Every now and then I find myself in a pop-cultural blind spot. Confessions: I didn’t know there were Captain America movies until the trailer for the third one came out; I thought Jeffrey Dean Morgan was Robert Downey Jr well into the 2010s; and I still don’t know what an Owl Of Ga’Hoole is. But no major film in recent years has caught me quite as unawares as The Bad Education Movie, a Jack Whitehall-starring adaptation of a BBC3 sitcom I’d never heard of, made on a not-insignificant budget and released into cinemas this August.
I watched the film on DVD this week, ashamed at having become the kind of “casual viewer” I normally disdain – the sort who actively benefits from the avalanche of exposition that kicks off each and every big-screen adaptation of a long-running TV show. With clunky efficiency, the opening 10 minutes managed to get audiences up to speed by opting to skip the franchise’s 9.5 hours of televisual output and starting all over again.
In short: Whitehall plays Alfie Wickers, a posh young history teacher whose rapport with the students of Abbey Grove School is built on an inability to structure his lessons, a desperation to be popular, and a general distractibility that renders him an easy target for the student body’s more committed timewasters. Despite this, Wickers’s anarchic lessons are shown time and time again to be more intellectually stimulating than those of his fellow teachers, making an unexpectedly firm case against a British education system increasingly driven by standardised testing.
As with all “The Movie” movies, a scenario built for half-hour tales is forced to expand its horizons to make way for a 90-minute storyline, so naturally The Bad Education Movie is set outside the boundaries of Abbey Grove. Less naturally, the plot concerns Wickers and his students’ accidental induction into a terroristic Cornish republican movement. It’s enough to make you pine for the way things (apparently) were.
Also out this week
Paper Towns Half-heartedly self-aware teen romp with Cara Delevingne.
Fantastic Four The $120m superhero movie that couldn’t.
Eden Consistently loud journey through the French club scene.
