Written by Barry Purchese. Tx 10th February 1984
Suzanne walks out of Grange Hill again, but this time it looks like she’s gone for good. On her way out she encounters Mr McGuffy and Mr Smart. Both want her to stay – although they speak to her in very different ways, as per their diametrically opposed characters. Mr McGuffy is patient and understanding whilst Mr Smart is abrupt and hectoring.
Neither tactic works, although it’s Mr Smart who feels the most affronted. He storms over to Mrs McClusky’s office to demand she does something, but the headmistress doesn’t share his anger. Gwyneth Powell’s been a little underused this year, but she’s very cutting in this brief scene.
Although Suzanne’s left the school, she’ll return to the series in episodes seventeen and eighteen. But this episode does see the final appearance of Mark Baxter as Duane Orpington. Given the length of time he’d spent in the series it’s slightly surprising that he just seems to fade away. One minute he’s there and the next he’s gone, with nobody appearing to notice (although I seem to recall that illness might have been the reason why Baxter didn’t appear in the rest of series seven).
Zammo eventually hands over Gluxo’s note to Jimmy. Jimmy’s up for a scrap – provided it’s done with a sense of style – but Zammo’s not keen. Jackie has forbidden him to get involved in any fighting, which leads to a simmering feeling of tension between him and Kevin. Zammo doesn’t want to be thought of as a coward, but neither does he want to lose Jackie. It’s a bit of a dilemma.
There’s the second mention of Diane’s boyfriend – and this time he’s got a name, Mark. At the moment this doesn’t go any further, but it’s another seed planted which will come to fruition later in the series.
Roland’s chaotic home life is finally explained, as Janet (annoyingly helpful and inquisitive as ever) pops around and is told by Mr Browning that Roland’s mother has left home. One parent families are such a fact of life now (and would also be in later series of Grange Hill) that it seems rather remarkable that this is one of the first instances in the series when it’s been explicitly stated that someone is missing a parent.
The big fight is an anti-climax, but on the plus side it means that Zammo doesn’t have to break his promise to Jackie. Gluxo locks the Grange Hill boys into the warehouse where the fight was supposed to take place and calls the police. That’s a somewhat uncharacteristic thing for Gluxo to have done, but GH couldn’t really have been seen to condone gang fighting, so this ending (even if it feels like a bit of a cop-out) does make sense.
Archive Television Musings 
Regarding Mark Baxter who played Duane – he was interviewed by Grange Hill Gold a few years ago. He did confirm he became quite ill during production of Series 7 – I can’t recall what he suffered from. He was written out of the programme for the remaining episodes this year, but sadly he would never return to the series again.
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Apparently Mark Baxter had Crohn’s disease, which is why he was written out so abruptly. He wasn’t a great loss to the show, he was a below average actor and his character Duane never left an impression. Another scene is cut on the DVD, where one-off character Pargetter shows McLaren a home made knuckle duster.
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I didn’t find him any more or any less ‘of a certain standard’ than many of the actors he was introduced with at the start of Series 3. But after that initial year which saw his friendship with Tracey challenged by both making new friends and GH (which continued on into s4 with Tracey morphed into Claire), and with him playing sidekick in Pogo’s money-making schemes, there seemed increasingly little for him to do. His crush on Miss Lexington was brushed over and forgotten before it could have ever got interesting.
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I’m waay behind on my comments as I rewatch each episode, so I’ll randomly dip back in with this ep that I’ve just sat and watched now.
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I’m waay behind on my comments as I rewatch each episode, so I’ll randomly dip back in with this ep that I’ve just sat and watched now.
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I’m waay behind on my comments as I rewatch each episode, so I’ll randomly dip back in with this ep that I’ve just sat and watched now.
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I’m waay behind on my comments as I rewatch each episode, so I’ll randomly dip back in with this ep that I’ve just sat and watched now.
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I’m waay behind on my comments as I rewatch each episode, so I’ll randomly dip back in with this ep that I’ve just sat and watched now.
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I’m waay behind on my comments as I rewatch each episode, so I’ll randomly dip back in with this ep that I’ve just sat and watched now. (And my comment just completely glitched, resulting in multiple posts, grrr! SORRY)
Suzanne is stropping around having enough of school again. Expertly played as ever by Susan Tully, an always interesting (maybe even slightly ahead of her time character), and yet… at this stage… I do find can slightly be of “oh not again” fodder. Not the fault of Tully, nor Suzanne as a character, but I do feel at times during S7 the writers could try to keep too many plates up in the air, and in a case such as Suzanne it’s something that does not developing. …Which does happen very soon.
Whilst we are still firmly in the middle of the Golden Era of the series by my count (though for me that’s pretty much anything between 1978-90), it dies seen that at times, Series 7 feels to be scratching about occasionally for new things to do (right down to shifting much of the proceedings to the youth club for this episode). Jeremy’s drowning (originally intended, of course, to be Jonah) was planned to try and giving ratings a shot in the arm after they had dipped slightly previous year, but much of s7 in my view does feel like something of a subtle gear change at times, and this episode in some ways kind of sums up that whole feel. Things would get a new shot of energy the following year with the move to Elstre and the arrival of some new memorable characters.
Jimmy and Nigel have been intriguing characters throughout Series 7 – in one sense, “posher” and more intelligent bullies now Gripper is out of the way, but on the other hand, rather clever and – at times, oddly quite likable – characters, often feeling like a comedy act and who might not have felt out of place in any of the several school-based comedies series which did the rounds of on Children’s BBB in the 1980s (‘Who Sir? Me Sir?’ and the criminally forgotten ‘Bad Boyes’ springs to mind). Then again, with episodes like this, we see their nastier side. With accomplice Roland in tow, their money-lending racket sees a walkman confiscated as collateral and a watch seemingly next, it does put them in a somewhat different light than the “cheeky money makers” they appeared to be early on. I can’t help but wonder if they were a(nother) case of character(s) being bent about and reworked in order to help pull storylines together.
Talking of Roland, we do finally get to see the result of his ill-kept appearance (and indeed, falling in with bad company) in s7, when his Dad confesses to ‘intruder’ Janet that his mother has left them. Oddly, I had in it my memory that she had instead died, but as I hadn’t seen this particular episode for 30+ years (for “unlike me” reasons neglecting to tape the Sunday morning BBC Two repeats in the 1990s), I think I can be forgiven on that one!
The big fight finale – or lack of – is curious. It tries to go for tension and comedy at the same time. I wouldn’t say it’s one of GH’s classic moments, but it does work. This a a fairly unusual episode – far from perfect in some ways, yet some reasonable moments which do redeem it slightly.
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