Incredibly, kids school drama Grange Hill ran for thirty years on British telly, from 1978 to 2008. As such, most of our audience will be familiar with it and those ground breaking moments… and now the latest generation will get a taste.
But not of a TV show. Nope, as a movie is in the works. Even better, original creator Phil Redmond is in the driving seat. Here he is explaining to BBC Breakfast why it would work now: “You just go out as honestly as you can and try to reflect society as it is, try to be as truthful as you can within the bounds of fiction and do the research properly.
One of the things I’ve always done is work with great young teams to actually deliver the vision. So we’ll just take a look at the way Britain is now, and not the way policymakers would like us to think it is. We will take a realistic view of what education is like now and what that means to kids going through it.”
And why was Grange Hill so special? Phil has an idea: “Really what the controversy boiled down to was that we were showing real kids with real working-class accents on the screen… It wasn’t particularly the issues itself, it was that we were actually changing that perception that children’s television should all be Secret Garden and Enid Blyton”.
Certainly was.
Also in the last few hours we’ve learned that actor Nicholas Donnelly, aka Mr MacKenzie, had passed away. He was 83.
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