does the Bad Girls Complete Series 1-4 have the same extras, more extras or less extras than buying them seperately? When I was looking, I ended up buying seperately, because it was cheaper and I knew the individual ones had them seperately.

What's the release date for series 5-8 complete? If they charge a fair price and have decent extras, I think it might be the only way I actually end up buying S8 lol.

I think the box set is identical to the individual ones, sadly. Like, by this point they weren't putting any extra effort into these things (as evidenced by the complete lack of extras on the S8 dvd set!).

I'm in agreement about the S2 set being the best, what with the gorgeous Helen-Nikki-centric packaging, and the fantastic extras (no interviews, but the SA trailer is worth about 10 interviews I think). I like the fact that they put Helen on the front, because it's yet another hint that Helen isn't really gone when she quits in S2E2--which is important to convey to viewers any way you can.

Glad they fixed the S2 packaging--that episode commentary was the cruelest hoax.

The SA releases must be as boring as the US ones. No extras, just the episodes. Also the episodes have no titles, it's literally just Episode 1, Episode 2, etc.

S1 has Shell and Fenner on the cover and on the back some screencaps of Shell and Fenner, Zandra, Helen and Nikki after her fight with Shell.
S2 has Helen and Fenner on the cover and a cast shot of Shell, Denny, Nikki, Karin, Helen and Fenner on the back.
S3 has Karin and Helen on the cover and in the background a screenshot of Di, Pam, Josh and the Julies. On the back we have a dying Fenner, Shell with her bottle and a faded screenshot of Shaz, Yvonne, Nikki and Shell.

As far as I can tell these series' are just as "uncut" as the UK ones. I have seen the UK ones and haven't missed any scenes on my SA ones. But I still want to import from amazon, seeing as my current collection is showing signs of damage (now I wonder whose fault is that?)

Btw, you can buy S1-3 for dirt cheap in SA - R200 for all three boxes, which works back to something like $29 or roughly £14!

That probably explains why they were selling the UK sets cheaper just after Christmas. I thought it was because they had been shown recently on ITV3. But it's more likely that they were about to release a new version. Unfortunately my Series 2 set does claim to have the commentary which confused the hell out of me for ages. I take it there are still no subtitles on the newer version?

I came across this link on Wikipedia the other day - and I wasn't even looking for Bad Girls stuff!! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Girls_DVD_Sets) Doesn't give you much info but shows front & back designs on each set.

Actually I have just checked and amazon still have them selling at £12 each (S1 to S3).

Hi Cass! I'm talking £14 for the whole lot, not per individual box set. They have packaged series 1-3 into one complete box set and they're selling that for £14. If I understand you correctly you would be paying £12 x 3 to get S1-3, which amounts to £36. The SA deal is then considerably cheaper at £14! Not?

Hi microsofty! Sorry I didn't read your original post properly. Yep, the SA deal is much, much better than the Amazon one.

How do DVDs in SA compare with the UK prices? Is this just a one off or are they normally much cheaper?

Hi Cass! Hope you're doing well.

I think this is just a once-off deal. When I initially bought my DVDs I paid R600 (about £43) for S1-3. As far as comparisons go between SA and UK prices, I would say it largely depends on what you want to buy. The mainstream (mostly US) movies would cost an average of about R150 (about £11). A single TV series can cost up to about R300 (£22). If you go for British productions (like I always do), it would be worth your while to import from amazon directly. For example series 5 of 'Allo! 'Allo finally arrived in SA about 5 months ago, but most of the stores imported the series and are now selling it at a considerable mark-up - close to R500 (or about £36) per half of the series (they're selling it as series 5.1 and series 5.2). For the locals this is quite expensive, but most of the American and European tourists to SA always comment about how cheap things are in SA!

(Maybe we should start a price comparison thread! Plonk in things like the price of a can of Coke, R4.50 in SA, which is equal to about 32p in the UK).

That is interesting about the SA set. I know it says £12.80 on the Amazon site, but if you buy all three seasons together, you end up paying £10.20 x 3. Still not the deal of all three for £14. If delivery from SA isn't too bad, maybe I'd get that for a loaner set, as opposed to paying $18 for US series 1, lol. I'll just burn a copy of DVD X Player Pro, so the borrowers will just have to watch from their PCs, lol.

Thanks for the Wiki link, Cassandra. Too bad that they don't have the SA covers on there.

