Forty years on, what happened after the final bell?
Forty years ago, the iconic TV show graced our screens for the first time. So what happened next? Michael Hogan reports
Have you ever speared a sausage with a fork and comedically waved it in someone’s face while singing “wah-wah wah waaah”? Perhaps followed by a Cockney cry of “Flipping ’eck, Tucker” or “Leg it, Bullet Baxter’s coming”? If the answer is yes, you are undoubtedly one of the Grange Hill generation. And you should also prepare to feel depressingly old, because the landmark BBC school drama is celebrating its 40th anniversary this week.
When writer Phil Redmond first devised the series, set at a fictional London comprehensive, nobody predicted that it would become Britain’s most famous school – and a nostalgic cultural reference point for anyone aged 30 to 50.
Indeed, initially Grange Hill got flak for its gritty, unflinching look at inner city youth at a time when afterschool viewing was still dominated by what Redmond called “Enid Blyton, middleclass” programming.
Questions were asked in the House of Commons and Redmond (who soon created the equally controversial Brookside) was summoned by BBC grandees to justify why he was filling the airwaves with lippy yobs wearing loose tie-knots. He was forced to agree there would be no further series unless he toned things down. He duly did… at least, for a few months until the fuss died down. Grange Hill ran for 30 years, becoming part of the fabric of millions of British childhoods. Its banger-on-afork comic strip title sequence and squelchy synth theme tune are enough to provide a Proustian rush back to teatimes of our youth.
In a recent poll of the 50 greatest children’s TV shows of all time, it was voted number two, behind only Blue Peter.
On this pioneering show
– a sort of junior Eastenders – adolescent viewers saw their lives reflected back at them: the scrapes, pranks, growing pains and fumbling romances behind the bike sheds. I vividly remember watching Claire and Stewpot snogging at the end-of-term disco to True by Spandau Ballet – then going to my school disco that very evening and doing the same with Claire-lookalike Susan.
Everyone had their own heroes, depending on how old they were. There were the lovable tearaways: Tucker Jenkins and his gang (who got their own sexed-up, leather-jacketed show Tucker’s Luck); wheeler-dealers Gonch and Hollo; laddish Zammo Mcguire; and Scouse scamp Ziggy Greaves. There were the gobby girls: Trisha “Pongo” Yates, Precious Matthews, Fay Lucas, Calley Donnington and Ronnie Birtles.
Then came the misfits – overweight Roland Browning (“I’m trying to help you, Row-land”) or sickly graffiti artist Danny Kendall – and the bullies who preyed on them, punched their scabs and stole their dinner money: such feared figures as Gripper Stebson, Mauler Mccaul and Imelda Davis.
Finally, the long-suffering teachers: hippy-dippy liberal Scruffy Mcguffy, bearded PE tyrant Bullet Baxter, headmistress Bridget “The Midget” Mccluskey, down with the kids Sooty Sutcliffe and bewigged disciplinarian Mr Bronson.
Grange Hill’s heyday was undoubtedly the late Eighties, when it became increasingly dark and edgy, tackling such issues as racism, rape, disability, knife-crime, death and drugs. Indeed, Zammo’s descent into heroin addiction proved a better anti-drugs advert than any government campaign. “Just Say No” became a playground mantra, as well as the title of a spin-off hit single. The cast even took the campaign to the White House, where they met Nancy Reagan. The heroin storyline was the pet project of then-script editor, the late Anthony Minghella, who went on to become the Oscar-winning director of The English Patient.
The show had passed its peak by the Nineties but limped into the Noughties, when it relocated to Phil Redmond’s native Liverpool, where the set is now used for Hollyoaks
– his other youth soap. The BBC eventually admitted defeat and pulled the plug in 2008.
Tucker Jenkins (played by Todd Carty) returned for the final episode. “If it hadn’t been for this place, I’d have been written off,” he said.
Grange Hill provided early TV exposure for some future stars, while others sank into obscurity or, in some sad cases, tragedy. Forty years after the school bell first rang in February 1978, here’s a school reunion…