Tune In, Switch Off: Monstrous Creations

Is there a monster in Beverley Hills? We were invited to find out in a new series of US detective drama, Life, on ITV3. For sure, a monster left our first exhibit, corpse Max, "severely beaten to death". Every bone in his body was broken before he was tied to a bar stool and thrown into a swimming pool. Something monsters do all the time.

Strange though, that after being at the bottom for so many hours, his face was still covered in blood, as if he'd come off badly in a paintballing match. Lots of gore like Banquo's ghost. There must be a clue in there. Not enough chlorine in the water? Maybe the make-up department used the wrong gel. Or was there a simpler answer: sloppy direction?

This was stylised storytelling in which the slick, quick scene shifts and occasionally witty dialogue seemed out of synch with the cliched characters and situations - a steroid taking, terminator-pecked, gang banger; sex on a throbbing red bike; and a leggy therapist with a secret. All in a day's work.

"Is it normal not to feel normal?" asks our cheery cop, Charlie Crews, played by Damian Lewis, a kind of Hugh Laurie House character. Charlie was incarcerated for 12 years for a crime he didn't commit, which drove him insane and explains why he's now a detective behaving oddly. The Shrink would charge about $450 an hour. That's a fifty minute hour, by the way. (But then that's the same as you get with ITV, so don't feel short-changed.)

The Shrink was shocked into confession mode when she saw her photo on the crime board. That's all it took. I told you it was fast-moving, more Desperate Detectives than The Bill. And there were plenty more characters all connected to the monster; I think. But don't test me on the plot. Let's just say I needed the crime board as much as the cops to keep track of things.

It was middle-class monsters, rather than LA terrors, which were the focus in May Contain Nuts (ITV1), based on John O'Farrell's novel, exposing obsessions with class and education. This had some of the laugh-out-loud humour of a personal favourite read Things Can Only Get Better, O'Farrell's account of his miserable years as a 1980s Labour supporter.

Monster, Ffion - yes two fs - played by Elizabeth Berrington, believed the area served by the local state school was a drug dealers' paradise. Her solution? "Bulldoze the whole area and drive them over the border into Lambeth." Her child's prep school had diagnosed him as talented in a "dinosaur-based play". That's personalisation for you.

But for newcomer Alice, played by Shirley Henderson, the solution was to try to cheat the system by sitting the school entrance exam, disguised as her daughter: "All's fair in love, war and secondary transfer."

The secret of pulling it off as a teenage girl? Look ugly. Hers was the silliest disguise since Toad dressed as a washerwoman in The Wind in the Willows.

Parent-child reversals are the stuff of fantasy films. And this became an over-long comedy sketch, a monster best strangled at birth - or tied to a bar stool and left in the water to sink.

Ray Tarleton is principal at South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

Tune In, Switch Off: Leave an Impression

"There's little we can do about the economy. We're only the Government and we've got obesity to worry about," declared the two Johns, playing the famed stereotypical civil servants they've made their trademark in a timely return of Bremner, Bird and Fortune on Channel 4.

This was politics masquerading as entertainment. Rory Bremner was on top form, especially in the uncanny impersonations of the Prime Minister. How does he do that with his face? Bremner's YouTube spoof was almost as funny as the Number 10 original.

Dispatches: Crash Gordon (also Channel 4) though a serious documentary, could have been another sketch from the show. "No return to boom and bust," Mr Brown has apparently intoned more than one hundred times. Presenter Andrew Rawnsley treated us to repeat clips to prove it.

These were from the days when macho Gordon, like his namesake celebrity chef, believed he had an economic recipe that wasn't cooking the books.

Labour MP Frank Field suggested to roars of laughter (in my house anyway) that we should introduce Asbo-style behaviour contracts for the rich. Just run that idea past me again, Frank. Or was he being Rory?

Bremner presented this year's TES Schools Awards and he's as good in the flesh: cartoon quality faces and voices so real you think he's brought the politicians with him. I wonder why he's not impersonated Sir Alan, now Lord Sugar, yet. A couple of weeks ago, we had either The Apprentice (BBC1) or one of its off-shoot programmes nearly every night. Why not just an Apprentice Channel devoted to the life histories of these young entrepreneurs?

But in schools, we'll all applaud Sugar if he creates more apprenticeships in his role as government adviser, even if they are in chocolate manufacture.

Here's what Rory Bremner's Sir Alan might say: "Listen. I don't give a boardroom bollocking which of 'em gets through. As long they ain't costing me money. Show business is still business. You don't get to be popular by being popular. Any good teacher can tell you that.

