Last night on television Gerard O’donovan A lesson in how not to deal with Britain’s failing pupils
Would children do better at school if their parents took a more active interest in their education? That, in essence, was the loaded question posed by Living with the Brainy Bunch (BBC Two), a not-so revelatory “experiment” to see if a few weeks living with A-graders and their families could improve the mindset of a couple of underperforming Year 11 students.
We met 15-year-old Hollie, preparing for her GCSES, who failed to get a C in any subject in her mock exams. The cameras zoomed in on her home life and a father saying: “We’re involved very little in Hollie’s education… You put your trust in the teacher to do the best job possible.”
Then we were introduced to her fellow student Holly (described by her head teacher as “fantastic… your on the front-of-the-prospectus type child”). Holly’s home life was far more conducive to learning: timetables, activities, dinner-table fun taking turns naming Shakespeare’s plays.
The same process was repeated on Jack, also 15, who had received three exclusions and 105 detentions in the previous year. (Cue Jack’s mother: “I work long hours… I don’t want to argue with Jack, I just want him to know he’s loved”). He was paired with his hard-working schoolmate Tharush who arrived in the UK a year ago from Italy and is already excelling, and whose mother didn’t hesitate to impose strict rules and structure.
Did Hollie and Jack need help? Of course they did. Was singling them out – two students from a school of 800 – shining a spotlight on them and forcing them to spend an excruciating chunk of their GCSE year living with these shining examples of everything they were not, ever likely to provide that help? No, it was not.
Six weeks and a host of predictable mini-dramas later, including tearful meltdowns, confidence collapses and late nights out without permission, it came as little surprise that no miraculous changes were wrought in either of them. There have been some top class education-based shows on TV recently, but this was not one of them. Perhaps the people behind it should be forced to spend the next few months at home with the makers of, say, Channel 4’s excellent Indian Summer School, and see how they like it.
If the participants learned anything or took any positives away from this mostly painful experience, it was down to their own resilience in the face of such unnecessary pressure.
Another show that could have done better was Urban Myths: Marilyn Monroe and Billy Wilder (Sky Arts). I like this portfolio series which casts a comic eye over well-known, if mostly apocryphal, tales from the lives of the famous. That the casts feature an impressive number of well-known faces is a big plus. But they tend to be hit and miss.
This edition took on the hoary old tale that Marilyn Monroe was so off her face on pills and alcohol during the making of the 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot, that it took her 47 takes to nail a scene in which all she had to do was knock on a door and say: “It’s me, Sugar”. Much to the frustration of director Billy Wilder.
In the hands of Gemma Arterton playing Monroe and James Purefoy as Wilder, we might have hoped for subtlety and sophistication. But all we got was predictability and slapstick. And misogynistic slapstick at that. No attempt was made to depict Monroe as anything other than the dumb sex-bomb blonde of cinematic lore.
That the men in the piece were treated little better was no comfort. Wilder’s portrayal was a lazy caricature of the cigar-chewing European émigré director; Monroe’s playwright husband Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott) a prickly stuffed shirt; Tony Curtis (Alex Pettyfer) a cardboard-quality cad. Some of the macho jousting – everyone ribbing the self-important Miller that his plays were good but “short on laughs” – hit the mark. But not often enough.
Overall the sense was of an opportunity missed. Might it not have been more amusing to see this fable through Monroe’s eyes, however bleary they were; or to wonder how she could have put in a performance of such scintillating comic precision despite being wasted all the time?
In the end the only bright light was Adam Brody, who caught perfectly Jack Lemmon’s contribution to the art of drag. Other than that, the best thing about this was that it gave Sky Arts an excuse to show the film Some Like It Hot afterwards. Now that’s what you call a great comedy.
Living with the Brainy Bunch Urban Myths: Marilyn Monroe and Billy Wilder