Waterloo Road

BBC One

OK, line up you pesky kids, it's a new term at Waterloo Road, the world's most insane school; the place that makes Grange Hill look like a swots' paradise. We're straight into the delirious scrum with a new executive über-head played by Tom Chambers, the guy who won Strictly Come Dancing last year under the mushroom cloud of the voting scandal. Here he's supposed to be evil. He wants to take over Waterloo Road and run it as a place where students actually aspire to academic excellence. He wants to make it more like the school where he comes from and with which Waterloo Road is now amalgamated.

But boo hiss, the kids just want to have fun, and their current headteacher says she wants them to express themselves. Her staff are all nice and easygoing, like Denise Welch's French teacher who doesn't know any French (that is apparently meant to be funny). There is a riot between the rival schools' pupils. The teachers from the school joining Waterloo Road are either bossy, critical and stuffy or in the case of one, totally barking - I predict that particular teacher will either blow up the school or incite aliens to come down from outer space to take double maths.

As the sheer, calamitous rollercoaster barrelled on - one of the pupils clearly knows more about the death of her abusive father than she is letting on - it reminded me more and more of Bad Girls. And quelle bleedin' surprise: Shed Productions, who made the excellent ladies in prison drama, are responsible for this. And just as Bad Girls is set in what could be a modern prison (if it was filled with inmates culled from a Mexican soap opera), so it is with Waterloo Road. Yes, this is a comprehensive school set in something like the present day - but, apart from the odd reference to league tables, it may as well be Dynasty.

The bizarre thing, but perhaps bizarre only to squares like me, is that the villain is the guy who's trying to make the school and its pupils better. I'll follow the lead of scriptwriters most of the time, but it's hard to side with a heroine who seems to want less for the children in her charge than her sneering nemesis.

The Making of Modern Britain

BBC Two

Andrew Marr took us from Queen Victoria's death to the general election of 1905 in the first episode of his fascinating series, The Making of Modern Britain. He sensibly told big stories through individual lives and the detail glinted: the hideous human cost of the Boer War, the struggle for women's emancipation, the meeting of Rolls and Royce that revolutionised automobile technology, the flawed idealism, raging egos and sheer cavalierness of politicians. Marr is a wonderful guide - intellectually rigorous and engaging.

Natural World: Bearwalker of the Northwoods

BBC Two

After the histrionics of Ed Wardle's Alone in the Wild, where there was a bear around every corner ready to attack, it was a relief to find Dr Lynn Rogers involved in a very different relationship with the grizzly denizens of the Minnesota Northwoods. In Natural World, the bears loved Dr Rogers and they had every reason to: sometimes devotees of anything can be hard work - their passion usually obscuring logic, or simply making them seem a little loopy.

But Dr Rogers, a passionate protector and observer of bears, was the best kind of advocate: fearless, intelligent, warm and unintentionally very funny. Bears are very big and quite scary, but to this seemingly kind, gentle man - who, like the rest of us, grew up with scary images of bears - they are his friends. He had names for them: Joan, Big Harry.

The tumbling cubs were cute, although the documentary itself was quietly revelatory. We watched Dr Rogers feed the bears nuts so he could put a tracking device around their necks. He said that when bears look as if they're going for you aggressively, what they're actually saying is: “I'm nervous, give me some space, let's talk about it.” The bears ate ant larvae and green shoots, they play-fought, and Dr Rogers got incredibly close to them. (“It's me, bear,” he said by way of a greeting.) As he approached the lairs where the bears were dwelling you feared for his life, but the creatures seemed relaxed around him: at one point he lay on the grass next to one, man and beast in perfect repose.

The hunting season began and Dr Rogers tried to keep the bears he was studying safe by tying big pink ribbons on them (which certainly made them stand out). The companionship of three bears Dr Rogers called “the amigos” was shattered when two were killed. But his spirits were lifted when his surviving study group all made it into their lairs to hibernate.

The changing seasons - burnished copper trees in the autumn, glistening snowscapes - were beautifully captured by the photography of David Wright, David McKay and Sue Mansfield, and despite the bullets of the hunters there was a happy ending. Dr Rogers's favourite bear had two cubs. On an autumn night, it made you go “awww”.

tim.teeman@thetimes.co.uk

Editor's choice

• The super cool Vampire Weekend
• Streep and Baldwin get complicated
• Guy Ritchie on Sherlock Holmes