"So when people wonder why I throw the nice guys out and keep the steaming, screaming hysterics, they just don't get it, do they? It's bleedin' obvious why I chucked the likes of Sandhurst Ben, who thought making money was better than sex, or that mousy Mona. And all the other limp shadows. They was as dull as daytime TV."

Cock-ups and tantrums make great telly. That's why The Apprentice is the most talked about TV programme. Forget Britain's got Talented Amateurs with Piers, Amanda and Simon.

As Sir Alan (or Rory) might say: "As I tell everybody each week, there is no second prize. There's only one winner. Me. The rest is just entertainment."

Ray Tarleton is principal of South Dartmoor Community College in Ashburton, Devon.

Tune in, switch off - Choice cuts from meaty shows

During The Operation: Surgery Live (Channel 4) in which we gawped at keyhole hernia repair, a Twitterer asked: "Is the yellow stuff fat?" Clearly, they had missed an earlier BBC programme, 10 Things You Need To Know About Losing Weight. In that show, we saw an illuminated depiction of the grease-lined internal organs of medical journalist Michael Mosley (pictured right). The camera never lies: Michael needed to lose weight on the inside, even though he looked slim on the outside.

But help was at hand. Did you know that bigger plates hold more food? Believe me, it's a scientific fact. So tip number one was: eat from smaller plates. Why have I never thought of that? Time to smash some crockery and dig out the dolls' tea set from the loft.

Then it got more scientific. Apparently our stomachs process a cup of water and plate of solids more quickly than the same meal splurged in the blender as soup. The sludge takes ages to go down. Just like the water in my bathroom sink. So I'm definitely buying smaller soup bowls now.

Apparently, my brain can also fool my stomach into thinking it's just had a Christmas dinner, even if the last meal I ate was three days ago, so long as I eat protein. Bring on the steaks.
So it was useful when in Come Dine With Me (Channel 4), amateur chef Sabrina demonstrated how to tell if a steak was properly cooked. You prod it. The greater the bounce, the rarer it is. She demonstrated on her face, jabbing nose and cheeks. No need to stick in a fork to release the juices. Leave that to the surgeons.

But her fellow contestant Greg, representing Everyman and gardeners, horrified effete Hugo - as privileged as the heather-fed lamb on his plate - by eating his protein-packed chop with his bare hands. Fine dining establishments would throw him out, opined Hugo. He used words I'd forgotten existed such as "Titicaca", while Greg could only describe the flavour of his pears and ice cream as "peary and ice creamy". It's another winning reality TV format.

But back to the hernia repair show. It was made up of some unlikely ingredients: an operation, a live audience and questions via Twitter. If watching food programmes is the next best thing to eating, then the same must apply to surgery a thousand times over. Viewers saw robotic claws and beaks chasing the deadly yellow gunge - once soup - around the oesophagus and stomach in search of a nerve.

"What could go wrong?" asked one member of the audience who, unlike me, was daring to look. In the end, everything was trussed up with wire as neatly as a Sunday joint. What would happen if it was done too tight? Simple, she wouldn't be able to eat - even from keyhole-sized plates, presumably. Another dieting opportunity though.

Luckily, the surgeon said he would "fiddle and diddle" to get it perfect. Sounded like Hugo again. But he did reassure me by announcing that, as you become more experienced your hands became steadier. His advice to novice surgeons? Practise in the kitchen.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - Is poetry on TV Donne for?

Where has all the poetry on our screens come from? I think the swirling surges of this stuff started when Andrew Motion - velvet voice like the rolling ocean - relinquished his 10-year tenure as Poet Laureate. I may just re-read that paragraph to check that it scans.
But Motion's real career can begin now: reading the voice-overs for cocoa adverts. So soporific are his vocal chords, I once slept through several of his answers in a seminar I chaired when he answered questions from our sixth form.

The start of the BBC poetry season had Griff Rhys Jones posing in a field of daffodils where he just looked silly. Well, comedy is what he's lived his life for. But forget poetry, Griff, and stick to Restoration, where you can defend derelict objects like Mel Smith.

In Poetry Please on BBC Four, we watched the scarlet-jumpered Roger McGough unveiling the secrets of the nation's favourite Radio 4 poetry request programme. Was it his red jersey? No, it was simply reading poems to the listeners without musical serenade, suggestive images or interference of any kind. BBC television, please note.

There was plenty of swirling suggestiveness in Simon Schama's John Donne on BBC Two. What gives Schama the right to claim ownership of Donne? But there were three of them in this programme: John Carey, Fiona Shaw and the great poet's keeper.

