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2006 was not a memorable year for fashion. This is immediately evident upon revisiting the first series of BBC drama Waterloo Road, which was first broadcast in that year, ran until 2015, and was in September plonked onto iPlayer for the first time in its 200-episode entirety. Dominated by cropped cargo pants and crocheted boleros, the mid-noughties episodes are something of an anomaly; not old enough to be period pieces, but still visibly not-of-this-time. Sure, the mobile phones are old and the recurrent motif of the interactive whiteboard as a marker of pedagogical prestige feels incredibly 2006, but there’s something else going on which makes Waterloo Road a culturally eye-opening rewatch.
When old TV series get deposited on streaming services, it’s inevitable that audiences watch through the lens of contemporary politics. We have Twitter now – great – so every shared cultural moment comes with fresh commentary, whether we like it or not. And Waterloo Road focussed on two of the big ones when it comes to commentary: class and opportunity.
Set in a turbulent comprehensive school in working-class North Manchester, detailing the home and school lives of teachers and pupils, and the efforts of straight-laced authorities trying to get them all to pull their socks up, it was never going to win any BAFTAs. The plotlines are preposterous and the script heavy-handed. It depicted poverty in a way which never took the piss when it so easily could have done. It offered sympathetic readings of unsympathetic characters, and showed teachers, exhausted, spread too thinly between demanding pupils and inflexible higher-ups. It’s nuanced and unashamedly pro-public sector workers, not things which are particularly sexy or glamorous, but viewers were hooked. Around 4.5 million of them at its peak.
2006 was not a particularly glamorous year for me either. I started high school, also in Greater Manchester (in the suburban South, as opposed to Rochdale’s near-rural North) in an unremarkable comprehensive school in a borough which over-indexes on prestigious Grammar Schools. Our Conservative MP makes ‘saving’ the Grammar School his parliamentary cause, and rich families flood to the area as a result. My parents sent me to Wellington School (formerly Wellington Road when my dad attended 30 years earlier, abbreviated to just ‘Welly’). When Waterloo Road hit our screens, the symmetry of the two names meant that there was a sustained playground rumour that ‘we’ were the real-life inspiration behind it. Being a pathologically well-behaved kid, I wasn’t allowed to watch until later series, but when I saw that our TV counterparts were trending online post-iPlayer release, I still felt a strange and specific sense of pride.
Plot-wise, it’s quite easy to get a hold on things. The opening scene of the first episode features a Hieronymus Bosch-like montage of juvenile carnage, set to Kaiser Chiefs’ I Predict A Riot, setting the tone for things to come. Kids get up to bad stuff, and then we discover that they are in bad situations at home. Acting headteacher Jack Rimmer – played by Jason Merrells as Gene Hunt with a PGCE – swaggers around the place looking for smug investors to punch. All the teachers are trying to get it on with each other and, er, something important about league table results. Denise Welch puts in a brilliant comedy performance as french teacher Steph Haydock, as does Chelsee Healey as lovable gobshite Janeece Bryant. Jason Done as English teacher Tom also stands out for his incredibly convincing portrayal of a handsome yet tired man. It’s a complete hoot.
There are, of course, things which don’t sit right. There’s an amount of uncomfortable stereotyping around benefits cheats and addicts (we might note that The Jeremy Kyle Show first disgraced our screens only one year earlier in 2005). Attitudes towards feminism aren’t particularly enlightened either; when one student has naked pictures leaked online, she herself is blamed by staff.
What’s more jarring though is a sense of faith in the state. If the students just achieve the grades they need, they’ll “go on to college and get a great job”. It feels very New Labour, and sort of quaint. This singular message was the message the Blair government of the mid-2000s had us believe. Writing in the same month David Cameron published his memoirs, which are a memoirs of the 2008 financial crash and the opportunity-crushing austerity it would bring in, this straightforward reading of the trajectory of social mobility no longer holds.
It’s not the haircuts and early depictions of cyberbullying which make Waterloo Road a cultural artefact, it’s a belief in a societal system which was poised so imminently to come crashing down. It is also, and I cannot stress this enough, a load of fun.
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