Latest essay: Please Sir, Why are State Schools so Inaccurately Portrayed in British TV Drama?
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LATEST ESSAY:
Please Sir, Why are State Schools so Inaccurately Portrayed in British TV drama?
That was a question never asked of our venerable soap Chips during his seventy-eight years at the chalk face pre- and post-retirement, but maybe it should have been.
Along with:
'Sir, have you always taught every single one of your neighbours' children?'
'Do you arrange it with the head to have like really small inner city classes of ten clever kids, innit?'
The 'Big Thre'e public services portrayed down the years in British TV drama are hospitals, the police and schools. Of these state education has been done a disservice in the area of broadcasting accuracy that the other two have to a much larger extent escaped (caveats are many of course, to include: mass murder suspect interviews minus solicitors, too many public wards with only two beds—the other bed always holding a grizzled but wise ancient with early onset dementia, and legions of garrulous maverick DCIs with drink problems and cast iron gut feelings. Indeed any nurse, doctor or police officer who is foolish enough to be reading this will be spitting exasperated opprobrium at the author and scribbling vehement lists).
In short, the commissioning TV companies clearly push at least some resources in the direction of research when they knock out their various dramatic crime/medical offerings. The audience is becoming more demanding in this regard. We know more and we are prepared to assert this.
Schools? They clearly never give it a second thought. The feeling appears to be, We all went to school, everybody knows what it's like, so let's just lob Barlow in the classroom with those six kids from Italia Conti and get them to rile the old buzzard for a few minutes in bad Mancunian/cod-street London/Italia Conti accents until they all leg it on the bell when he's half way through his poetry pentameter thingy. The fact that most of the viewers' children will be taught in classes of thirty and old Barlow won't live even remotely close to any of them because of the not inconsiderable fear of 'Teacher in Jeans with Wife and Unrestrained Pupils on Lager on Bikes' incidents never seems to cross anybody's mind. Furthermore that even the most frayed and frankly useless teacher has at least the tacit procedural support of the institution he works in to be able to dismiss his class on his own instruction is an artistic consideration too far for Auntie Beeb and the independent chaps on the other channels.
And I know this how?
Well, twenty-five years at the chalk face, is how. A whole career living the dream that is teaching the teenagers of Britain.
And so I see, and shudder at: secondary school deputies suddenly become primary school heads (won't happen, not ever; that's like a horse turning into a squirrel); members of the public wandering onto school grounds to tap on classroom windows when security in British schools is akin now to the regimes variously established at places like Treblinka and Fort Knox in the past; concerned teachers visiting pupils' houses at night to voice their concerns about behaviour/progress/drugs habits/prostitution rings/messiah syndromes to blissfully unaware parents, where in fact you would attempt this on the average South London or inner Liverpool estate and risk a) being reported and sacked, or b) hung from a balcony and beaten with sticks.
School trips are supervised by a lone junior teacher with no first aider, and kids get drunk on the coach, and are rude to old ladies, and are noisy in the museum, and are inevitably lost and late and kleptomaniac and disinterested in the focus of their day. This is unfair, condescending bullshit if you really want to know—child-hating Blighty coming out in us like a rash. And why have a school tie and then fail to have kids with knots as big as your fist hanging ten inches below their chins, and tattoos of monkeys on their faces? After all, no teacher will ever notice, and fewer will do anything about it. Or hey, let's not have a uniform at all, like when we were at school in the Seventies!
Bad Kid always turns up for his detention, albeit reluctantly. In reality, bad kid never turns up for his detention and goes into the exclusion unit the next day for it. Fifteen-year-olds tell their mums they've got a free lesson, and just nipped the two miles home from school. Their next un-free lesson therefore started ten minutes ago. Scriptwriters, please listen: NO FREE LESSONS, NOT EVER! Smoking and fighting and flirting proliferate on the school playing fields Mr Gove has sold to Mr Barratt and Mr Bellway and their friends. Oh, and bike sheds! About 0.5% of children cycle to school these days, so forget your bike sheds and all that may go on behind them.
Teachers are either simpering posh girls/young fellows with hearts of gold and mildly condescending approaches, or ancient retainers well past their sell-by date, or rhino-skinned Neanderthals out of the Kes era, or bedraggled head teachers with lots and lots of pot plants in their offices and a villainous penchant for permanent exclusion for incidents such as paper aeroplane construction and excessive chewing gum use (do any of these types exist? Well yes, but so do TV executives and artistic directors who do not live in Islington).