It began graphically. Our "most electrifying poet", announced Schama. Cue fluorescent ceiling lights. He's a metaphysical poet. Cue clouds. Tales of terror, racks and disembowelment: cue droplets of red liquid. Why the phoney photos? Poetry is meant to feed our imaginations. Perhaps the producer thought we had none.

But Schama is a compelling storyteller and Carey and Shaw made great props. It was time to read some Donne so the camera panned to anywhere in London that looked old.
To get inside these erotic poems we also had to get up close and magnified. Lazing on leather sofas with Fiona, Schama verbally wrestled, swapping lines and insights.

Red sofas, of course. She had the text ready annotated, dirty bits underlined: "License my roving hands and let them go" - the rudest line ever written, we were told. There was pounding music and poems that lived - "not left-over relics". Sorry, Mel Smith.

The full frontal shots shifted to Carey and the back of Schama's head, revealing magnificent, magnified red ears. The two held a private tutorial, the world watching, as they dissected the verbal strip tease of: "To His Mistress Going to Bed". Today's sixth form males recite it as chat up lines, my English teacher wife tells me.

So to the end and death was everywhere in shots of sunsets and blackened trees as Donne wrote the Holy Sonnets and Fiona got to jog on the beach out of breath, reciting verse that "throbs with physical force".

Meanwhile on Britain's Got Talent, the hyperbolic Piers Morgan described Susan Boyle's singing as "having inspired the world". But you have to be Obama or John Donne to achieve that. No matter how many YouTube hits you score, it's all exaggeration - something Piers Morgan, former editor of the Daily Mirror, should know all about. Cue fake photos?

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - A bad case of the geeks

Take a group of actors, all aged over 20, dress them in school uniforms to look 16 and have them pretend to be 18 to get served in a pub. No, it's not The History Boys, but the plot of the first episode of The Inbetweeners, the first series of which is now showing again on E4.
Topically, there was also the public schoolboy, Will, (pictured) whose daddy suddenly couldn't afford the fees, so he had to get acquainted with the low life at the local comprehensive.

A budding entrepreneur, Will calculated that purchase of a carvery meal would qualify him for the alcoholic beverage to accompany it. Mummy, driving an open-top sports car, looked like his wildly attractive younger sister, so was the subject of shagging fantasies by his new mates. If you think it sounds rather silly, that's because it was.

Deadly serious, in contrast, was Unreported World, the Channel 4 undercover investigative series. This episode featured Recife in northern Brazil. A glamorous beach resort, it's also home to 4,000 murders a year. By coincidence, when you read this I'll be there, unless I cancel the flight in fright.

In fact, it's my third visit. Schools there are safe havens where meals are provided and pupils thrive. The Brazilians are full of joy and generosity. They embrace, sing and dance without the politically correct child protection rules that tie us in knots. Their teachers touch the children affectionately, and the children hug them in return. Call me unadventurous, but I'm not going to try this in Devon. Why risk arrest?

While education liberates, Unreported World graphically showed how poverty and drugs are the universal villains that spawn death squads. These squads often consist of police who are instructed by senior officers whom they must target; one confessed to personally having shot 30 young people. The executions are sometimes requested by shopkeepers desperate for action to get rid of the "scumbag crooks" because the legal system is regarded as too slow.
The price varies, depending on the value of the individual. Much more expensive to remove a politician than a drug dealer. Given recent developments, I'm not sure we'd place much value on a UK politician's life. Scumbag crooks sounds about right to me.

This was brave journalism, filmed among the action in grim detail with first-hand witnesses. I'd heard about the high murder rate from the teachers in the schools I visited. The body in the school playground is an everyday event.

Equally harrowing was the portrayal of Lucy by Molly Windsor, who acted and looked 11 in The Unloved, part of Channel 4's Forgotten Children season. Directed by the actress Samantha Morton and seen through a child's eyes, we experienced the damage adults do. There are no problem children, only problem parents.

Ditch the bucket loads of child protection training the Government has planned for schools in the autumn. Show this extraordinary drama to teachers and governors everywhere and hearts will break.

Ray Tarleton

Tune in, switch off - The art of spin wears thin

"Don't mention the war." That's what Gordon Brown must have been muttering as he saw the shots of himself in that Lewisham school with Nazi swastikas on the wall behind him. As they ran the pictures on news broadcasts throughout the evening and for days afterwards, I thought only of the distress they would cause.

