School Gate blog: top 15 Grange Hill characters

Last night, school was out for ever on Grange Hill. After 30 years, the show was finally expelled from the BBC after years of nugatory ratings and sundry re-vamps failed to raise the show back to its former glory.

In its heyday in the Eighties it was produced by Phil “Brookside” Redmond, and Zammo, Roland and doomed Danny Kendall were as famous as the characters in EastEnders. They were on the news, in the White House, and up the charts with the atonal anti-smack nag Just Say No. It was a show was fit for kings.

Tuning in for the last-ever episode last night, however, any former viewer would have been met with a bewildering array of new kids- all non-chartbound, and non-infamous. There was a great, eye-linered bitch, Chloe (Mia Smith), and a couple of cute gingery nerds - but all have so little recognition outside the ghetto of kids' TV that it's necessary for Todd Carty - Tucker, from the halcyon days of the show - to come back, and finally put poor old Grange Hill to bed.

“Uncle Peter! What are you doing here?” said Togger, whose name sounds quite a lot like Tucker, as Carty walked into the common room. What Uncle Peter was there to do was hijack the airwaves for one last, impassioned Phil Redmond rant - this time, about the history of comprehensive education in this country. And why not.

In order for this to happen, Togger had to ask, in a manner that was in no way natural:“What was a secondary modern, Uncle Peter?” Togger asked. “Places where kids like you went, to be told you wouldn't amount to anything,” Tucker said, all manly in his motorcycle leathers.

“But Grange Hill - it was for everyone. If kids like you can't go here, where can they go?”

The ghoulishly watching thirty-AHEM-something viewers would have found this blast from old-skool Redmond shouty-telly inherently cheering; and subsequently run off to Youtube to watch Zammo gouching out in the toilets, over and over again. The last few children watching, meanwhile, surely used the opportunity to fix a quick snack, before the “Shy Kid and Fat Kid Get It On at the Prom” storyline returned.

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