A touch of Class

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!)