Tears, mischief and a lesson in the importance of a shared language
EDUCATING Greater Manchester (C4) should have been heartwarming telly. It focused on the innocent friendship of two 11-yearold lads born 2,000 miles apart, and a school that pulled together in the wake of an unspeakable terrorist atrocity.
But it left me feeling saddened by the sheer scale of the problems in classes where so many pupils struggle to speak English.
There seems no point in trying to teach the standard curriculum to a child who thinks in Arabic or Polish, and who can ask for a bottle of pop in the canteen only by pointing. Surely a better solution would be to suspend all other lessons for immigrant pupils until they are at least halfway fluent in English.
Without a common language, the youngsters can’t even make themselves understood to each other. Factions and grudges are quick to multiply.
Murad, a boy with haunted eyes, was trying to tell his classmates how his family fled the bombing in Syria and crossed the sea in a refugee boat.
He was separated from his father, and without any documents had to be identified by his fingerprints on reaching Britain.
An East European girl blurted: ‘Like terrorist?’ Murad took that the wrong way and called her a racist. The girl fled in tears.
Luckily, language was no barrier
BINGE OF THE WEEK: The drugcrazed true crime drama Narcos (Netflix) returns today. This story of Colombian gangsters and the American police is just unbeatable. Curtains shut, phone switched off — and don’t bother me till I’ve watched it all.
for Jack, 11, who was looking for a partner in mischief. He needed a friend to whisper with when the teacher’s back was turned, or join him drawing rude pictures in the dust on white vans.
He found his fellow conspirator in Rani, another Syrian refugee, who giggled himself silly at Jack’s horseplay. To Rani, there’s nothing funnier in the world than a pretend headbutt and a shout of: ‘Booof!’
The most moving moment of the episode came when Jack’s mum asked Rani’s dad, Khalid, if the boys could have tea together at her house. Khalid was taken aback.
‘Is it birthday or something?’ he asked.
This series, shot with dozens of ‘ fixed- rig’ cameras mounted around the site and operated remotely, promises to be a great advert for Harrop Fold School in Salford — once deemed among the worst schools in the UK.
Staff dealt superbly with the aftermath of the Manchester Arena bomb: several of their children had been there, and were traumatised by what they saw. Harrop Fold is coping. But coping should never be enough.
The emergency services are frequently unable to cope, swamped by the sheer volume of 999 calls.
But the second part of the documentary series Ambulance (BBC1) gave the impression that this crisis is partly self-inflicted. Paramedics who should have been deployed solely as rapid response teams were too often wasting their time, being amateur social workers.
One duo turned up at the house of an 89- year- old in distress, and discovered his prescription for blood-thinning tablets had run out.
So they sat with him for hours, waiting for a duty doctor to visit. Another pair rushed with sirens blazing to the home of an alcoholic who had stopped eating.
His partner wanted him out of the house. He wouldn’t leave, and the crew wasted half the night arguing with him.
Perhaps the solution is for ambulances to carry their own social services back-up — outriders who are not medics, to sit with the elderly and the drunks, leaving the emergency workers to dash away on their next call.
Instead, we got stuck with too many sad, seedy cases.
The producers wallowed in it, ending with a sentimental pop dirge. But feeling sorry for ourselves is not the answer.