Teachers (Channel 4, 2001)

Abstract

Tiger Aspect Productions was also responsible for the Channel 4 series, Teachers (2001–04), a comedy drama about a group of teachers at a comprehensive school in Bristol. Like This Life and Births, Marriages and Deaths this was also stylistically innovative, employing quirky camerawork, fast cutting and fantasy sequences. As its late-night presence on Channel 4 might suggest, this was an alternative, light-hearted view of the teaching profession, targeted at a young audience, ranging in age from the mid-teens of the schoolchildren portrayed to the late 20s and early 30s of the central group of teachers. Emotionally, the male teachers, in particular, are not much more mature than the pupils they are teaching and, as Sarah Cardwell notes in an article on ‘The Representation of Youth in the Twenty-Something Serial’, they show little of the ambition shown by the young barristers in This Life:

The teachers are neither high-achieving careerists such as those depicted in This Life, nor the trendy city-types presented in Queer as Folk; rather, they are relaxed to the point of lethargy at work, cynical about their careers and anyone who is ‘too keen’, and uninterested in or failing at their personal relationships. They show most enthusiasm when engrossed in drunken discussions of inanities. Their hobbies outside the classroom include lolling around in the staffroom, smoking behind the bike sheds (having confiscated the cigarettes from pupils), and hanging out at the bowling alley, or in the local pub — a dreary, unfashionable place from which pupils are informally banned.

(Cardwell, 2005b: 133)¹