Jamie's Dream School

I have to say that I normally find Jamie Oliver and his 'mockney' accent and 'cheeky chappie' style very irritating, but his latest venture on Channel 4 about trying to stimulate a group of young school failures is absolutely fascinating. It was only recently that I wrote something about our disadvantaged communities having very little to broaden the horizons of young people and who typically give up on state education around the age of 13. Here we see a group of 20 supposed school failures taking part in a social experiment in order to see how they will react to some of the 'best' teachers that money can buy.

Now this sort of venture for enthusiastic amateurs can be potentially dangerous territory as demonstrated by Monty Don's efforts a couple of years ago in trying to rehabilitate young offenders by introducing them to gardening and horticulture. Although I didn't watch the series, I understand it caused poor old Monty much stress and heartache, probably through a degree of naivety and dearth of sound expert advice. Such experiments are worth doing though and are in the best spirit and tradition of probation of old.

Although I'm a very keen supporter of any social experiments that can shed light on a better understanding of human behaviour in its myriad forms, I always worry about the role of the tv production people who of course have an eye on being able to produce gripping footage. Experience says that will invariably involve conflict in some shape or other because they assume anything else will not be of sufficient interest. I seem to recall that 'Big Brother' started out as an interesting social experiment but quickly developed into a crazy freak show at the behest of the production company.

I'm assuming that it was with this in mind that the producer of 'Jamie's Dream School' thought it would be really interesting to invite that irritating and arrogant tosser David Starkey to teach them history. Even though we've only seen one episode, the result was entirely predictable and as much about the class divide as anything. Starkey was completely unable to admit he was wrong in calling a pupil fat and offer an apology. To a lesser degree the same goes for Lord Winston who just seemed to get great delight in shocking the kids by taking a circular saw to a dead pig. Maybe this is the real message of the series though. No matter how brilliant you are at any subject, it counts for nothing if you don't have the ability to relate to challenging kids. I predict Rolf Harris is likely to have more success in this regard than say the likes of Alastair Campbell.

The funny thing is that this group don't strike me as that challenging at all when compared to the group I had in mind when discussing the issue of deprived communities and young people in them needing to be inspired. Happily this sparky group don't strike me as being obvious candidates for heroin or cheap lager consumed on street corners. Now trying to work with that group would be a real challenge and make for some gripping tv I think.