As 11-year-old James Parker prepares to go up his secondary school, Chase Bridge in the London Borough of Islington, his parents feared that as a fan of the BBC serial Waterloo Road, he may have a misleading view of life in big school. Fortunately his older brother Clive has been able to assure James that the reality is very different.
'Waterloo Road is fun but some of the plotlines are a bit far-fetched,’ commented Clive. ‘I mean take the time when the headmasters’ daughter had a fling with the same boy as another girl in Year 12 and they both got pregnant, then had a catfight in class, then one lost the baby and they made up again. Things like that don’t happen at Chase Bridge every day. Hardly once a term, really.’
One thing that may surprise young James, his brother added, is the number of affairs pupils have with teachers. To the best of his knowledge, this has never happened during his school career, for very good reasons.
‘Miss Harris is the fittest teacher at Chase Bridge but she’s 24, that’s well old, and she smells of garlic,’ Clive said. ‘I know 15-year-olds are meant to be support systems for hormones, but I wouldn’t. Mind you I did see Mr Cartwright’s cock in the changing rooms once and it was MASSIVE. And hairy. Eeeww.’
In another plotline, a teacher smuggled drugs into Waterloo Road so that a pupil from a poverty-stricken family could sell them. 'Absolute rubbish,' said Clive. 'Teachers don't smuggle in drugs for that, they do it so they can have a quick spliff in the staff room to cope with being unqualified social workers to teenage psychopaths. Duh.'
Clive also criticised the storyline in which a Polish janitor at Waterloo Road was abused by Year 10 children who claimed their fathers had lost their jobs to East Europeans and sprayed ‘Immigrants Go Home’ on the walls. ‘Yeah, very likely,’ he said. ‘Year 10s in Islington knowing their fathers. Or how to spell ‘immigrants’.’
