Do Not Grange Bad Things Again and Again
Equally a teenager, I had a lost year. I drank a lot and went to clubs a lot, and was generally never to be seen in school, and because I was extremely proficient at lying, and the teachers oftentimes helped by existence on strike (to their days of action, I would add my own imaginary ones, should I be asked whatsoever awkward questions at home), I was able to get abroad with it for a while. Just though I was, for a nice middle-class girl, really quite badly behaved – bad enough eventually to accept to commencement my A-levels all over again in a dissimilar school – there were still some things I would non do. Serious drugs? Never. On that score (no pun intended), Zammo McGuire, the miniature smackhead played past Lee MacDonald in Grange Loma, had taught me – he had taught all of us – to say no. Fifty-fifty at present, I'yard still a little haunted past him. The slumped dorsum. The heavy eyelids. The tiny teeth that seemed to belong to a boy half his age. His skin made you think of oyster shells.
The TV series Grange Hill, which ran on BBC1 from 1978 until 2008, was the creation of Phil Redmond, the man who would later on invent Brookside for the newly launched (in 1982) Channel 4, and who is, somewhat bizarrely, apparently planning to revive information technology (Grange Hill, I mean) in the form of a feature picture show. And yep, it is hard to explicate now the role it played in the lives of children right across the Uk in its glory years (I think they ended in about 1988, simply by then I'd gone to academy; I'thousand not really in a position to gauge). For my generation, information technology was, without doubt, the well-nigh important and dear bear witness on Television receiver. No child in their right heed who was allowed to watch it – we'll come dorsum to those who weren't – would ever miss it. Boing-boing-boing. Upward in your bedroom, you'd hear the weirdly springy opening notes of its theme tune ("Chicken Homo" by Alan Hawkshaw) blasting out – a sign that i of your siblings, fully primed, was already sitting cross-legged on the carpet in front end of the telly – and inside seconds, you were there too. Budge upward! My blood brother liked it most as much as I did, which in itself made information technology remarkable.
Of course, we had no selection dorsum then simply to all scout the aforementioned affair. There were only 3 (later four) TV channels, and ITV's programming for children was generally rubbish compared with that of the BBC (not to mention frowned on by some parents). Still, Grange Hill was, at kickoff, a revelation – and nosotros drank of its excitements securely. Most of the states were used to shows that were, if not always about the kind of Edwardian children who had governesses, and so inevitably almost children who sounded similar they might be Edwardian (the voices of kid actors were and so, almost without exception, laughably posh).
But in Grange Loma, the children sounded similar themselves: they had London accents, because they were from London, where the series was set (though their voices, in their way, were only as exotic to me every bit those of the E Nesbit types: I was a teenager before I always set foot in London). As for their school, it was not straight out of, say, Enid Blyton, and nor did its staff take anything to do with, say, Goodbye, Mr Chips. Information technology looked very much similar my comprehensive school – which is to say, ugly, modernistic, shabby, noisy and crowded – and in the principal, its staff strongly resembled my teachers, who were neither smartly dressed nor particularly strict. Truly, it was uncanny. Every fourth dimension the schoolhouse's long-serving head, Mrs McClusky (Gwyneth Powell), walked into a classroom, I could almost smell the Nescafé and Silk Cut on her breath.
People talk of the mode Grange Hill tackled "issues", and it'south true that, across the years, it dealt with such things as habit, divorce, homelessness, Aids, teenage pregnancy and pupil-teacher relationships (long before Zammo fell for heroin, Fay Lucas had an exciting niggling fling – don't judge me: this was pre-#MeToo – with Mr King, who taught maths). But because the school and all who sailed in it was wholly recognisable, we did not receive these storylines as lectures; even if they occasionally had an outcome on our behaviour (see Zammo), the series was closer to a lather opera than anything else, and thus, such scenarios were more akin to gossip for united states.
They weren't even, to be honest, that far out. I knew no heroin addicts at schoolhouse, but one boy in my class used to sniff glue to the point where he cruel asleep at his desk in lessons (and went absolutely nuts when the teacher had the temerity to wake him up); several girls in my year left before they'd taken their O-levels, having fallen pregnant (they were quite happy about it); and in the sixth form, a new girl appeared who was, information technology was rumoured, nevertheless involved with a teacher from her old schoolhouse. Teachers, and all of their affairs, were already forage for our cracking interest; nosotros must have looked similar the tricoteuse at the guillotine as we watched from the window on the morning time Miss Southward arrived at school, not in Mr R's Citroen, only in Mr B's Volvo. Grange Hill, in other words, was just an extension of all this, just with slightly more than pacy storylines. (The scripts were practiced: Zammo's descent into hell was written by Anthony Minghella, who later directed The English language Patient).
Content from our partners
Thanks to all of the above, and to the fact that my mother, a teacher herself, often used to picket it with us, thrilling to the same things that we did, I was always slightly amazed that for some of my friends, information technology was forbidden fruit (though this gave it extra cachet, of form). At J's house, where the pelmets were ultra-luxurious and the all-pino country-style kitchen was entirely crumb-gratuitous, Grange Hill was strictly verboten – as I was gutted to discover when I happened to exist there on a dark it was on (this was pre-video: the episode was lost forever).
How peculiar that she was allowed to wear stretch jeans with heels to school (I was still making the case for these items), and yet she was non permitted always to handclapping eyes on Tucker Jenkins, Suzanne Ross and Alan Humphries. She must accept felt so left out when we used to shout "RO-LAAAND!" in sing-song voices at some poor boy nosotros'd identified as existence peculiarly Roland-like (Roland Browning, who was rarely to be seen without a bag of crisps in his hands, was a grapheme we found all kinds of hilarious). Her parents' strictures, though, did no good. What happened to her? Ah, yes… I remember. If only they'd let her watch information technology! But that'south another story, and certainly not ane for your ears (or not today).
[Encounter too: The best Goggle box of 2021]
camachothatted1966.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/tv/2022/01/why-grange-hill-was-to-my-generation-the-most-important-and-beloved-show-on-tv
0 Response to "Do Not Grange Bad Things Again and Again"
Post a Comment