Has anyone been watching Jamie's Dream School? I've been at university so haven't watched anything except redtube and whatever comes up when you mis-spell redtube in Google, but now I'm back I've decided to plunge my head into the pool of the telly zeitgeist, and this is the first thing that's come up. It's been getting a lot of coverage in the media by TV critics and satirists, so I told myself I wouldn't write about it for fear of being unoriginal, but it's such an event in history omitting reference to it on the blog would be akin to a Dictator ignoring the revolution going on outside his window.
Anyway, episode one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDFt5Qp3vSg&list=SL).
*
00:00 - It kicks with a load of kids explaining how few GCSEs they've ended up with. Then Jamie Oliver strolls on screen, his boyish face making him look virtually indistinguishable from the kids; except that he's spent so long whoring himself out to supermarket advertisers you can smell what a shit he is through the screen. The system has failed these kids, says Jamie. Oh good, so he's on their side then. He then shows a load of clips of the celebrities he's chosen to teach them for the next two months. 'It's the great and the good, versus the bored and the badly behaved' says Jamie. Wait, so he...isn't on their side, then. If Alastair fucking Campbell is considered more 'good' than a bunch of disadvantaged teenagers then my grip on morality is tragically skewed. Maybe I'll go and stab a load of pensioners to make up for it.
03:30 - Jamie introduces his celebrity teachers for this week. There's David Starkey teaching History, Simon Callow teaching English, Rolf Harris teaching Art and Ellen MacArthur teaching...Expeditions. Actually I'm not sure we offered Expeditions at my school, which is a shame, because a lot of kids do go on to make their living doing Expeditions, and it would have been a good way to make use of the million dollar yachting fleet and the small tropical sea we had lying around behind the science labs. Presumably next week will feature Levitation taught by David Blaine and Killing the Elderly with Harold Shipman.
4:40 - 'You're not in the minority' explains Jamie, who's raised his hand to show solidarity with those who have less than 5 good GCSE's, 'you're actually quite normal'. Good, so he's back on their side then. Except then he wheels out a load of uniforms and makes them put the on. Hooray for equality. 'When you're finished changing we'll be waiting out in the cloisters, or whatever you wanna call it, the hallway' he says. Yes, it's called a hallway. I wasn't sure it was possible to sound supercilious just while referring to a hallway, but he managed it.
5:25 - 'To help me run the school I've got a real head-teacher - his name's John d'Abbro, aka "Dabbs"'. 'I think these are really cool' muses Dabbs, awkwardly manhandling one of his female students as he does so. He couldn't have come across as out of touch in five seconds if he'd walked on wearing a backwards cap and calling everything 'wizard'.
7:35 - 'Inspirational Expert' Simon Callow walks into his first class. 'Lovely faces, very good' he remarks, sitting down in the chair he's positioned directly in front of several rows of students, which makes him look not like a teacher but someone performing a tragic Alan Bennett monologue about a Nazi doctor.
9:30 - In an astonishing sequence Jamie cynically admits that the kids don't actually give a toss, and then does a fantastic impression of both them and Callow. It's a display that contrasts so utterly with his bullshit about 'inspirational experts' and 'dream schools' that it's giving me whiplash. 'Was I like that? A little shit?' he wonders.
11:50 - 'Basically they're unruly' concludes Callow, 'what's called, er...' - 'Feral?' suggests Jamie. His switch from Mother Teresa to Jeremy Clarkson looks set to be the most entertaining thing about the show.
16:20 - Actually scratch that; by far the most entertaining thing (or at least the most jaw-dropping) looks set to be David Starkey. 'You've failed' he says simply to the class, then, picking on of them out, 'C'mon your so fat you couldn't really move'. Normally this is the sort of baiting I'd find quite appealing but since it's a successful Cambridge historian unprovokedly attacking an unqualified teenager, one who came across as a pretty decent guy in an earlier interview, it's just insidious. Is this Starkey's method of correcting the 'low self-esteem' he identified as an issue with these kids? What a colossal shit-muncher. He deserves everything that gets flung at him.