It was the school I was concerned about. Weeks of preparation, everything polished and gleaming. This was billed as the educational equivalent of a moon landing. It had to be perfect. Imagine the staff meeting inquest afterwards. "Right. Own up. Who forgot to take down the swastikas? You? Well you can kiss goodbye to your threshold progression, matey."

Then someone forgets to tidy up the wall displays. If Peter Capaldi's expletive-driven spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker, from The Thick of It and In the Loop had turned up, the unfortunate member of staff would have had their career, reputation and the contents of their bag blown to pieces in front of them, along with the swastika.

I should know, as I was there. The swastikas were just the half of it. No one filmed the bizarre moment myself and the rest of the "room meat", as we would be called by political window dressers, witnessed just before the PM delivered his highly trailed speech about changing the educational world.

The TV broadcasters were all doing their sound checks and everyone was looking important. It was like waiting in church for the bride to arrive. Then an aide (or was it the head's PA?) suddenly noticed the water jug contained a sliced lemon. Mr Brown must be allergic to lemon because the aide furtively dipped her hand in the water and the lemon was removed as skilfully as if it were a dead fish.

In the week we had been campaigning for greater hygiene to prevent the spread of swine flu, it had us all covering our faces with hankies. Stifling giggles as the cameras from the news organisations rolled, we watched in horror when the PM poured a drink, unaware of the human touch.

If all this sounds like satire, that naturally brings me to Mark Lawson talks to Ian Hislop, BBC4. The ever-chirpy Private Eye editor defended his satirical art as "illuminating and informative" even if not powerful enough to topple the Government. It was fascinating to watch these giant brains, critic and satirist, interacting, distracted only by the photographic memorabilia and video clips that stopped me complaining it would work better on radio.

In the week we heard of the demise of The South Bank Show, it was reassuring to see that the talking head format still rocks.

Describing his battles against vested interests, Hislop defended his paper as "where you read the news".

Out to get him, muck-raking journalists once even asked his village vicar if he had any gossip. This was war, but without the swastikas.

Ray Tarleton

A write of passage for a year about to disperse

"My response to anyone bringing alcohol on to this site will make the Taleban regime look soft!" A pause to let the implications sink in. I think Year 11 have got the message. As always, we want their last routine day of teaching - that great rite of passage before the exams blast away the timetable - to be special, but also comfortable for everyone.

Our great tradition, a folklore ceremony you'd imagine goes back centuries, is The Signing of the Shirts. I spell out the rules of this game with military precision. First, like opening presents at Christmas, nothing must happen until the declared hour when lunch begins. Second, the entire year group are shepherded into the sports hall away from gatecrashers. It's a party, after all.

Felt tips are produced and away they go. It's simplicity itself. And the remarkable thing is how long it takes, and how totally absorbed everyone is. The happy hour is filled with scribbled good wishes that cover every inch of shirts and fill the year books. No one is bored or wants to leave. Staff drop in to add their much coveted signatures, and cameras click throughout. Even though it's a blazing hot sunny day and the doors are open to the seating area outside, few choose to go there. The sports hall is where the action is. If only learning could be so focused!

Guy Claxton could use this to write a lecture demonstrating his principles of "resilience and reciprocity" in action. David Hargreaves, architect of "Deep Learning" (seven whole days of that here this year ...) could feature "Deep Signing" in his next pamphlet.

"Uniform is a symbol of your pride in your school and aspiration to achieve," I've told Year 11 often. But by the end of the afternoon, they resemble mobile wall graffiti. A passing Martian might wonder what anarchy five years of secondary education has taught them. One of the bus drivers gives me a sorrowful look that suggests I've either lost control or gone mad. There's no telling what the public must think.

As they've been such a great group of youngsters, I try to analyse the process. Why does it matter so much to them? Attendance figures on this day are the highest in the year. One absentee - playing professional football already - sends in his shirt to be signed and I watch the care with which the autographs are collected.

More than three-quarters of Year 11 will stay on in our sixth form, so the reality is that most are not actually leaving. But the year group itself is about to fragment, decisive personal choices are being made for the first time in their lives, and the comfort zone of compulsory education with guided options is now over. Uniform symbolises the past. Tomorrow they transmogrify into sixth formers-in-waiting with personal freedoms about many things, including what to wear.

So the signature trophy hunting, far from an act of desecration, is a way of binding memories, remembering this moment in their lives. The hugs, tears and fears are all part of the process: sadness and joy in equal measure.

Well, that's my story - but I doubt if that bus driver would agree, or even know what I'm talking about. Oh, and the day was incident free, so I didn't have to invoke the Taleban option.

Ray Tarleton