It was completely by mistake the other day that I began to watch the school drama series Waterloo Road.
It must have been something to do with watching the television while ironing and randomly pushing buttons on the antiquated remote. Someone somewhere decided that Waterloo Road was the thing for me. And, by George, he or she was right.
The first series came out in 2006, by which time I had been teaching for only four years. Set in a school in Rochdale, it opens with the headmaster, driven beyond endurance, having a nervous breakdown on the roof of one of the school buildings.
Thereafter it deals with the travails of the acting headmaster and his attempts to turn this rough school into something resembling an institution of learning more than Bedlam.
The plots are good, and the performances mostly strong – but it was the comparisons with schools today that really drew me in and have kept me hooked.
Our hero, the acting head, brings in a ‘posh’ teacher who has strong views on discipline as a deputy head. The staff do not like it, or him, and the children are outraged.
But, gradually, things begin to change. The deputy introduces a house system, which is sneered at as posh. (To be honest, I felt the same when I started my first job. I had no idea that state schools ever had house systems and thought it very odd.) The children engage in the competition, but of course everything goes wrong.
What has really worried me as I watched this show, which does sometimes lack verisimilitude for the purposes of dramatic narrative, is how little we have learned since 2006.
The mobile telephones are not smart, but they can take pictures, children can cause problems with them, and teachers are already struggling with them. Why is it only in the last few years that most schools have banned them? you wonder while watching the show.
Bullies still bully. Cheating on coursework (by the teachers, not the students) has become a thing of the past because the GCSEs are now 100-per-cent examined rather than because human nature has changed.
But that is the only element of the plot that is no longer entirely relevant to modern schools.
It is outside the school setting that the programme begins to lose its truth. The teachers are endlessly meeting for pub lunches, and when they meet after school they drink champagne.
The pub features a lot – a teacher even takes a troubled 14-year-old to the pub and buys half-pints of cider.
There is a lot of hot romance between staff members. Call it romance, if you will; sometimes, it has nothing to do with love and involves desks. While I have of course known of staff romances, and even desk-related scandals, they are much fewer and further apart than Waterloo Road would have you believe.
But the teachers themselves, even if sometimes stereotyped, do ring true. There is the grumpy old man who hates children, hates teaching and hates the school but is tolerated because at least he can keep discipline.
In contrast with him, we have the teacher who prides herself on how much she cares, even if sometimes it leads to wrong decisions.
There is the hopeless one who tries to make friends with the children by wiggling her bottom when teaching French and trying desperately to be liked by making smutty jokes. Needless to say, her classes are riot scenes.
And the children? We have the geeks, the troubled teens, the bully, the kind, thick girl with overlooked promise and the carer. And not one of them has a shirt tucked in or a tie done up.
Now that’s true to type. No wonder this show runs and runs. It’s glorious.
