Written by Barry Purchese. Tx 26th February 1982
It’s the day of the school revue and tempers are becoming more and more frayed. There’s a very decent turn out though, which is a little surprising as at the start of the episode we’re told that very few tickets have been sold. This is due to the fact that Pogo’s been given the sole rights to sell the tickets and he’s put his own mark up on the price.
Tucker and Alan take over the ticket sales and in a very short time they manage to ensure that the event is a sell out. They achieve this by offering a bottle of champagne to one lucky ticket holder, although it’s not really champagne and only cost two pounds – which probably gives a fair indication of its quality. I love the scene in the off licence as the man behind the counter (John Tordoff) looks at the pair of them dead-pan as they proudly plonk down the money – in mostly pennies and halfpennies. He fastidiously removes a piece of fluff from the pile, before Tucker and Alan cheerly saunter off.
Tucker’s certainly changed from the tearaway we saw in series one. His desire to ensure that the school revue is a success is his only motivation and he certainly goes to some effort to achieve this. Most amusingly, he wangles Pogo a role in the revue (in exchange for the tickets). Pogo’s far from impressed though, he has to dance with girls and complains non-stop that he’s unable to lift Claire – claiming she’s too heavy!
In order for the episode to work you have to believe that Mrs McClusky has no idea what the content of the revue will be. This is hard to accept, especially since previously there were fears voiced that she’d attempt to censor the production. But if you can swallow this then there’s a great deal of pleasure to be derived from her discomfort as the evening wears on (for extra comedy value she’s sitting next to a vicar).
The opening number has a mild bit of raunch, thanks to Precious, Suzanne and Claire (the camera drops down several times to their tight, jeans-clad bottoms) as Mrs McClusky’s smile becomes ever more fixed. Next, Hopwood, Sutcliffe and Baxter are all ridiculed by Trisha (they’re depicted as stuffed dogs). The first two take it in good heart, but it’s characteristic that Mr Baxter remains firmly unamused.
Cathy’s impression of Margaret Thatcher seems to be a riff on the Prime Minster’s comment that a return to Victorian values would be a good thing, except it seems that the first time Mrs Thatcher mentioned it was a year later, in 1983. Grange Hill‘s ahead of the game then. And broad though this section is – with gruel flying around – it does have a barbed political point to make.
It’s nice to see Tucker, Alan, Trisha and Cathy for the final time at Grange Hill, but the most unexpected appearance is that of Penny Lewis. Last seen at the end of series three, she was then replaced by the suspiciously similar character of Pamela Cartwright for the fourth series. And it’s probably apt that the last few minutes are Tucker’s (he launches into a song in praise of Mr McGuffy) as he was the hub of the series during the first four years – if you mention the “Tucker era” then most people will know what you mean.
Archive Television Musings 
Does the book “Tucker and Co” fill in the fifth year adventures of Tucker and his mates hand in hand with series 5?
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Grange Hill For Sale certainly does, not sure about Tucker and Co though.
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It’s good fun to read these articles alongside watching the series’ on YouTube. Sometimes though, we think we remember things, even though when don’t actually remember them at all. If people of my generation discuss Grange Hill, they generally say, ah yes Tucker Jenkins and whatnot. After watching series 3 and 5 though, I realised that I actually remembered next to nothing about Tucker and co. and that my real memories begin with series 5. Just goes to show how the early characters became like pop culture icons, even for people who didn’t pay much attention to the early series’.
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I think the Victorian comparison with Thatcher was already commonplace even though it wasn’t until the following year she acknowledged it. But it’s amazing that such a direct attack was gotten away with on Children’s BBC at the time.
It’s a pity the show didn’t try to make more use of the original characters for longer. As someone who first watched the series in the late 1980s & early 1990s I was used to characters having a longer life span into the sixth form and even occasionally beyond that. Here we got much less of the originals and their initial replacement have been slow to grow on me (not helped by the practice of generally giving the sillier storylines to the first years and the indepth ones to the third years). Perhaps the writers had realised they had gotten themselves into a corner with the 1980 intake being slow to develop.
Of course there was the spin-off Tucker’s Luck – which a look at Radio Times Genome reveals was a BBC 2 series in what looks like one of their attempts at a teenage slot (a demographic the BBC has often been poor at serving). It ran for three seasons but the only repeat seems to have been rerunning the first series immediately after the second – how repeats used to come with such little regard for story development! By contrast Grange Hill by my day had a regular autumn repeat before the next season began in the spring.
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This episode did manage to capture the panic and chaos of a school production and I enjoyed the fact that it gave a ‘last hurrah’ to some established characters who have been with us from series one – Lindy Brill’s Thatcher impersonation was particularly good.
It did get me thinking about the final appearances of certain actors/characters in series five, though. We had Justin Bennett preside over a school council meeting a couple of episodes ago which I think was his only appearance in this series. Benny Green helps out at the sports tryouts in episode six. And here we have a whole bunch of characters who have not appeared for ages, in Penny Lewis’s case not since the third series – and none of them featured in any of the revue rehearsals that have been going on for several episodes.
Did the producers recognise that these actors and characters deserved a send off? Did they want to being them back on set for a few final days of shooting – on in Justin Bennett’s case, presumably just an hour or so? I have read a few interviews with the cast of this time and I have not seen any specific discussion of these final appearances. It would be interesting to find out what the motivation was behind them.
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What a brilliant impression of Thatcher by Lindy Brill. Sad to see the class of 78 go, end of an era for sure.
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