Hello Gazers! We watched three episodes of Grange Hill discussed in this podcast:
Click here to watch the Racism episode from 1983 on YouTube
Click here to watch the first Zammo Heroin episode from 1983 on YouTube
Click here to watch the second Zammo Heroin episode from 1983 on YouTube
Get your school bags ready because this week we're going back to Grange Hill—the BBC children's drama. Created by Phil Redmond and first broadcast in 1978, Grange Hill broke new ground by putting ordinary comprehensive-school pupils at the centre of children's television. We explore its 30-year history, its changing filming locations, its commitment to working-class and multicultural characters, and the controversy that followed its determination to tackle subjects other children's programmes often avoided.
Then we're revisiting three episodes from the show's classic era.
First, we head to 1983, where notorious school bully Gripper Stebson targets Sikh pupil Randhir Singh in a disturbing storyline about racism. More than 40 years later, we ask how well it holds up and consider just how unusual it was for children's television to confront racial prejudice so directly.
Then it's 1986 and arguably the most famous Grange Hill storyline of them all: Zammo's heroin addiction. We revisit two episodes depicting his increasingly desperate behaviour, the damage his addiction causes to the people around him, and the moments that shocked a generation of young viewers.
We also look at what happened when the storyline escaped the television screen. Just Say No became a real-life anti-drugs campaign and Grange Hill cast single, eventually taking its young stars all the way to America and the White House.
Along the way we discuss the programme's battles with critics including Mary Whitehouse, the sometimes astonishingly harsh school discipline, classic characters and behind-the-scenes stories from three decades of Grange Hill.
And in Culture Corner, we're investigating that peculiar period in pop history when children's choirs kept appearing on enormous hit singles. Who were all these singing children, and why were they apparently everywhere?
Nostalgic, funny and occasionally much darker than we remembered, Grange Hill wasn't afraid to tackle racism, drugs, class and social inequality while still being unmistakably children's television.
More than 45 years after those famous school gates first opened, we're asking what made Grange Hill so groundbreaking—and whether today's children's television would dare to do the same.
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