Written by Phil Redmond. Tx 8th January 1980
It’s the start of a new school year and Grange Hill is preparing itself for an influx of fresh first years. Mr Sutcliffe has spent hours going around the school putting up signs to help the newcomers, but unfortunately things don’t quite go to plan.
As with the notices seen in the very first episode, the arrows can be moved in the opposite direction – and Cathy does so here. When will people learn that it’s a much better idea to draw the arrows on! Mr Sutcliffe also attracts the ire of Mr Garfield and his colleague – since all the notices (affixed with sellotape) have damaged the walls. This allows Mr Sutcliffe to make some forceable points to both of the caretakers, about how a school exists to serve the interests of the pupils (leaving you with the feeling that all school caretakers would much prefer it if there were no children about …)
Amongst the influx of new arrivals are Michael Green (Mark Bishop) and Karen Stanton (Carey Born). Both are escorted to school by their older brothers, Benny and Andrew – but once they arrive things are very different. Andrew is overprotective to a ridiculous degree, which irritates the independent Karen no end, whilst Benny leaves the overawed Michael very much to his own devices.
The other main characters in the first form are Duane Orpington (Mark Baxter), Tracey Edwards (Amanda Mealing) and Douglas “Pogo” Patterson (Peter Moran). Out of this crop of newcomers, only Pogo and Duane would reach the fifth form – poor Karen and Tracey don’t even manage to make it to the second half of this school year!
This was a common problem during the series’ entire run – children would drop out for various reasons (exams, etc) and replacements would have to be drafted in. In series four, it’s clear to see that Tracey’s place was taken by Clare Scott (both of them were friends with Duane, for example) whilst Karen was replaced by Suzanne Ross.
On the teacher front, Miss Peterson (Cheryl Branker) attracts some casual racist comments from Doyle, although he’s wise enough to make them just out of her earshot. Our first sight of Miss Mooney – dropping a pile of textbooks with an annoyed comment of “bother” – is a characteristic introduction to someone who always seems slightly disorganised, but is also a first-rate teacher who cares for her pupils.
Since the first two series covered one school year, series three and four cover another – and in the gap between the second and third series the original influx of pupils have moved from the first form to the third. The only time this gap doesn’t quite work is when Trisha asks Sudhanami Patel (Sheila Chandra) why she’s still wearing school uniform, since it’s now been made optional. She’s had a whole (unseen) year to ask that question!
The theft of Duane’s bike seems to be an isolated incident, but we’ll see that the bike thefts become a running theme through the early episodes – culminating in Madelin Tanner receiving her long-awaited comeuppance.
Archive Television Musings 
What was unrealistic about series three and four of Grange Hill was that some pupils wore uniform and some didn’t. (The ones who did were probably the ones whose parents made them.)
It was during the academic year that this series was broadcast that we had a debate on school uniform at school and our teacher said that you either have a school uniform that everyone wears, or you don’t have a uniform at all. You can’t have a uniform that’s optional.
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I wonder if there were real life schools of the period who did have/keep the uniform as optional?
Although it’s not explicitly said (yet?) there are several suggestions in the series that Northam has only recently switched over to comprehensive education (in real life the move had been going on for many years but one of the biggest shocks was the 1976 Education Act that forbade selection) and there are still parents who are not particularly happy with comprehensive schools but feel trapped in them because other options aren’t viable because of cost or disruption. Such parents would be horrified at the complete abolition of school uniforms and it’s easy to see a school keeping the uniform as optional *for parents to choose* to cater to such parents (and in turn the uniform would not automatically carry a stigma of being from a poor home). Susi McMahon’s mother is the best depiction so far.
(Jumping forward several seasons we’ll meet a teacher who almost certainly started out as a grammar school master – the term is quite deliberate – who winds up at Grange Hill through comprehensivisation and amalgamation. Much of his attitude is easy to understand as someone who hates all the changes but can’t do anything to reverse them.)
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I always found Series 3 of Grange Hill to be a mixed bag.
The arrival of the new first years (the second intake of pupils after Tucker’s year) are a welcome addition, but some of the newcomers would be gone by Series 4, as they would introduce favourites like Suzanne, Claire and of course Gripper.
Another odd thing here was the absence of Mr Llewellyn throughout the third series. He is still the Head and would ultimately hand the baton over to the legendary Mrs McClusky the following year.
At first, I thought actor Sean Arnold had left to do Bergerac, but that didn’t begin production until 1981, when GH’s fifth series was in the pipeline.
Mr Llewellyn’s absence this year does seem to leave a bit of a void after he made such an impression the previous year.
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If you listen to the dialogue in the season carefully it seems that Sean Arnold proved unavailable at very short notice. There are some scenes on film that namecheck Mr Llewellyn as the person characters are going to see only for the meeting to be a studio scene with Mr Keating. Clearly even at the location stage it was assumed Arnold would be available for the studio recordings hence the resort to a deputy covering on film rather than a replacement.
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Series Three would see some changes at Grange Hill. Primarily, with Tucker, Trisha and co. now in in the third year (the “two series=one school year” and skipping alternate years on-screen rule generally being consistent through the Golden Era, but occasionally contradicted/forgotten/ignored) …it was time to bring in a new batch of first years.
Series three wheels in new characters that it hopes will hook viewers just as the original first years did, but there were challenges to the production, which I’ll get onto in a bit.
But those weren’t the only changes – the school used for location filming, changed from Kingsbury High School, to Willesden High School (nowadays Capital City Academy). And yet, they look different, and yet not so severely different that it would have stuck out like a sore thumb. But even beyond the change of the school itself, the series feels to be moving into it’s next chapter with the start of Series Three.
