Television
Class struggle
Wendy Cope
Teaching brings out the best in peo- ple,' says the DES television advertise- ment. This little film features a French lesson, in which an unseen teacher asks one pupil how old he is. He is onze, just turning douze. He is charming. While he converses with his teacher, the rest of the class is silent, presumably enthralled by the exchange. There are no paper aeroplanes or scuffles about stolen rubbers to lower the tone of this Department of Education Science fantasy. No one talks out of turn. No one has to be told off. It may be like that in some schools but potential recruits shouldn't bank on it.
Last week's edition of Present Imperfect (BBC 2, 9.30 p.m., Tuesday), entitled A Teacher's Lot, looked at Spurley Hey High School in Manchester. We saw some of the staff at work in their classrooms: 'Stop that, Gary. Can we have some quiet in here, please? Can we have some QUIET in here, please?'
'We spend so much time policing', com- mented one of them, 'that there's very little over for teaching.'
That's an old problem. Then there are the new ones. How can they meet the demands of the National Curriculum with inadequate funding and facilities? How safe are their jobs? How should they go about marketing the school and attracting support from local businesses? Spurley Hey succeeded in persuading Barclays Bank to produce some folders — complete with Barclays logo — to hand out to local primary schools. The head and one of his staff managed to be moderately enthusias- tic about this achievement. Everyone else at the meeting looked depressed and appalled.
'I can't ever remember morale being as low as this,' said a teacher. 'For the first time in 17 years I didn't want to go back,' said another. If one thing became clear, it was that teaching is not bringing out the best in these people. For anyone who has been a school- teacher, it is a strange experience addres- sing an audience of polite, silent grown- ups. The grown-ups who had gathered to listen to Alan Bennett talking about Tho- mas Hardy in Poetry in Motion (Channel 4, 9.15 p.m., Wednesday) looked deeply moved and very serious, as poetry audi- ences usually do. When a poetry event is televised, it is customary to include close- up pictures of one youngish, attractive woman looking especially moved and se- rious. The woman in question almost always has long, dark hair. She may really be paying attention to the speaker. She may be thinking about her lover or the telephone bill or wondering if she's going to look OK on television. There's no way of knowing.
It's quite likely that the dark-haired woman seen in close-up in Poetry in Motion was actually listening to Alan Bennett. His introductions and readings of Hardy's poems were very good. I look forward to hearing him on Housman, Auden and Larkin, even though it will probably mean putting up with more silly bits of film dreamed up by the television people to go with the poems. This is the downside of Poetry in Motion. While we were hearing 'In Church', we saw pictures of the inside of a church. At the point where the vestry door opens, the vestry door opened. There's a mirror in the poem, so they put a mirror in the film. It made you feel like a three-year-old being conducted through an alphabet book. I wish they wouldn't do it.
Previous page
