Back in the dim, distant past before streaming video services were a thing, and in a wonderful time before the apparently collective decision that if you're not continually "consuming new content" you're Doing It Wrong, there were several DVD series I had on my shelf that were in almost continual rotation in my DVD player. Spaced, Black Books, Peep Show, Big Train, that sort of thing; a particular brand of British comedy, almost always originally broadcast on Channel 4, and in many cases involving the exact same cast members.
(Aside: a fair few of these have been sullied a little in recent years by their association with Graham "I Hate Trans People… Wait, Why Do You All Hate Me Now" Linehan, but I do try my best not to let that bother me too much, because these series — and the work of the actors therein, most of whom do not subscribe to Linehan's odious bigotry — will always be special to me.)
One of my absolute favourites was Teachers, which was a thoroughly interesting show. I've just re-acquired the DVDs of the complete season, and I watched the first episode last night for the first time in a very long while.
Teachers, if you're unfamiliar, is probably best described as a comedy-drama rather than an out-and-out comedy. It initially focuses on the life of a 27 year old English teacher named Simon, who works at a comprehensive school in Bristol. In later series, several of the original cast members (including Andrew Lincoln, who played Simon) depart to make way for a new ensemble cast, so as a complete run it's more of a snapshot of a moment in a group of people's lives rather than a particularly "personal" story as such. There are a few constants along the way, though.
One of the most interesting things about Teachers is its heavily stylised nature. A trademark of the show is how each episode looks at several days across a typical week, and the introduction to each week is done diegetically through the name of the day appearing on something in the world — on a billboard, on a sheet of paper being photocopies, on a computer display, that sort of thing. This is just the beginning of things, though.
There's an almost hallucinogenic quality to certain sequences in Teachers, which certainly in the initial series is intended to reflect the somewhat turbulent state of mind that our hero, Simon, is in. Simon, you see, is a bit stressed out and starting to have significant doubts over whether he actually wants to be a teacher, and his rather rocky relationship with his peer in the English department, a stern woman named Jenny (played with great enthusiasm by Nina Sia), certainly doesn't make things any easier.
Sometimes these stylised sections are very obvious, such as when Simon returns to school the night after a drunken night out, during which he and his friends broke into the school and let a sheep in, among other things, and starts hallucinating that a full-on forensics team is dusting down his classroom for prints. At others, they are subtle, such as peculiar things happening in the background of scenes — the aforementioned sheep continually shows up throughout the series, for example — or little sound effects, such as when Jenny aggressively touches Simon on the shoulders with her fingertips while admonishing him, and you can hear the sound of sizzling.
One of the best things about the show is the ensemble of Kurt and Brian, played by Navin Chowdhry and Adrian Bower respectively. This pair are, in many ways, the worst of the worst. They're male chauvinist pigs constantly obsessing over people's arses, they always do their best to avoid getting out of having to do anything, they're utterly irresponsible, and they're absolute pranksters.
And yet you can't help but love them. Their behaviour towards women, which might initially seem winceworthy in the somewhat more enlightened world we supposedly live in today, is endearingly, amusingly pathetic in light of the fact that the pair of them seemingly get no action whatsoever for the vast majority of the run (that and the female members of the cast are more than capable of standing up for themselves); their irresponsibility actually comes across as a relatively healthy method of coping with the potentially overwhelming stress of working as a teacher; and their pranks… well, they're always amusing.
Probably the absolute best thing about the show, though, is its use of music, which almost exclusively consists of late '90s/early '00s Britpop and indie rock. In some respects it dates the show enormously — as does the fact that a plot point of the first episode is that teachers are no longer allowed to smoke in the school building in the "smoking room" — but in others it forms an absolutely core part of the show's identity.
Teachers is great because it tells some believably human stories about a distinctly down-to-earth cast of characters and doesn't get hung up on high drama — which is something that subsequent school-based TV shows, like Waterloo Road, could be accused of — and focuses on just being entertaining. Watching Teachers is like being included in this little friendship group of characters; you get to see them at their best and, more frequently, their worst — but that "worst" is never anything particularly serious — and it's always a joy to be among them.
It's definitely a show that is very much "of its time", but after revisiting the first episode earlier, I'm looking forward to watching some more.
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