A soap with some real sparkle, so why won’t C4 let it shine?
Don’t watch Ackley Bridge (C4). Channel 4’s schedulers clearly don’t want you to see it. take the hint. the school soap opera, superheating dramas between white and Asian communities in a northern city, airs all this week in double bills, far too late for its target audience.
the first pair of episodes in this fifth series started at 10pm. the last one will conclude after midnight, in the small hours of Saturday morning.
What’s the point of showing teen romances and playground spats at that time? C4 would do better to screen Ackley Bridge at 6pm, before Hollyoaks, instead of those interminable Simpsons repeats.
the show and its characters have always been treated with a cavalier lack of respect.
three years ago, the central duo, Missy and nas (Poppy Lee Friar and Amy-Leigh Hickman) were brutally written out as soon as their final exams were over.
one moment they were celebrating the end of school, the next they were mown down by a speeding car. If you’d followed the girls through their rebellions and heartaches, and grown attached to them, tough luck!
Adding insult to fatal injury, Missy and nas were reincarnated in two identikit new characters, halfsisters Marina and Kayla (Megan Morgan and Robyn Cara). one is flamboyant but insecure, the other is swotty but steel-willed. All the old storylines are being recycled, as Marina campaigns to make herself the most popular girl in the school and Kayla falls in love with a boy from a family of white racists.
By the end of part two, their mum Jules (Gemma Page north) was planning to uproot the family to Glasgow. Will Marina and Kayla be leaving? they’d better take care when crossing the road.
It’s frustrating that fans of the show are treated so badly, because Ackley Bridge has moments of real sparkle. Marina turned on her headmaster (Robert James-Collier) with a savage put-down: ‘I’d rather leave school with nothing than be stuck here forever in a bad suit.’
We were left wondering what he’d done to deserve her contempt, until his sweaty affair with Jules was revealed.
Sunetra Sarker is marvellous fun, as she always is, playing the prudish Mrs Paracha — aghast to be put in charge of sex education for the 16year-olds. Her lessons were summed up in one line: ‘Save it for your wedding night.’ And for any spotty oik tempted to look at porn on his phone: ‘Watch Blue Peter instead!’
none of the adolescent traumas in Ackley could compare to the horror of Mark Chesterfield’s childhood. the 87-year-old returned to the foundling hospital where he grew up in the 1930s and could not suppress a shiver, on Long Lost Family (ItV). He recalled how the principal would stalk the corridors with his punishment book under his arm, and thrash children on any excuse.
Mark had left the past behind, and was happily married with four grown-up children, when he received a shocking bundle of papers 15 years ago. the hospital was being demolished and in a file labelled with his name he discovered the letters his desperate single mother sent to the authorities, begging to have her baby back.
Also in the folder were the Christmas and birthday cards she loyally sent each year, to tell her son how much she longed to see him. Everything was kept from him — and yet it was not destroyed either.
Presenters Davina McCall and nicky Campbell were able to introduce Mark for the first time to a half-sister who welcomed him with hugs and tears. It’s remarkable that such a gentle, patient man can emerge from so harsh and cruel a childhood.