Episode One goes through the expected introductions – the prominent new first year pupils (many of whom won’t last that long…!) and G3’s new form teacher, Miss Peterson (Cheryl Branker). We saw our first black teacher at GH, also female, in the penultimate episode of last series, but even so it is an interesting development considering the era in which the episode was made, and prompts some racist comments from Doyle and his cohort how “Benny will be alright … all those jungle stories we’ll hear”, “and swinging from tree to tree”.
Miss Peterson proves herself to be far stricter than the often sardonic Mr. Mitchell (whom I really miss). We are given no clue who served as the form’s tutor during their unseen second year, although we do hear how Mr. Sutcliffe had last year been chasing after Miss Summers, suggesting her departure from Grange Hill to have only been recent (she’s another character I really miss in s3) – however, there’s a continuity blooper when she is referred to as Sheila Summers… her name was June!
We also hear (all of this in a scene with Trisha, Cathy, Mary and Sudhamani – chattering teenage girls being useful to scriptwriters for info dumps!) that Hoppy has now turned his romantic attentions towards Miss Mooney, new to the series but whom would have joined the school during that unseen second year. Over the next few year I’ll find Miss Mooney a divisive character – always nicely played by Lucinda Gane, but whom as a character veers between endearingly scatty, and at times toe-curlingly infuriating in her sheer incompetence sometimes. Trisha refers to her in this episode as “Mooney the Loony”, a nickname that didn’t particularly stick. There is also a very minor continuity blooper of sorts in this episode – we deduct that Miss Mooney has been teaching at GH since the previous year, yet when Tucker is collared into showing the lost Pogo to his form room, Tucker asks “Are you Miss Mooney?” – he would have already have known who she was.
On the subject of time passing between the first and the first year, we get Trisha’s comment to Sudhanami “You’re not still wearing that thing, are you”, regarding Sudhanami’s uniform, now that pupils are permitted to wear casual clothes. However this might not necessarily be an oversight of the year having passed in-between – it could be taken as a “You’re not STILL wearing that thing, are you”, despite the time passed since the uniform referendum; The line serves to sow the seeds of the plot regarding Sudhanami’s extremely strict father which will come to the fore in a few episodes time.
We are introduced to Benny’s younger brother Micheal, and Andrew’s younger sister Karen, who both join the school as part of the new characters we are supposed to take to just like we did the old first year, but both of whom will abruptly disappear before Series Three is out – more on that in a moment. Curiously, we will also meet Trisha’s younger brother Jenny … briefly mentioned in the first ever episode and never even referred again until now. Oddly considering Trisha is one of the central characters, Jenny just suddenly appears in Episode Five of this series, appears in eps Six and Seven, and then promptly vanishes again! There are a couple of lines of dialogue relating to Trisha being her sister, but they are easily missed, and I think on the BBC Two repeat run in the 1990s I completely failed to notice it … even in one of my previous posts on this blog I think I erroneously stated that after being mentioned in Episode 1, Jenny never appeared – THAT’S how surprisingly small use of the character is.
And on that whole subject of disappearing characters, which isn’t uncommon in the programme, but not in such quantity in the middle of a series … It’s become more apparent in recent years that there was quite a lot of last minute alterations and restructuring behind the scenes, following the SAG protests of Series Two (specifically, Episodes 11 and 12), which had had resulted in questions about the series being raised in Parliament; as a result, the BBC had held an “unofficial meeting” with Phil Redmond over lunch, the outcome of which being that he would tone things down for Series Three. The fact that the series had won a BAFTA was one of the things that helped save it from the axe entirely.
However, Series Three was always in the late stages of pre-planning and close to starting shooting when this all happened, and there seems to have been some quite late-in-the-day restructuring of a number of elements in Series Three. As late as September the previous year, Phil Redmond was stating in interviews that Series Three would see things even rougher and tougher in the school; but in reality it seems that as a result of that last minute meeting which occurred not long after, and which was in the very late days of pre-production as filming was approaching, saw a number of planned things being altered and toned down, which may account for some of the unevenness felt across Series Three.
In an interview, Mark “Duane” Baxter has also stated writer’s had hoped to recreate the three-male lead with Pogo, Duane and Michael in place of Tucker, Alan and Benny, but the dynamic just did not work and it was soon dropped. We might presume Karen and friend Sally were hoped to be the new Trisha and Cathy and also didn’t work out and were dropped. Only Pogo, Duane and rotund gossip Anita will make it through on to Series Four.
Much of Episode One focuses on Duane, his friendship with Tracy, and his new bike. Duane’s a decent character, and decently played by Mark Baxter, and the “eternally down on his luck lad” character isn’t without some appeal, but at the same time can be a bit of a drip and a bit whiney – – maybe not prime pickings for one of the major characters of the new pupil intake. Thankfully when he pairs up with Pogo over the next few episodes, it forms an enjoyable duo and is maybe telling why they made it through to the next series. (Amanda “Tracy” Mealing, by the way, opted not to return as she didn’t want to be typecast; and, of course, Tracy would go on to morph into the character of Claire). There is a faceplam moment when, after Duane’s bike lock proves to be broken, he sulkily refuses Tracey’s offer to use her lock to secure both bikes together; instead, he simply leaves his bike in the rack unchained. Noooo! Little surprise that when he later returns, his bike is gone; Dipstick! The bike theft racket will unfolds over the next few episodes and thakfully proves to be more interesting, and far less drawn out, than the case of Clarke’s pinched bike in Series 12!
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