When Bad Education started on BBC Three in 2012, it was tempting to dismiss it as just a career booster for Jack Whitehall: ticking off a sitcom would be another staging post in the standup comic’s charmed journey towards the comedy A-list. The idea of a sitcom set in a chaotic secondary school didn’t sound as if much thought had gone into it, and Whitehall’s character – rookie teacher and overgrown public schoolboy Alfie Wickers – was bound to be another version of his cheeky-toff stage persona. Great sitcoms require toil and heart to get right – surely Whitehall couldn’t possibly have tossed off a classic?
If you dismissed Bad Education on those grounds and never watched it – congratulations, you were absolutely right. Alfie was Jack Whitehall being Jack Whitehall, everyone else was a flat, lazy cartoon, the series was awful and the fact that it ran for three seasons and resulted in a honking spin-off movie was depressing when you thought about it – although you probably didn’t.
Now, however, you must prepare yourself to briefly consider it again because, in an era when any show or movie with any brand recognition at all is liable to be revived, Bad Education is back … but Whitehall isn’t. At the end of 2022, eight years on from the original finale, a reunion episode set up the reworked sit for a revived com: Alfie Wickers has said goodbye to Abbey Grove, but his former pupils Stephen (Layton Williams) and Mitchell (Charlie Wernham) have grown up and are starting their own teaching careers.
As well as the show boasting a fresh cast, Whitehall has relinquished scripting duties, leaving room for a phalanx of hungry young comedy writers to take their shot. Whitehall and his regular co-writer Freddy Syborn still oversee the series – Syborn directs, with Whitehall as executive producer – and both are credited with “additional material” on episode one, which suggests they gave the first script a once-over. So they have to be given credit for the fact that this clumsy Jack Whitehall vehicle has returned without Whitehall in it and is … slightly better.
Williams and Wernham become the co-leads, one as a fierce, fashion-obsessed gay man who insists he is only working as a drama teacher between acting jobs, the other as a cockney/Essex wide boy who has become a PE teacher because it keeps him out of trouble and is a chance to goof off. Natural enemies, the pair find common ground in their own incompetence and lack of interest in the job, which gives them a shared nemesis in the form of strict but wacky headteacher Ms Hoburn (the always superb Vicki Pepperdine, doing predictably fine work here in a role that doesn’t stretch her).
The new series really improves on the old with the gang of kids who make up the all-new Class K. When Bad Education began, Alfie’s pupils were a parade of almost unbelievably crude and obvious stereotypes: a flamboyant gay boy, a sexually precocious queen bee, a meathead, a schlubby loser, even a fearsomely studious Chinese girl. Now we have a group of kids who are mostly just recognisable 2023 teens. Has the classroom vernacular moved with the times? Just about, more or less: people make references to Salt Bae and the different heat levels at Nando’s, and say things like “it’s giving …”, “allow it!” and, er, “My change dot org has been shadowbanned.”
Making a sitcom bang up to date will always be a recipe for potential cringeworthiness, because it’s an essentially old-fashioned format. The new Bad Education isn’t fazed by that, working its way through classic set-ups such as a mishearing that spirals out of control, an episode where nearly everyone gets locked in a room, and one where Ms Hoburn is nervous about an inspector arriving but then, due to an unlikely mix up, ends up brown-nosing the wrong person. Don’t, however, expect precise Fawlty Towers-esque plotting, where you take a break from laughing to purr over the neatness of the story’s construction. Here, the resolutions – usually kids and teachers uniting to foil Ms Hoburn at the last second – are hastily bolted together and feel less like updates and more like bad copies. The same is true of a lot of the jokes, which have familiar rhythms but just aren’t very strongly written: “You know nothing about geography, Sir! You thought Carluccio’s was the capital of Italy!”
The new Bad Education might be less grating but that doesn’t mean it’s actually good. It’s not as obviously empty-hearted as the old series, with the dance finale of an episode where Stephen tries to take his class to a “drag brunch” ending up being an unexpected burst of joy. But it still lacks any coherent structure or purpose. As a result, it too often comes across as juvenile – but not in a fun way.