19:00 - 'Aw, c'mon, did he really say that?' asks Jamie disbelievingly when two girls leave Starkey's class. Yes, he fucking did Jamie. I know, I'll need counselling for the shock too. Jamie then chastises them for not taking advantage of the oppertunity of examining the £30 million's worth of Anglo Saxon gold. 'You might even get to touch some of it' he enthuses. What a persuasive incentive. Presumably they'd buy into education for life if he just let them have a bit of a lick.
20:45 - The classroom having descended into anarchy, Starkey simply begins rocking silently back and forth like one of those bottom-weighted tilting dolls, one wearing a suit and carved in the shape of a prick. 'I survived' he summarizes, a criteria for success that would surely render the death of everyone else on earth in a nuclear disaster as no bad thing.
21:50 - Oh look, now he's claiming ADHD is a 'description of an entire age-group'. What trenchant analysis. I often find it hard to listen to and respect someone who's just insulted my physical appearance, but it's comforting to know that there's an incurable medical reason for this. I'd never have worked it out otherwise.
30:40 - Having taken a full 8 minutes to recover from Starkey, the program introduces its next inspirational expert, Rolf Harris. A smart choice, since Rolf is physically impossible to dislike. 'The first thing you do is you kill the white' he says to his students, subtly inciting racial hatred , but everyone laps it up because, hey, it's Rolf Harris. I'd let him sodomise my dog if he whistled a bit of 'Jake the Peg' while he did it.
32:20 - Rolf is also the only teacher to seem genuinely upset by his failure to reach every student. What a hero. Starkey would be unimpressed. What's he complaining about? He survived?
32:50 - For their 'Expedition' lesson, the kids...wait no, only four of the kids, since it turns out a yacht isn't the best place to hold a lesson for a full class. So only four of them get to learn. How inspiring! What a dream school this is!
35:35 - 'What's the most exciting thing that you've done?' asks Ellen. 'This' answer the kids. So there's the answer! Lessons should be held on boats! To be fair, Starkey had the right idea; swaying around like a captain who's drilled a hole in the bottom of his boat and can't understand why the rest of the crew are yelling at him.
38:20 - FINALLY Dabbs takes it upon himself to watch the Starkey tapes. Unfortunately he can't quite appreciate the post-modern genius of it all, and suggests that the comment would normally have led to a disciplinery hearing. 'It's difficult' he explains, presumably trying to decide whether Starkey's face looks more like a wrinkled ball-sack or a discarded foreskin.
39:00 - Plumb out of ideas, Jamie invites Super Mario to inspire the kids, who's presumably ingested the 'boffin-in-chinos' powerup. I think you can find it in world 3.
40:00 - ...And proceeds get the kids to slice up mice, and then a pig. It seems a remarkably time-consuming way of getting rid of enemies. What was wrong with stomping on them?
42:30 - Shit, it's Starkey's next lesson. True to form, he's...wait, where is he?
42:48 - 'But sadly, David Starkey's decided to stay at home' Jamie explains. We then cut to him outlining his plan for a perfect school which IN NO WAY resembles the guidelines for maintaining a happy concentration camp. He seems to hesitate on the word 'children' as though he's have preferred a different term for them. 'Untermensch', perhaps?
47:20 - ...But don't worry kids, he'll be back next week. Along with Alastair Campbell. Yay.
*
So what have we learnt? Well, that teaching kids is difficult. That they prefer not to be taught by pricks. That being on a boat is more fun than a classroom. And that Satan himself exists, and he teaches history. Badly. All of which I could have learnt by living in the world for half-an-hour, but it is at least entertaining to watch.
Actually I feel I've been a little unfair on Jamie Oliver, who's displayed a healthy degree of skepticism in the exercise and at the end of the day is only trying to help kids who've got a shit deal in life. I can't tell him off for that. There's no forgiving those Sainsbury's ads though, you hypocritical tool.
Oh, and this is perhaps the only time in history that the voice of morality is a man known as Dabbs. That's got to be some sort of achievement
No comments:
Post a Comment