Written by Margaret Simpson. Tx 22nd January 1980
This episode is the first indication that the theft of Duane’s bike wasn’t an isolated incident. David Mitchell (Michael Mannion) proudly shows the others his new bike. It’s not actually brand-new – it was bought second-hand from a local bike shop – but it does look as good as new.
Duane is initially impressed, although he’s perturbed when he spots a familiar looking dent. The early evidence would indicate that the shop is receiving the stolen bikes, respraying and customising them, then selling them on. It seems rather foolish to sell the stolen bikes in the same area (and indeed this is a point made by the shop owner in the next episode – concerned that the bikes he’s receiving are local) but if they had been sent further afield then the plot couldn’t have been wrapped up so quickly.
It turns out that Madelin Tanner is involved, helping the thieves to steal the bikes. Although quite why they need her help isn’t clear, since all the bikes are parked in the bike shed and are ripe for the picking – even the ones with chains.
This is quite a busy episode, as apart from setting in motion the bike plot (which will be concluded in the next episode) we’re also introduced to Chris (Jonathan Warren) , the editor of the school magazine. He’s chairing a meeting with Mr Curtis who although he’s keen to stress that the school magazine is very much the pupil’s responsibility, still wants to see everything due for publication before the magazine is sent to the printers.
Naturally this doesn’t go down very well and cries of censorship are heard. It’s interesting that the school magazine appears to have been going for a while and was originally set up by the pupils with no staff interference or involvement. Quite how this happened is a bit of a mystery (presumably it can be explained as one of Mr Llewellyn’s more progressive policies) but now the staff are keen to ensure that no embarrassing material makes it into the public domain. We’ll come back to this story-line later in the series.
Lastly, Sally is taken ill during Miss Peterson’s gym class and rumours (spread by the irresponsible Anita) state that she’s dead. It’s been threaded through the early episodes that Sally hasn’t been well, so her fall from the gym bars doesn’t come as a complete surprise. Just prior to her accident, the soundtrack switches to an ominous heartbeat – it’s a familiar dramatic device, but even though it’s a bit of a cliche it still works well.
The question is, was Miss Peterson responsible? We’ve already seen that she pushes the girls hard – she doesn’t accept any excuses for non-participation in games (telling them that she expects them to still join in even if they have a broken leg!). This doesn’t please the games-shy Anita (Joanne Boakes) who mutters that she’ll tell her Gran about this (which seems to be her stock response to almost everything).
Happily, Sally turns out to be fine and we find out in the next episode that she has a weak heart which meant that an attack could have happened at any time and therefore Miss Peterson wasn’t to blame. And now that her plot-line is concluded, Sally vanishes, never to be seen again. Not an uncommon occurrence in Grange Hill (think of Simon Shaw from series two).
We also get our first look at Jill Harcourt (Alex Kingston) although she’s very much in the background here and won’t emerge into prominence until later in the series, when she starts menacing Susi to complete her homework.
Archive Television Musings 
Although I find that Series Three can be a bit up and down in terms of quality, this is one of the better episodes, the main story thread being the increasing spate of bike thefts from the school, in a plot that is actually fairly interesting and not in the realms of the dreaded, never-ending saga of Clarke’s bike in Series 12. We get some fairly blatant hints that bad girl Madelin Tanner is somehow involved, and sure enough this is confirmed later in the episode.
David arrives on his “new” bike – which suspiciously resembles the one Duane had pinched but resprayed; This episode sees the quartet of Pogo, Duane, Michael and David together in several of the scenes. David has featured previously with the other three briefly in Episode Two, but the line-up is more prominent here, and is seen again in several of the upcoming episodes. Alas, for the new popular first year boys line-up which the series was attempting to set in place but alas it wasn’t to be – David, alongside Michael, will be gone some episodes before the end of Series Three as part of the clear-out and reconfiguring of the first year before Series Four. With due respect to the young actor (Michael Mannion), in his case maybe the clear-out was justified; the scene where he arrives outside with Michael to find his bicycle is the latest to have been stolen, he doesn’t exactly give one of the most convincing performances (despite Mannion having being no stranger to the cameras, with a small number of TV credits to his name in the late ’70s/early ’80s. Maybe he was just having an off day!)