Hi Wash! Here's pics of the SA covers.



Normally I would volunteer to buy you that box set, but as you've pointed out, I'm not too sure about our postal service either! If it was up to the SA Post Office, H&N would never have gotten together - Helen's first letter would still be wandering around somewhere in their system! But if you're willing to risk $28, PM me and we can make a plan! (PS It is region 2 DVDs, same as UK).

Hi microsofty! Yeah I'm fine. Hope you're doing well too! Thought you were trying to shake off that troublemaker image as you seemed to have gone rather quiet. Or maybe we've just been in different threads! :)

Thanks for info on DVD prices. They do seem cheaper than the UK although prices have been forced down more recently by some of the supermarkets. £43 for S1-3 seems very cheap. The full price on Amazon is £40 each.

Not sure there would be the same interest .... but you know me, interested in practically anything! Though we have kinda done that already for Stoli vodka in the Smoking BG thread. I also posted a general supermarket link there as well (See Supermarket comparisons - need to click on a product then click to ask for price). It's really meant for comparison of prices between the giant supermarkets in the UK but you could use it to compare with SA prices (or anywhere else).

Ta for the SA Box pics. And can't remember if I said or not but ... nice sig!!

I have a troublemaker image?! :eek

Nah, I'm not trying to shake anything off, I've just been working my arse of this week - with one of your guys, a consultant from the UK. I have to take him out shopping just now, but he is mainly interested in buying chocolates - what's up with that?

I had a look at some of the prices - you guys are being ripped off when it comes to South African wines! For instance Goiya in SA is regarded as a less elequant wine, very hard on the pallet and not very tasteful. Mainly because it is made from left over wines when they plonk everything together and then sell it off at a much cheaper rate. A bottle of Goiya Cabernet Sauvignon 75cl would cost about R25 (£1.80) - you guys pay twice the price! Our Chivas Regal is also slightly cheaper than yours, we pay about R250 (£17) for a 750ml bottle wheras you guys pay £19,83 for a 700ml bottle.

I agree, Washuai! It makes no sense whatsoever!! If the marketing folk were unwilling to push Helen & Nikki as the main characters in S1 then why not choose Fenner & Shell instead? Sylvia & Lorna seem a bizarre choice. I was going to ask the question of why they change DVD covers between countries. I understand that perhaps different wording may be required but why change the picture? Unless it was felt that sales were below expectation. However I'm not sure the SA S1 pic is any better. At first glance it looks more like a porno movie!

For S2, both the UK & SA ones look the same(?). It does seem strange to put Helen on the front unless Shed had more control this time and (as abzug suggested) is another hint that Helen isn't really gone.

Sorry to say but we are extremely sweet-toothed in the UK and consume an incredible amount of sweets and chocolate. Chocolates tend to be the unimaginative gift that a man buys his wife, girlfriend or mother!

ETA -

I suspect thats probably true for all alcohol, microsofty! What about soft drinks and more basic foods?

The cover of the DVD is decided on by the company releasing the DVD. Shed is the production company, but for instance the SA DVDs are released by a company called "Next". In the UK I believe the first 4 series' were released by "Cult TV" and from series 5 onwards by another company and that is why the covers changed again.

Hahaha, I made him buy koeksisters! http://z4.invisionfree.com/Nikki_and_Helen...opic=1199&st=75

A 2 litre Coke would cost about R12 (85p). Bread (depending on whether you buy white or brown) costs approximately R5 (35p). What else do you regard as "basic foods"? Just wondering about the price of petrol. We all moan and complain about that, we regard petrol as very expensive at about R6 (43p) per litre - what do you guys pay?

OK, that makes sense. I just assumed that it would be the same company. Though it doesn't explain why the S2 covers are the same? Sorry. gotta dash ....

I dunno, I think making Bad Girls look like porn would sell more copies than Sylvia and Lorna, whether I like that kind of marketing or not.

The different companies is a good point.


Petrol . . is $3.50 =~1.76 GBP for 9/10 of a gallon in Cali . . It is not that many years ago it was 1/3 that price. The price of gas isn't the same in different cities, let alone across the US, though.

S2 covers, well maybe it has to do with the set of promotional photos they were selecting from and they like to look at Simone, as much as we do? +abzugs theory.

