Skip to main content

A touch of Class

Image
By

BBC3’s latest Sci-Fi creation, Class, popped-up online a couple of weeks ago, with a familiar feel and a very recognisable guest appearance.

Christmas is jingling it’s way towards us with alarming speed. This means (apart from eight weeks of festive songs on a loop in the shops) that the great Xmas day TV tradition is just around the corner.

It’ll soon be Doctor Who Day, when an implausible plot with a snowy twist, celebrity co-stars, and a liberal dose of feel-good-factor burst forth from out goggle-boxes, temporarily distracting us from overindulgence, present-based disappointment and trying to avoid the washing up.

The Doctor has made an early visit this year though, with a brief cameo appearance in BBC3’s new Sci-Fi drama, Class. Whovians will be familiar with Coal Hill Academy, where the main characters go for education, shared teenage angst, aliens and unexpected death.

Originally just a good old-fashioned school with a grumpy time-traveller hanging around, it featured in the very first series of Doctor Who, and has reappeared on many occasions since. Sadly for it’s current occupants, all the timey-wimey stuff has marked it as a handy access point for all the multi-universes’ riff-raff and trouble-makers.

Aimed at a ‘young adult’ audience, it is notably gorier, a touch scarier, similarly humorous, and awkwardly ruder than Who. Three episodes in, it does however still feel like watching the original show, and wondering when the Doctor will show up.

Despite two of the main characters being aliens in hiding (handily in human disguise), the plots revolve around the tumultuous emotions of the teenage characters as much as they do the nasty aliens and potential destruction of the planet.

So far, so suspension-of-disbelief good. There is a problem though – it seems to be trying a bit too hard to tick the box marked ‘Diversity’. Ignoring the alien/human ones, the main (and supporting) characters are ethnically and culturally varied, plus we have a same-sex relationship, mums in wheelchairs and absent/dead/in prison dads. Most seem emotionally damaged or vulnerable.

No problem with seeing all this over a couple of series; Maybe even in one. But three episodes? Ever since Midsomer Murders was criticised for having no ethnically diverse characters, it feels like TV shows are desperately trying to prove they’re not failing to show every possible facet of humanity.

There’s a really quite good show in there (Episode 3 was genuinely quite touching in it’s take on the pain of loss), but it’s being masked by the heavy-handed desire to be politically correct. Of course, they could have just decided to get all of their cards on the table early on, so we can forget about it and enjoy the stories.

I can’t help but feel, though, that the producers are being slightly condescending – that if we didn’t see what an infinitely diverse place Coal Hill is, we wouldn’t find it believable. Unfortunately, I think it’s just the opposite.

Class act? Nearly. 7 out of 10 – must try less hard.

This post first appeared as my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 4th of November 2016. A link to it was on their homepage on the day, but, again, it hasn't gone into any archive. You can see it on their website here though, where they re-titled it as "Go to the middle of the Class". The print edition got yet another title - "Needs a touch more, Class". Yes I know - baffling, that.

 I failed to point out that I am actually enjoying the show, despite the heavy-handedness of the PC brigade. It's nice to have some British-made science fiction on the box - it seems to be a rare thing these days, despite the ongoing success of Doctor Who.  

(CD A-Z: Kraftwerk's "Minimum-Maximum" -  great stuff, but if it wasn't for the occasional cheering, you'd be hard pushed to tell it was live!)
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

By
If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...
Post a Comment
Read more

Suffering from natural obsolescence

By
You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Shouting in the social media mirror

By
It was always tricky to fit everything you wanted into the intentionally short character count of Twitter, especially when, like me, you tend to write ridiculously long sentences that keep going on and on, with no discernible end in sight, until you start wondering what the point was in the first place. The maximum length of a text message originally limited a tweet to 140 characters, due to it being a common way to post your ramblings in Twitter’s early days. Ten years later, we’ve largely consigned texting to the tech dustbin, and after a lot of angst, the social media platform’s bigwigs have finally opted to double your ranting capacity to 280. Responses ranged from “You’ve ruined it! Closing my account!” to the far more common “Meh” of modern disinterest. As someone rightly pointed out, just because you have twice as much capacity doesn’t mean you actually have to use it. It is, of course, and excellent opportunity to use the English language correctly and include punctuat...
Post a Comment
Read more