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Having soaped-up the medical profession in Peak Practice, and explored the riotous entertainment value of the army in Soldier Soldier, writer Lucy Gannon has turned her sights on the fraught battleground of education in her new series, Hope and Glory (BBC1). Her timing's not bad. In the climate of Blairism and New Labour reforming zeal, a series probing the way idealism can be sapped by underfunding and institutionalised cynicism offers bags of scope for dramatic personality clashes with a twist of documentary realism.
But Gannon isn't a Jimmy McGovern or Alan Bleasdale. Judging by episode one, Hope and Glory prefers to stick to the guidelines of old fashioned melodrama rather than trying to depict education as a bear- pit of ideological bloodletting. Casting Lenny Henry as ambitious headteacher Ian George even throws up echoes of that classroom classic, To Sir With Love, where the insufferably upright Sidney Poitier took on the Bash Street Kids, with tear-jerking consequences.
From the opening, Hope and Glory suffered from an uncertainty of tone. The head- teacher was seen addressing a teachers'...