The original Adolescence? The controversial BBC drama made to be shown in schools
Adolescence has not only been described as the most important programme to be broadcast on British television this year, but Keir Starmer has now decreed, in a mark of its great importance, that it should be shown in schools the country over – thus giving teenagers yet more access to screen time, albeit this time government-sanctioned.
This may seem like nanny state behaviour, but those who decry it should look back to one of the BBC's longest-lived yet strangely overlooked endeavours – the anthology series Scene. It began in 1968, finished in 2002 (with a couple of one-off episodes stretching into 2007) and eventually comprised over 300 short dramas and documentaries, each of them aimed at teenagers.
The dramas were slightly longer, running to just under half an hour, and the factual programmes varied in length, but generally came in at between 20 and 25 minutes. The idea was that a single episode could be shown in its entirety during a school lesson and discussed afterwards. With the advent of the video recorder, this was a particular blessing for less committed teachers, who could tape the original broadcast and then show it to their classes repeatedly, saving themselves the trouble of preparing original work.
When the first episode was broadcast on September 27 1968, its subject – appropriately enough, given that it was shown less than six months after Enoch Powell's notorious Rivers of Blood speech on 20 April that year – was about race relations and immigration. The title of the episode – The Dark Immigrants: Sorry No Coloureds – gives a good indication as to the ideas behind the show, and its successor, Asian Communities, was broadcast the following week.
Today, the programmes, although undeniably well-intentioned, look embarrassingly naïve and patronising. But they still had the noble intention of reaching as many children from different backgrounds as possible and explaining the basic tenets of immigration and integration to them in a straightforward and accessible way. Made on extremely tight budgets, they were not flashy exercises in entertainment, but instead designed to make their worthy points as concisely and swiftly as possible.
Early on, the Scene series alternated between straightforward documentaries – for instance, there were two programmes that covered the US election that took place that autumn, which resulted in the presidency of Richard Nixon – and dramas that now seem to anticipate a children-oriented version of Play For Today, which would itself begin broadcasting in 1970.
Its first work of fiction, written by the playwright Keith Dewhirst, was the two-part play Last Bus and The Sentence of the Court. In the first episode, a group of youths on a bus attempt to fare dodge, and assault the conductor when he remonstrates with them; the other passengers make no attempt to intervene. (The programme notes observed that 'teachers are warned that this play deliberately sets out to create and then to exploit dramatically an unpleasant situation, involving young people who are heard to use bad language and who are involved in a short but closely observed act of violence.')
In the following instalment, the youths are prosecuted, and their punishments pronounced by the juvenile court. Today, the episodes are most notable for the casting of a young Robin Askwith – a few years before he was getting into quite another kind of trouble in the sex comedy Confessions... series – but there can be no doubt about the sincerity of their intentions.
This pattern continued throughout the following decade. There are some individual documentary episodes that have aged spectacularly badly, not least the 27th instalment, Personal View: Jimmy Savile, which called itself 'a specially filmed documentary about the unusual world of the disc jockey Jimmy Savile'. In the notes supplied for teachers, the programme makers wrote,
'The enigma of Jimmy Savile is that for a man who can afford anything and who above all can afford not to have to work 5 days a week, he is most extraordinarily active. He uses the freedom his fame and wealth have brought him to devote his time and energy to those less fortunate. His diary is full from one month to another with charitable engagements up and down the country. These can vary between delivering church sermons or taking crippled children to the seaside, to judging beauty contests. But whatever it is he does, no payment is received.'
Watched today, the show is both chilling and surprising. Decades before his exposure, the grinning, sinister figure shown on screen – in a programme aimed at people who could easily have been his victims – is so obviously concealing something that its young audiences might have been forgiven for taking fright decades before the diabolic DJ was eventually exposed.
Were Scene a mixture merely of incurious documentaries and agitprop-laden dramas, then it might be easy to file it away simply as a well-meaning but inessential historical artefact. Yet over its three and a half decades, there were also many far more interesting programmes broadcast. The first drama of any lasting significance that it produced, written by the playwright Alan Plater, was called Terry and was screened on 30 Jan 1969. The drama, which starred a young Dennis Waterman, was about a young man who was unable to find, and then hold down, a job. Although a synopsis makes it sound no more sophisticated than any of the other shows, Plater's rich, humane writing and Waterman's sympathetic performance made it stand out.