Despite being quite an irritating little whatsit at times, it is Pogo who injects some colour into proceedings and has some of the best scenes in this episode, and with the forms “bring in an insect” project he comes up with a bit of a gambling racket – desktop cockroach racing! However, in the classroom scene in question, whilst we have a couple of close-up shots (presumably filmed separately) with the ‘roaches moving around, in the shots with himself, Michael and Dwayne supposedly racing them, they suspiciously aren’t moving – Michael ever nudges one along with his hand.
In this same scene, Lucinda Gane gives a really good performance, with Miss Mooney arriving late in particularly flustered mood, after her car wouldn’t start and she got caught in the rain. I’ve commented before how the character can be good some of the time, irritating at other times; on this occasion she has the benefit of a decent script on her side.
We also get see planning of the school magazine, which Penny is turning her attentions to, no longer being year rep after loosing out to Doyle and the non-entity other candidate, whom is never really focused on again. The editor of the magazine, Chris Dukesy (Danny Steggall, not Jonathan Warren as the blog states), has been in a couple of S3 episodes previously, but this is the first one where he is of prominence. To my eye bearing quite a resemblance to Davy Jones of ‘The Monkees’, he’s another instance of an actor looking too old to be a pupil; However his age at the time is hard to find – there’s little information to be found about him (several sources confuse him with a similarly named American country singer!), but be doesn’t appear to have acted in much else, instead moving into TV production. During the meeting about the school magazine, there is mention of articles on the death of punk and the mod revival, firmly dating the episode to the period in which it was made.
The episode’s other man plot is regarding ill girl Sally. P.E. teacher Miss Peterson is very strict, but it is open to interpretation whether she pushed Sally too hard and was responsible for her accident after she has a bad turn. Introduced at the start of S3, we have seen Miss Peterson to indeed be strict and no-nonsense, yet we haven’t really seen enough of her in any great quantity to really judge just how far her strictness goes; if she was negligent here or, with Sally’s condition, it was bound to happen anyway. In the seconds before her fall, as Sally struggles climbing the gym bars, we get to hear her “heartbeat”, a very rare use of a non-naturalistic sound effect in the series.
Regardless, after Sally collapses and falls from the climbing bars, the ambulance which arrives at the school is, to my obsessive eye, a familiar one – the same ambulance, reg OMO 227M, can be seen in several episodes of ‘The Professionals’, ‘Minder and a couple of other programmes of the era. This also reinforces my theory – after the police car seen in s02e08 which also is likely one of the batch of Fords leased for ‘The Sweeney’, ‘The Professionals’, etc. – that the same vehicle hire company supplied both the BBC and ITV. (On similar note, several of the cars Mr. Meaker owned over the years in ‘Rentaghost’ also turn up in both BBC and ITV productions).
When the ambulancemen arrive, as soon as they’ve entered the gym hall they immediately move Sally, lifting her onto the stretcher. Never bother to check her over… not even remotely bothered if she might have based her head… Yes it was a very different era, but even so, the scene seems extremely rushed, and not all totally convincing.
All of the drama provides good fodder for rotund first year gossip Anita, who after the incident revels in relaying an exaggerated version of events to classmates, and insisting that Sally is DEAD. This is the first episode to really give Anita time in the spotlight, and it is also, I believe, the first time we hear mention of her Gran, whom Anita forever refers to as if validation for whatever issue at hand (“My Gran says…”). Anita would be one of the few batch of new first years to survive beyond Series Three.
Oh, and one other useless point of trivia: the closing credits of several episodes of Series Three sound as though the sound editor was playing around with the pitch of the theme tune. On Episode 2, it was amusingly high pitched and sounded sped up; On this episode, it’s very low pitched. I wonder if the sound editor was trying to squeeze it/stretch it each time in order for the episode to hit an exact timing mark, or if they were just amusing themself trying different settings. It sounds as if it could have been young master Jenkins himself sat there twiddling knobs mischievously!!
LikeLike
In regards the ambulancemen, this would have been an era where that was pretty much all they were: Men in an ambulance. They had no medical training and were just there to transport patients to hospital and had them over to someone who knew what to do. It’ll be some time into the 80s before they’ll start to resemble the modern paramedics.e
LikeLike