TV Pick of the Week: ‘Educating Yorkshire: One Year On’

When I was 15 or 16, I’d style out my striped tie with a look of pure disdain and a gelled hairstyle with such an impressive structure it could withstand the combined weight of a chicken salad baguette and a Lion bar and still hold out.

Back then, when I was trying to study for my GCSEs, adults would turn to me and say “oh, but your school years are the best of your life!”. Which, as we all know, is a load of old guff.

It turns out the best years of your life are actually the ones where you can watch programmes like Educating Yorkshire while washing a Domino’s pizza down with a large gin and tonic, smug in the knowledge you’ll never have to deal with anything as relentlessly awful as a secondary school social hierarchy again.

The fly-on-the-wall format might have worn a bit thin after reality TV started using it to give us an insight into the most boring people on the planet (hello, Peter Andre) but on Educating Yorkshire it offered a fresh, exciting perspective. WATCH as kids slag off teachers without them hearing! GASP as the viewer gets unprecedented access to the teacher’s office! LOOK AWAY NERVOUSLY as you watch a teacher cry and realise that these starchy, curriculum-fuelled robots have feelings!

It’s already been a year since Educating Yorkshire was on our screens, and we got a fascinating glimpse into the actual youth of today. There was the precocious scamp who hated Geography but pined for a career driving an ambulance, a boy with a crippling speech impediment who borrowed a storyline from The King’s Speech and moved his peers to tears, and a teacher who suffered such a rare allergic reaction that his hands and feet started swelling up and he had to limp around everywhere, looking every bit like death warmed up.

Educating Yorkshire was charming but often brutally honest, and it demonstrated that even the most demonic little shits are just trying to figure out some way to survive, fighting their own personal battles outside the classroom. Sometimes there was a happy ending, and you realise that even the most Dickensian teachers are just trying to mould you into a more socially acceptable person; but sometimes it was the opposite, and it can be heartbreaking.

Next week sees the format move to the London suburb of Walthamstow for Educating The East End, but before then Channel 4 is popping back to Thornhill Community Academy tonight (August 21) to check in on all the Northern pupils, and see how they’re doing.

There’s no preview for the episode yet, though, as today is also GCSE results day, and in the spirit of capturing all things – no matter how awkward or disheartening – Thornhill’s students are opening their results in front of cameras on the day.

What we do know, though, is we’re going to spend the episode catching up with Musharaf, who, after making his entire year cry with his leaving speech, is now pursuing a career as a teacher; Bailey, the girl who shaved her eyebrows off and is now interested in taking a singing course, and Sheridan, who is pursuing an elusive C in Maths while also learning to drive.

So do make sure you tune in, whether you fancy being cheered up by the spirit of precocious youth or just want to watch a child’s dream dissolve into a file mulch.

Educating Yorkshire: One Year On airs tonight (August 21) at 9pm on Channel 4.

Last week’s TV pick of the week was Gay Sex, Apps and Me presented by Harry Hitchens. Read more about it here.