This pattern soon persisted, especially when its grown-up cousin Play For Today began broadcasting in 1970. Episodes such as 1984's A Guide to Armageddon – essentially Threads for schoolchildren – were juxtaposed with the two-part, Bafta-winning DH Lawrence adaptation A Collier's Friday Night, first broadcast in 1976. There were behind-the-scenes profiles of comedians such as Victoria Wood and Morecambe and Wise, as well as musicians including Ian Dury.
By the Nineties, the show had reached its artistic peak, under the stewardship of visionary producer Andy Rowley. It commissioned everything from Tom Stoppard adaptations (1993's A Separate Peace) to original drama by Willy Russell (1993's Terraces). It eventually received the ultimate accolade when the 1995 two-part show Loved Up, starring a pre-Game of Thrones Lena Headey and Ian Hart, was aired in an extended, more explicit version on BBC2, suggesting that the line between children's and adult programming was nowhere near as thick as most might have imagined.
Many of the shows, especially the earlier ones, have aged spectacularly badly today. If you want a typical example, 1981's Patty Fatty, written by Kay McManus, revolves around the misadventures of an overweight girl, Patricia, and her condescending and rude family. While the intentions, as ever with this show, were commendable, the ham-fisted execution meant that more children were probably bullied with cries of 'Patty Fatty!' than were ever helped by its having been made. Yet for every flop, there was probably another show that did some good in its Reithian desire to inform, educate and entertain. Many actors also had significant early roles in the programmes, including Lucy Davis, Adrian Lester and Jemima Rooper.
Whatever your opinions about Adolescence, there is no doubt that in its one-take technical prowess, awards-worthy performances and general air of grown-up grittiness, it is streets ahead of anything produced in the Scene strand. Audiences these days expect their drama to be uncompromising rather than idealistic, littered with four-letter words and full of scenes of blistering intensity.
They may be right to do so. But at its best, the Scene films had a welcome innocence to them, regardless of the adult-oriented themes that they explored. Their writers and directors believed that, if teenagers were told about the world as it was, and how it could be, they might grow up to be better people. We may sneer at that today, yet most would also admit that British television could do with something as purely well-intentioned as Scene all over again. Are you listening, BBC?
Five of the best Scene films
1. Terry (1969)
The show that first suggested that Scene might be capable of dramas that lasted the test of time, rather than being forgotten about shortly after the end of the lesson. Alan Plater's beautifully written and gently humorous play comes on like a predecessor of Boys from the Blackstuff, aided by Dennis Waterman's subtle, affecting performance as the lead.
2. A Separate Peace (1993)
Scene's greater artistic ambitions under its producer Andy Rowley were illuminated by this adaptation of an early, and largely forgotten, Tom Stoppard radio play, in which an enigmatic man, calling himself 'John Brown', arrives at a nursing home, despite there being nothing apparently wrong with him. Full of Stoppardian wit and subversions of convention, it was broadcast a couple of weeks before Arcadia, the play which many consider his masterpiece, premiered at the National Theatre.
3. Teaching Matthew (1994)
A young Adrian Lester hinted at the star power that he would later display on screen and stage alike in this witty post-modern take on Educating Rita. This time, Lester plays the reluctant teenager Matthew, who is being forced to study for his exams by his older brother Lester, who has returned from teacher training college to instil some education in his sibling. The show explores questions not only of the value of learning for its own sake and for social advancement, but also manages to succeed as a wry satire on Willy Russell's earlier play. Russell, who occasionally contributed shows to the Scene series, must surely have enjoyed the backhanded compliment.
4. Loved Up (1995)
At its most accomplished, the Scene shows were indistinguishable from adult drama, as could be seen from the two-part, Bafta-winning Loved Up, written by future Mamma Mia and Best Exotic Marigold Hotel screenwriter Ol Parker. It was screened in the midst of the growing national panic about drugs and rave culture in the mid-Nineties.
By the time that it was shown on BBC2 in more explicit, extended form, it boasted a zeitgeist-y soundtrack including The Prodigy and Leftfield. Yet its depiction of a doomed romance between two young people more in thrall to drugs than each other proved surprisingly affecting, as well as being a fascinating pre-Trainspotting snapshot of an era.
5. Junk (1999)
By the end of the Nineties, Scene had really come into its own as a youth-oriented series that dealt with hot-button issues with just as much sophistication and intelligence as the far cooler (and better-known) Skins. This adaptation of Melvin Burgess's bestselling novel, features a young Jemima Rooper as a girl who is dragged into prostitution and heroin addiction after she runs away from home. It won a Bafta for Best Schools Drama, and treats its grim, gritty subject with a measure of candour and explicitness that must surely have scared away its target audience from even contemplating taking drugs.
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