An entertainingly eventful end to Ackley Bridge’s term
‘My dad’s screwing the headmistress. That’s the only bit of integration going on ’ere!” It wasn’t the hymn to diversity the school governors of (Channel 4) wanted but student Alya Nawaz’s (Maariah Hussain) determination to mortify her cheating school-sponsor father, Sadiq (Adil Ray), by announcing his infidelity to a packed assembly hall on Open Day, certainly set the drama up for an eventful closing episode.
And very entertaining it was, too. Even if the main focus of the ending – in which troubled Missy Booth (Poppy Lee Friar) was reunited with her sister Hayley (Cody Ryan) when her drug addict mother Simone (Samantha Power) finally got it together enough to convince social workers to allow her out of care – was a little too redemptively upbeat to be entirely convincing. Especially when it was disgraced headmistress Mandy Carter’s (Jo Joyner) eleventh hour intervention that made the difference.
Overall, though, perhaps the most surprising thing about Ackley Bridge is precisely how credible much of it was, considering that producing a school drama that probes issues of racism, integration and cultural difference without being either worthy or offensive is like wrestling a prickly octopus. Comparisons, inevitably, have been made with BBC One’s defunct school drama Waterloo Road which ran out of steam well before it closed the doors a couple of years ago. But Ackley Bridge exerts a stronger hold because the central focus of merging two schools divided along racial grounds gives it a clear contemporary resonance and relevance.
Still, that wasn’t allowed to dominate a final episode that deftly tied up a multitude of soapy plot strands while leaving plenty of others dangling – not least the school governors’ decision as to how to punish Ms Carter and Mr Nawaz’s transgression – for the second series that’s already been ordered by Channel 4. And Ackley Bridge certainly deserves another run. Not least for the sheer energy and talent of the younger cast members, who not only outshone their grown-up fellows at every turn (notably so in the case of Samuel Bottomley as troubled tearaway Jordan Wilson), but who generally sported the more interesting storylines, too.
Nothing would improve this drama more next time round than a script that leant less heavily towards the soapy side of drama, and employed something less ploddingly predictable than sex to motivate at least some of those who populate the Ackley Bridge staff room. Gerard O’donovan
If you’re fine with the sight of an athlete lampooning the sport that he helped besmirch, then
(Sky Atlantic) was a tour de force of never-ending jokes, rampant ribaldry and on-the-nose satire. For some, however, watching Lance Armstrong’s cameo in a mockumentary about drugs in cycling will have been too much too soon.
In this one-off film, created by Andy Samberg and Murray Miller, the delegitimised cycling champion was cast as a drugs informant, winking and nudging at his many years of illicit substance abuse. “The last thing I need is to be seen on TV talking about doping again,” said Armstrong, his voice scrambled but heavy with irony. That his anonymity was frequently compromised – via the light on his smartphone, for instance – meant that the joke was very much on him. Yet it also left a strange aftertaste, in that it essentially lent Armstrong a platform with which to make light of his disgrace.
Thankfully, everything else about Pharmacy Road was a riot. Set in 1982, it created a fictional Tour de France, in which 170 of the competitors were disqualified even before the race had begun, leaving five – who were also all on a cocktail of drugs – to battle it out.
Among them: Marty Hass (Samberg), an obnoxious American who called himself Nigerian, only because his parents owned a diamond mine in Niger, and Adriana Baton (Freddie Highmore), a French woman pretending to be a man in order to be allowed into the race. (In an ingenious bit of casting, Julia Ormond played the modern-day Adriana; Jeff Goldblum, meanwhile, was the older Marty.)
Like 7 Days in Hell, Samberg and Miller’s 2015 parody about a single week-long match at Wimbledon, Pharmacy Road whooshed wildly between frat-boy puerility and highbrow pastiche, at one point masterfully skewering Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. As for the faux talking heads: Armstrong aside, they were deliciously loopy, especially a bewigged Kevin Bacon as a sleazy anti-doping official. At just 39 minutes long, it didn’t outstay its welcome, either, instead playing like a short, sharp injection of adrenalin-fuelled goofiness. Someone hand Samberg and Miller the yellow jersey immediately. Patrick Smith
Ackley Bridge ★★★ Pharmacy Road ★★★★