I’m going back to school... and there are Girls Allowed!
ACKLEY BRIDGE Tuesday, 8pm - Channel 4
BELIEVE me, I have tried. But despite my best efforts to pay as little attention as possible to whatever is doing the rounds on social media, it is practically impossible to avoid it entirely.
The latest big thing suggests that the No. 1 hit at the time of your 14th birthday is the defining song of your life. Nothing at all to back this up, of course, because presumably it was dreamt up by some saddo with far too much time on his hands.
Unfortunately, I’m the sort of saddo with enough time on his hands to go to the bother of actually checking it out.
I should say at this point that if I’d been born a week earlier the soundtrack of my 14th birthday would have been Beat Surrender, the barnstorming swansong from The Jam.
By the time the big day came around, however, the top spot in the charts was instead occupied by Renée & Renato’s rather less cool Save Your Love.
I’m sorry I went to the trouble of looking it up now. Besides, it’s a ridiculous concept to begin with.
How can a completely random song be considered as defining in anyone’s life? Especially when it has been recorded by a couple of cabaret performers who look like they should have been fourth on the bill in some workingman’s club on the outskirts of Grimsby.
Anyway, what exactly is meant by ‘defining’ in this instance?
I fully see how personal relationships or financial circumstances or even jobs can be described as defining, but I’m just not sure where one-hit wonders fit into the equation. Maybe I am overthinking it. If we are talking in terms of big impact, though, I’d argue that the TV series Grange Hill – set in a north London comprehensive school – was the most defining thing on the popular culture front for youngsters of my generation.
It was well past its peak by the time I turned 14, mind you, but its glory years still stick in my mind.
There were wonderfully named characters like Tucker Jenkins, Pogo Patterson, Bridget ‘The Midget’ McClusky (the no-nonsense headmistress), Bullet Baxter (the no-nonsense PE teacher) and, perhaps most memorably of all, psychopaths-in-training Gripper Stebson and Booga Benson.
Although there was humour aplenty, serious social issues – bullying, racism, poverty, drug
addiction and so on – were addressed in an intelligent and non-patronising manner.
Forty years on from the first series of Grange Hill, its influence can be seen in Ackley Bridge.
The first series, set in a newly integrated school of white and Asian communities in a workingclass area of Yorkshire, was screened last summer.
Now it is back for a welldeserved second run. The opening moments of last Tuesday’s episode saw a male pupil hurling an orange at members of staff as they arrived for another day at the chalkface.
Headmistress Mandy Carter (Jo Joyner) barked at a teaching colleague: ‘Mr Simpson, can you escort him to my office please!’ By way of laconic reply, Mr Simpson (Tom Varey) shrugged and said: ‘Y’know, in some schools that could have been a petrol bomb.’
The plot also featured teenage pregnancy and a particular unpleasant instance of domestic violence. But perhaps the biggest development in terms of future storylines was the arrival on the scene of Claire Butterworth (Kimberley Walsh), the ex-partner of Miss Carter’s semiestranged husband and a right piece of work.
And, yes, that is the same Kimberley Walsh who was in Girls Aloud. Which, in some respects, brings us full circle.
Because I’ve just checked on the internet and – by an amazing coincidence – it turns out that their first No 1 was released the day after my 34th birthday. Spooky, eh?