Bad Education

Bad Education has got Jack Whitehall in it and Jack Whitehall is sick. (As I believe young people are wont to describe things of which they violently approve.) Whitehall (born 1988, the bastard!) is someone you might certainly wish to hate if he weren't so utterly charming, enormously talented and disarmingly honest. He went to Marlborough (he's the son of an actress and a leading theatrical agent) and one of the things that's great about him is that he makes absolutely no pretence that he's anything other than a smug, louche, overprivileged, desperately middle-class public school tosser with a weapons-grade sense of entitlement.

Whitehall has built his career on playing thinly-disguised versions of himself, whether as the eyelash-batting school tart flirting outrageously with susceptible prefect Stephen Fry on QI, or as swaggering Old Stoic JP in Fresh Meat or, in Bad Education, the spectacularly useless, impeccably middle-class, Mumford & Sons-loving Mr Wickers.

There is lots wrong with Bad Education, starting with the fact that it has nothing whatsoever satirically insightful to say about the failings of sink comprehensives like the one in which it is set. And how come the class sizes are smaller than you get in many private schools? And how come the kids, even the supposedly delinquent ones, all have hearts of gold? In truth, Bad Education would work just as well on a spaceship, or in a jungle village, or in the lodging house shared by three priests on a remote Irish island...

Just like Father Ted, though (which of course gave us little insight into the Catholic Church), Bad Education transcends its obvious limitations by simple virtue of being naturally funny. From the way it's shot to the way it's acted, it oozes the cocky, infectious confidence of a winner.

It doesn't matter that the jokes are hit and miss. When they work, you love them, like the one where the white headmaster, who has already upset a black parent with the insensitive use of a racial term ('Perhaps, with hindsight best left to rappers. Eh, bro?'), decides to open the school swimming gala as if it were an Olympic ceremony. He does so in a white bathrobe, lighting a candelabra of torches which unfortunately collapses to become a flaming cross, even as the pointed hood on his robe sticks up and he dances in embarrassment as the black parent looks on in horror. Totally contrived; utterly ludicrous; but a gag that will stick in the memory like the rude vegetables scene from Blackadder II.

Bad Education - TV review

Jack Whitehall and Abbey Grove School need some special measures - unless, of course, it's all a send-up.

Bad Education, Jack Whitehall's enjoyably puerile sitcom, has returned for a second series and this time around has to contend with Big School, another BBC school sitcom in which the main joke is that the staff are no more grown-up than the pupils. For my money, Whitehall's Abbey Grove edges Walliams' Greybridge in the comedy league tables, thanks mainly to its youthful anarchy. At 25, Whitehall is barely out of short trousers after all, and it is his admirable willingness to make himself look silly - often repellently so - that carries the show. He is ably supported in the staff room by an understated and terminally unimpressed Sarah Solemani and an unhinged, livewire Mathew Horne as the would-be trendy Head who wears neon trainers and lives for the banter.

The opening episode was defiantly gross-out, involving a swimming gala, toilet humour, nudity, and a disfiguring reaction to chlorine. Around the edges, it packed in a lot of good jokes, from hair puns to digs at Mumford and Sons. It's scattergun stuff, but the clearly gifted Whitehall should trust his writing and the performances to carry the comedy more. He resorts to off-colour, physical gags too often here, but that may just be start-of-term hijinks. Shows promise.

The first series of Jack Whitehall's "newly qualified teacher" sitcom was the highest-rated comedy in BBC3 history, so naturally it was commissioned for a second. In this opener, Abbey Grove is holding its annual swimming gala, and in a direct homage to ITV's Splash, it closes with a special synchronised diving competition. Elsewhere, Miss Gulliver reveals a new lover, and it's not Alfie. The jokes are pretty thin; you'd do better waiting for Whitehall's return as posh "ledge" JP in Channel 4's Fresh Meat later this year.

Series two of Jack Whitehall's sitcom kicks off with that most excruciating of school rituals: the swimming gala. Naturally, the teachers are far more competitive than the pupils and place hefty bets.

Sporting a new bowl haircut that will also bring back ugly memories for some viewers, Whitehall's character sets about bribing his class into the pool but is thwarted by a lifeguard even meaner than the deputy head.

Michelle Gomez plays the latter with gleeful menace, while Mathew Horne returns as the highly inappropriate, equally frightfully coiffed headmaster. Prepare for lewd gags and the eye-watering sight of Whitehall in nothing but Y-fronts.

Jack Whitehall's hapless teacher Alfie, the indomitable deputy head Miss Pickwell (Michelle Gomez) and master of the one-liners Grayson (Jack Bence) are back for a new term at Abbey Grove, where kids and staff are as gleefully caricatured as ever. That's gleefully in the proper sense of the word, not in the Glee sense, where the caricatures might be more subtle but the lines are a lot less funny.

Plotwise, everything centres around Alfie's ongoing infatuation with Miss Gulliver and a swimming competition, with the two strands fusing beautifully in a rip-roaring conclusion. But the plot is throwaway, something to hang a load of laugh-out-loud, knowing one-liners on, as delivered by a deft cast that breezes through them.

Chuck in a load of cultural references that anyone aged ten to 30 will easily get, and star and writer Jack Whitehall can put his feet up and relax. Job done. Grayson's withering 'Oi, Mumford & Sons called. They want their gay one back!' to Whitehall's Alfie stood out for us, but there are so many more. As far as school sitcoms go, Bad Education is top of the class.

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