What it means
Means a prison sentence or time inside, usually heard as do porridge or doing porridge. The joke is that prison brekkie is famously bland and oat-heavy, so your stretch feels like endless bowls of it. The old BBC sitcom Porridge helped cement it as a proper British bit of gallows humour, often said with mock pity.
Usage examples
"Gaz got nicked shifting fake trainers and now he’s doing porridge for two years. That’s enough grey oats to wallpaper the whole wing."
"He did eighteen months porridge for the warehouse job and came out moaning the tea was better inside."
"Keep nicking cars like that and you'll be doing porridge before you're twenty, lad."
"If Dean keeps acting the hard man, he'll end up doing porridge and crying over state-issue toast."
"My uncle used to say a month inside was bad enough, but three years of porridge would melt your soul."
Where it comes from
It comes from prison porridge, the cheap oat breakfast long linked with British jail food. By the 1950s, do porridge was already showing up as slang for serving time. The 1970s BBC sitcom Porridge helped push it even deeper into everyday UK speech, with that dry, gallows-humour grin all over it.
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