Classroom lessons
Simon Hoggart
Teachers and police officers spend their lives dealing with some of the most intractable members of society. But the police can arrest miscreants, threaten them with gaol, and in extreme cases shoot them. Teachers can't. They rely on skill, experience, psychological cunning and grinding hard work. I know this, because in my gap year I learned that I was a hopeless teacher — even dealing with a classroom full of African youngsters desperate for qualifications. This was the equivalent of having food you've cooked refused by a prisoner in the Gulag.
Yet policemen are routinely praised to the skies by politicians, even as television shows film of them kicking drunks in the testicles. Teachers are harassed and hounded, forced to meet targets, slotted into meaningless league tables, and buried under sheds of paperwork, all while trying to cope with the anti-social menaces known as schoolchildren. We can only hope that Clare Short took the message back to Parliament after spending a week working as a geography teacher at an inner London school for My Week in the Real World (BBC 2, Wednesday).
Even I could have told her that her opening remarks to the class — 'I'm new here, and I need you to help me' — wouldn't work. Was that what Tony Blair said at his first Cabinet meeting in 1997? But then ministers don't sit with their mates so they can talk and giggle through the meeting. Her constant plucking and pleading for hush was toe-curling. Selina, the usual teacher, sat watching on a monitor with a wide, permanent grin; a grin that said 'This woman used to help run the country, and now she can't even keep my class quiet.' It was gripping stuff, like watching a car crash. Or hearing chalk squeak on a blackboard.
But by the end of the week Clare seemed to be getting the general idea. Her relationship with the diffident little, mixedrace pupil, Richard, was sweet enough to make the heart of a Hollywood movie, and she was beginning to cope with what she called 'the weight of the endless discipline problem, that I find — wurghh hard!'
Well said. And not bad for a short time, even if the presence of TV cameras must have had some effect — good or bad we cannot know — on the children's behaviour. At one point she was humiliated by the head of year arriving in her classroom to restore order; yet he admitted it had taken him around three years to get it right. Now the BBC should try A Week in
the Unreal World: inner-city teachers forced to answer parliamentary questions on international development. That'd stop them smiling.
Still with politics as drama, The Deputy (BBC 1, Monday) starred Warren Clarke as John Prescott in all but name. They even kicked off with his famously disastrous stand-in at Prime Minister's Question Time. Throw in the tendency to physical violence, the fact that he has to walk everywhere because the press will jeer at him for taking a car, plus a chippy sense that no one ever tells him anything that matters, and you have a match Rory Bremner would be pleased with.
The unseen prime minister is a woman, and so, amazingly, is the Alastair Campbell figure, played by Deryla Kirwan. We first saw her 12 years ago galumphing plumply round Cumbria in A Time to Dance, pursued by the famously detumescent Ronald Pickup. Next she played a moderately attractive hoyden in Ballykissangel. Now she radiates, oozes, pullulates and showers the viewer with 100-gigawatt sex appeal and power. Her very bosom demands obeisance; a disdainful curl of her lip could reduce any man to the condition suffered by the unhappy Mr Pickup.
Which is just as well because The Deputy doesn't seem to know where it's going. There's an okay stotyline about his son stealing government papers to give to a pressure group, and something about a single-parent mum who wants compensation. One thing it isn't is the British West Wing. Right now it's half House of Cards and half Yes, Minister, and you can't be both. My feeling at the end of the pilot episode was that The Deputy's Boss might make a better show.
A con caper, like Hustle (BBC 1, Tuesdays) needs to be very tightly plotted, preferably with an extra twist on top, creating a dramatic Mobius strip. You need to feel affection, or at least admiration, for the con men. The mark cannot be a sweet old lady, but a greedy rich bastard who wants to be even richer. In Tony Jordan's script, this last point was deftly made when we saw the intended victim steal a waitress's tip at the Oxo Tower, Famously, The Sting had all the qualities I've mentioned, which is why it's one of those films that, if you catch it part way through at 12.35 a.m. just as you're going to bed, you invariably watch to the end.
Hustle isn't quite that good, of course. But the acting is superb (how does Robert Vaughn — now the last living member of The Magnificent Seven — look virtually as young as he did 36 years ago in The Man from UNCLE.?), and the plot of the first episode is as tight as wheel nuts on a Bentley. I think the grifters need to be just a tiny bit more appealing — they seem a fairly chilly bunch, which they would be in real life, but this isn't real life. Great to see Marc Warren back, too, as a prestidigitatory punk; as he showed in State of Play last year, he really is the sleazeball's sleazeball.
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