In its 53 years, Doctor Who has taken us to the farthest reaches of the universe to the end of time itself. But now it finds somewhere genuinely new to go: a Shoreditch sixth-form. This week sees the launch of Class, the latest spinoff and an exercise in “Young Adult”, the bogglingly successful sub-genre that gave the world Twilight and The Hunger Games, and of which the show’s creator Patrick Ness is a leading light. It’s also the most high-profile offering from BBC3 since the channel’s move online. Doctor Who has been many things – epic, scary, life-affirming, naff – but up to this point, not many would have called it especially cool. Stay with me…
Class is familiar territory seen through new eyes. We are talking about a youth-oriented spinoff from a children’s show that grown adults enjoy getting angry about online, and that comes with a built-in warning that its adult themes make it “unsuitable for younger viewers”. Certainly, there are swears aplenty. One of the leads even smokes. And it doesn’t flinch from being gruesome. Such is the way with YA. But if Class carries itself with swagger and style, the young characters themselves don’t necessarily – yet.
We first meet April, an earnest Head Girl type, as she plans the sixth-form prom at Coal Hill Academy and moons hopelessly over Charlie, a newcomer from Sheffield who is quite clearly, both to himself and the rest of the school, gay. Charlie is taunted by school jock Ram, who in turn shares a Skype rapport with Tanya that has the obvious potential to develop into something more. (This points to a future scandalous storyline in itself, since Tanya is a 14-year-old advanced learner, shifted ahead into a peer-group of sixth-formers.)
Aside from exams and doomed crushes, the biggest challenge for the nascent gang is their physics teacher Miss Quill, played with gleeful spite by Coronation Street alum and Sarah-Lancashire-in-waiting Katherine Kelly. “The cream of the crop?” she withers in one classroom scene. “No wonder all this country exports is Downton Abbey.” Miss Quill is incredibly cool, though it’s soon clear that she has as many secrets as her charges – and things are only going to get messier.
Because as every fan knows, Coal Hill school is a longtime cornerstone of the Whoniverse. Here was the place where, back in the very first episode, teachers Ian and Barbara were so unnerved for the welfare of unearthly child Susan Foreman that they followed her home and straight into the space-time machine she occupied with her irascible “grandfather”. 25 Earth years later, the seventh Doctor returned to Coal Hill to retrieve fabled Timelord artefact the Hand of Omega, which had become bait for an invading Dalek fleet. The twelfth Doctor posed as the school caretaker in 2014, to chase down a murderous robot called the Skovox Blitzer, much to the consternation of his travelling companion Clara Oswald, who was holding down a job there as an English teacher.
By this point, too much timey-wimey nonsense has gone on at Coal Hill. The walls of time are being stretched, and now all manner of horrors might seep through to threaten those who walk its corridors. So it’s hardly a spoiler to reveal that by the end of the pilot, the gang have to add “reluctant protectors of humanity” to their list of teenage travails. Bereft Who fans craving a 2016 fix but who might be reticent about a “yoof” spinoff would do well to watch the pilot to the end.
UK TV drama has never really tackled the YA genre before, and of the many questions posed by the Class opener, perhaps the most pertinent is: “why the hell not?” This already feels more mature than Torchwood, the previous Doctor Who spinoff whose first series seemed to spend most weeks featuring a different alien that went round sexing people to death. And the inevitable comparison with Buffy is deftly hat-tipped in a scene where the gang liken Coal Hill’s predicament to a “Hellmouth”. Without getting too ahead of ourselves, it looks like Class will stand up handsomely beside its predecessor. And as for coolness – a certain somebody shan’t be needing those sonic shades any more.
Class will be available on iPlayer from 21 October.