:eek :eek :eek :eek :eek

That translates to about R24.50 per litre in SA!!! I guess R6 ($0.85) is then really nothing to complain about!

Gas is 3.02 a gallon here. I'm in Arizona

Ah, I'm feeling uninformed and lazy. I keep saying to myself I'll google monetary conversions but don't.
Can somebody tell me? So what's a pound worth to a dollar, a rand to a dollar?....I don't have a clue.

I only know the last I paid for octane 89 was $3.89 per gallon here in San Francisco.

Yeah, you're right. Much as I don't approve either, maybe the SA marketing guys were smart!

Actually I can see that they are not identical now. It wasn't so much that they used the same pictures of Helen & Fenner. More the layout was the same with Fenner in the background to the right and Helen in the left foreground. I was just surprised since the companies produced completely independent looks for S1 that they should choose very similiar layouts for S2. And as you said, the fact that Helen was on the front for S2 is surprising. Abzugs suggestion is good but I doubt that a marketing guy would think of that (no offence to marketing guys!) so thats why I wondered if Shed had had some input this time round. Don't worry - it probably just me wondering about trivial things again.

I'm sure whoever they were for would appreciate a more imaginative gift!

Don't you also need to convert the units as well? Washaiu quoted ' 9/10 of a gallon'. A US gallon is around 3.8 litres (UK gallon is 4.5 litres). Not entirely sure but that makes it around R7.2 (1 rand = $0.14 or £0.07)? Think it averages about £0.95 a litre here in the UK for unleaded ... which is around R14!!? - is that right .... seems a lot higher than SA or the US.

That's true, I completely forgot to convert gallons to litres! The conversion makes the price sound much more reasonable. Shaim Cass, you guys pay a lot for petrol, more than double what we pay! But at least you have an effective and well functioning public transport system, something that we don't have in SA. We're pretty much reliant on our cars to get us anywhere.

We complain about our transport system a lot as it isn't as effective and well functioning as a lot of Europe. A little snow or a few leaves and the trains grind to a halt. However it's probably not quite as bad as we make it out to be.

I don't mind the gas prices as much now because I don't drive to work anymore. I wake up ten minutes before I need to be to work, roll out of bed and walk into the next room and turn on my computer. AHHH

Ok bare with me....had to look it up myself finally. I had some sense of American $ to Canadian $ but not the others of the empire.

South African Rand
1 ZAR in ZAR
American Dollar 0.143441 6.9715
Australian Dollar 0.172281 5.80446
British Pound 0.0723573 13.8203
Canadian Dollar 0.159736 6.26033
Euro 0.106103 9.42477
New Zealand Dollar 0.195371 5.11846

British Pound
1 GBP in GBP
American Dollar 1.9824 0.504439
Australian Dollar 2.38098 0.419995
Canadian Dollar 2.2076 0.45298
Euro 1.46638 0.681951
New Zealand Dollar 2.70009 0.370358
South African Rand 13.8203 0.0723573

American Dollar
1 USD in USD
Australian Dollar 1.19918 0.833903
British Pound 0.499575 2.0017
Canadian Dollar 1.1225 0.890869
Euro 0.736377 1.358
New Zealand Dollar 1.34012 0.746202
South African Rand 7.0725 0.141393

I feel I have to defend our "porno movie" cover a bit, although I agree with the sentiment. It does have a nice marketing ploy on the cover as well, sort of like a slogan that states "Bribery, corruption, rape... and that's just the screws!" The S2 cover has the same "slogan" wheras the S3 cover simply states "The bribery and corruption continues".

LOL! We believe you! I'm sure it looks better in real life than the picture suggested.

ETA - Thanks for the conversions, solitasolano. Saves me looking them up again!

No... it really doesn't look any better. And now that you've planted the idea of a porno movie in my head, I'm stuck with the image. I can very well imagine that someone "green" (who's never heard of BG before) can pick up the box in a store, see the image, coupled with the title "Bad Girls" and think that it is indeed a porno movie! What a shaim.

I expect they got a lot of nasty complaints then!! :D

Of course that might be why next time round they go for the same layout as the other company.

Now I need to explore whether the back cover description would further enhance the the porno movie notion in a rookies head:

"Meet the Bad Girls of HMP Larkhall. Enter a hidden world, where anything can happen and drugs, sex and violence are the norm. On the inside, corrupt staff and treacherous inmates challenge the prison system and all its regulations. Even the toughest lifers struggle to survive."

