Jamie's Dream School, C4, Wednesday Chaotic, undisciplined, annoying, lacking in focus - no, I'm not talking about the kids at the centre of Jamie Oliver's bold new TV experiment, which seeks to reintroduce disenchanted teens to education. I'm talking about the programme itself.
Yes, there were some great telly moments in this opening episode, but I felt a bit dejected by the end of the hour.
Saint Jamie, still talking to some unnamed person slightly to the right of camera, has handpicked 20 young people who left school with virtually no qualifications and sent them back to a makeshift institution for two months, with leading celebrities as teachers.
"You're not odd, you're not useless, you're actually quite normal," he told them at the start of their "journey."
Nervous Simon Callow was first up as English teacher. He ended up mainly having to teach the shouty and unruly bunch the difference between Stratford where Shakespeare lived and Stratford "the ghetto near Romford."
"Was I like that?" wondered observer Jamie, who himself left school without any qualifications. "I think I was – a little s***."
Next up was stuffy old history teacher David Starkey. "You're all here because you've failed," he said by way of introduction. Then after a lot of yawning in class, a discussion on evolution ended up with Starkey telling one lad helpfully: "Come on, you're so fat you can hardly move." Even head teacher "Dabbs" admitted the comment would have led to disciplinary action in the real world.
The history professor, who bunked off his next lesson, was defiant in the face of the rabble. "Attention deficit disorder is not a disease, it's a description of an entire generation," he opined.
It would have been enlightening to see why these particular "failures" were chosen for the show – especially middle class Henry, with his fake cockney accent. Sound familiar?
Rolf Harris complained no one was listening in his art class. Robert Winston survived biology – just – by smiling inanely and getting the youngsters to cut up dead rats and pigs. Most threw up.
Indeed, so far, the only person really getting through to these very trying youngsters is Jamie himself.
His effortlessly comfortable dialogue with the group and the way they respond to his basic decency with them is quite an eye-opener.
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