And finally the pupils of TV High remain solidly the same old stereotypes trotted out in Grange Hill when Steven Poliakoff was a lad. These are: Vulnerable Thick Bully, Vulnerable but Nowhere Near as Thick Victim, Strange Kid with Artistic Powers Beyond the Imagining of the Frankly Stupid Teacher, Spiteful but Actually Vulnerable Tormentor Girl, Sporty Lad with blond hair, Stutterer, Smelly Girl, Fat Lad.
So who are the main culprits? Coronation Street and EastEnders (the latter merely reporting nonsense situations at Walford High but never setting scenes there) bestride this issue like two colossi—decade after decade of utter nonsense--but at least have the excuse that they deal with a lot of other stuff beyond the school gates. Waterloo Road is in this respect an abomination therefore, a dramatic construct out of the fifth circle of hell—an accuracy void filled instead with putrid caricatures and obtuse rankness, episode on episode, an affront to anybody that ever worked in a school or studied in a school, which means absolutely all of us. Skins simply redefines the teenage years as a Bacchanalian feast had by twenty-three year-olds, and is practically irrelevant in this regard but no less inaccurate. And the much loved and lost Teachers, which pretended to be a bit of a comedy but dressed itself in the clothes of noir C4 realism: it too must hold its hand out for six of the best. I do not include sitcoms for their comedic obviousness precludes any call for accuracy, indeed warrants anti-accuracy, so stay in your seats Bad Education, Please Sir, The Grimleys, and The Inbetweeners (I taught at James Buckley's secondary school, and a cocky little thespian poppet he was, too).
There are more offenders, but we have summoned and caned the ringleaders.
But how can we account for this complacency? Why so bad? Easy: public schools and the wrong idea of audience.
Having alluded to the intrinsic nationwide knowledge of the state education system I find myself having to apologise for a distortion, for only a minority of those commissioning editors, directors and scriptwriters mentioned have been within a single metric mile of a British comp in their entire lives, and only then to shudder a little as they pass on the way to a dinner party at Kit and Tessa's in Canonbury (they're doing a bouillabaisse and there will be Montrachet). In other words the very people putting the shows together have at best a vague notion of what state schooling is like, and at worst a contempt for the need for the accuracy that would be demanded by people just like them when 'doing public school', and a contempt for any corresponding desire for authenticity among a vast state-educated audience.
Snobbery then and laziness.
Well, not entirely. Ann McManus is the principle creator of Waterloo Road, along with her Shed TV chums. She was educated far from the dreaming spires and, moreover, taught English in an inner city Glasgow school. She therefore knows so, so much better. Her treachery is a simple and timeless one: she sold any good early intentions to the cheapening devil of popular prime-time broadcasting, got rich, moved to Islington. And who can blame her? She now allows others to re-imagine her teaching days with crass inaccuracy, plus monkey tattoos, defending the silly excesses her show depicts by asserting that everything Waterloo Road trots out has happened at some point in time at a school somewhere in Britain.
Drama as collage then, as anthology or tick list. Shakespeare missed a chance, and we another master work: his Royal Englishmen Summer Revue, in which Richard III appeals in vain for the same horse injured Prince Hal rides from Shrewsbury on his way to victory at Agincourt on the 'morrow, is lost to us forever.
One exception though, and I do mean just the one. In 1995 C4 put out Hearts and Minds, a Jimmy McGovern piece that featured Christopher Eccleston as a young teacher fighting his corner in a 'troubled' Liverpool comprehensive. The research was clearly done well (McGovern himself had taught). There appeared, for example, a scene about the marking of exercise books ('All they want is a big tick!'), so precise in its delivery and so peculiar to the profession that the stamp of authenticity lay all over it. Who knows, they may have even consulted a teacher at some stage who was still working within the profession. I urge you to see what's left of this piece if at all you can.
Our cinema has fared somewhat better in all of this over several decades, at least in its high points. Kes particularly, and Rita, Sue and Bob Too and Notes on a Scandal have much to recommend them, notwithstanding Judy Dench's frankly ludicrous lesbian spinster hell hound in the last of these. Across the pond, our American cousins, though not blameless (Glee!) extend a general instinct for veracity to this problematic medium, with Friday Night Lights and The Wire, among others, shining a direct and mainly honest light into the mysterious, fraught landscape of the classroom.
On our side: Barlow, itching powder, and an audience treated worse than sickly playground truants—with lazy condescension and a TV centre sneer.
William Ruby
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