[Mike]

I have to say I am not impressed with episode one, it strikes me that they're desperate to entice new viewers (use of texts overlaid on screen, children staging a coup and a violent disorder over a racist statue/school naming and paint bombs being thrown everywhere, along with a vagrant youth living in the boiler room).

Never watched the original series but going by that description of the reboot, is this what TV Producers/Script Writers think goes on in a secondary school?

The original series was also full of stupidity to be fair (moving a whole school to Scotland, stopping on the hard shoulder of a motorway and one of the students being killed by an HGV and a student breaking in to the school, dousing a room full of petrol and then being beaten up by the head teacher - then being employed by the school after he left a year later). Multiple major incidents (as in the JESIP definition) and never a question of poor management/security at the site being the cause and multiple teen-pregnancies, students running off and or having sexual relations with students and one case of two students running off to get married at 16... 


There is also a the overuse of steadicam, and the shakiness that goes with it along with the cinematic bars top and bottom of the screen, and a school with a budget to rebrand itself in the space of a week, during term time, inclusive of a wholesale change of blazer, jumper, tie, logo, ID card, signage, and paintwork... I can't even get a wholesale change of ID cards done in 2 years where I work, yet the Rochdale LEA can get a school to do all that almost instantly. 

I think their effort to be a serious drama rather than a soap opera as the old series was isn't the way forward, they also spend more time outside of and away from the school than in it, I've counted 4 students going AWOL in a school day, all walking out of the main entrance - surely the staff would've been trained or disciplined for this safeguarding failure.

**spoilers ahead**


I've tried to keep spoilers to a minimum in this thread but there seems to be a lot of stuff they get right (admittedly it's been 12 years since I was last at school) - but I don't see how students could organise a protest, start it, throw paint balloons at one another as if they had unlimited ammo and one of the paint balloons exploded on a car and caused an accident which killed off one of the characters from the original series - who was shunted over and hit her head, and died 5 hours later.