Hmmm, maybe a bit misleading. I didn't get the impression that either Nikki or Shell struggled to survive in S1. They struggled with other things, but not with survival. The concept of entering a "hidden world" would certainly play on the notion of a porn movie. I think the only truthful statement would be the one about the corrupt staff and treacherous inmates who challenge the system. But then again, not all inmates were treacherous...

Yeah, somewhat misleading and definitely doesn't dispel the porno movie image. The phrase "hidden world" and "where anything can happen" seems to reinforce that concept along with the promise of drugs, sex and violence.

Wouldn't make me want to buy it if I'd never heard of it .... but lets just hope you had, microsofty! :D

On the front of the UK version, it states at the top "The highly acclaimed original and controversional ITV woman's prison drama" which I guess summarises it quite well.

I discovered BG purely by chance at a local video store. I've seen bits and pieces of it when it was on on one of our local channels, m-net. M-net is part of our satellite tv network. I didn't have access to satellite at the time, so I only got to see it every now and then when I visited friends. Ironically enough, I also never saw eps from S1-3 during that time, it was more S4 and S6. So I walked into the video store firmly set on renting a movie or something, and I saw the BG DVDs. I then thought I'm more in the mood for something else, as opposed to a 1.5 hour movie that would turn out to be predictable in any case and having seen some snippets of BG on m-net, I decided to rent S1. And the rest, as they say, is history!

But, I have to also point out that this video store had the UK version of the series (only up to S4) so by the time I got round to buy the series for myself, I already knew the contents and wasn't put off by the covers and/or descriptions. I'm not too sure I would've been interested if I went in "cold" to buy the series.

What's your opinion of S4? I've only seen one episode so far and am not too sure if I'm going to like a N&H-less BG series. I don't want to read the S4-8 thread as I suspect it's full of spoilers. I'm half thinking about just buying the DVDs from Amazon rather than trying to catch it all on Five Life. I know the answer will probably vary from person to person but I'm just trying to get a feel for whether most folk enjoyed it or not .... i.e. is it worth owning?

Indeed! Amazing how one teeny, weeny decision can influence your life forever .... :)

It took a while to get used to the idea of an N&H-less series, but once you get passed that, I quite enjoyed S4. Having said that, it took me 7 months before I was ready to watch S4, the N&H storyline was too engrained for me to face a whole series without them! But I managed in the end...

*I'll try my best to give you my honest opinion of the series without any spoilers!*

S4 was much more light-hearted than S1-3, but I think it had to do with the pace of the series, which was much-much faster than the previous 3. Forbidden relationships in S1-3 took a good deal of 39 episodes to develop, whereas in S4 it happens in the space of about 7 episodes. This means that there is not much time left for the viewer to become emotionally involved with the characters like we had in S1-3. You will not find yourself becoming as obsessed with Roisin and Cassie as you would N&H. (Sorry, but I'm sure you are aware of Roisin and Cassie?) I also found myself more interested in the development of the "old" characters like Yvonne and Karen as opposed to being curious about the new characters. I jumped for joy when some old characters returned to the show! There are some really funny moments (and even whole eps) in S4 that at times would make you feel like you are watching a sitcom and not a serious drama.

Of course S4 ends in a huge cliff-hanger, which makes you want to watch S5, but from what I've heard, the show went downhill all the way. I've only watch S5E1 to satisfy my curiosity about how the cliff-hanger ended and it wasn't worth my while to be in suspense about it. S5 doesn't pick up where S4 left off, which was quite a disappointment.

In short I would say that you can only really enjoy S4 if you're ready for it, if you can get past the fact that there is no H&N. There are a number of references to them in S4, especially to Helen (people who are trying to get hold of her, but can't) so it helps to think of them as having a ball of a time in San Francisco during the events of S4.

Wow! Thanks for your in-depth reply, microsofty. That was really, really helpful. I've now decided to hold off buying the DVDs for now but will try to keep up with the weekly episodes on TV. If I don't have the time or if I really love S4 then I can always get the DVDs later in the year. :)

I'm not sure that I'm ready for such a big step yet .......... :D

Not sure where to post this, figured what the hey, here'll probably do.

Rumor mill says there may be a boxed set of 5-8 later this calendar year. (Which would totally make sense.)

Also, there may be a cd or something for the Musical.

No further data. :)