The Frighteners: The Classroom

This blog post is by way of an experiment. I have commented before that I just find some TV shows impossible to blog about, and if I did, I would just end up describing what was happening. Monty Python is perhaps the best example of this, although the internet is replete with solid commentary on what is going on in each episode. I have chosen this episode of The Frighteners because I was also thinking that I just wouldn't be able to write a blog post about it so I thought I would set out and see what I could do. The show also has the advantage that there is much less about it on the internet than about Monty Python.

I touched on the reasons for the lack of commentary on this 1972-3 show the last time I blogged about an episode, which I see was as long ago as 2017 when I wrote about Bed and Breakfast (http://culttvblog.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-frighteners-bed-and-breakfast.html?m=1). I commented on the simple fact that nobody remembers this series at all, let alone with fondness, because almost nobody saw it when it was first broadcast. It wasn't given the luxury of a set slot, and when it was shown tended to be in graveyard slots; add to this that industrial action meant that some episodes were made in colour and some in monochrome, these things are a recipe for ensuring a show is completely forgotten. When you add that it doesn't fit comfortably into any genre, we have an additional reason you might not watch any more even if you chanced to find one episode being broadcast. It isn't really horror, nor yet really a thriller; some episodes include themes of human motivation like Vice does, others have unexpected twists like Tales of the Unexpected. It's a real mixture, and yet strangely that fact is what makes me love it.

The Classroom may possibly be best described as a psychological drama with a twist towards the end. It is about a much-loved and well-esteemed teacher who is retiring after a long career. We see a group of people presenting her with a clock in her classroom and then leaving her alone in the room. The caretaker comes in and she tells him that she will lock the school up and make sure the lights are off. He addresses her as Miss Smith, which is where we get the first hint that there is something wrong here. Even given that this was over fifty years ago, in a school, and he would definitely have been her inferior, there is something about the way he addresses her as Miss Smith that suggests that that is all there is to her. She is defined by her role as a teacher and only addressed by everyone as the kids address her. If you think about the first time you discover that the teachers at your school address each other by their first names when you're not around, Miss Smith isn't even at that stage, she effectually embodies the way children think teachers address each other.

The caretaker leaves and we see that there is a man hiding by the boiler as the caretaker leaves, who then goes to Miss Smith's classroom and introduces himself to her as one of her old pupils. He talks about his feelings for her and the way she treated him. In one way this episode is a wish-fulfilment of everyone who has ever felt they have been singled out by a teacher. He brings up stuff that indicates that far from deserving the esteem she receives Miss Smith is much more of a monster: she had the whole class humiliate him for not knowing the word for a baby horse. She used to lean out of the window and throw out a single sweet to the children in the playground and watch them fight over it. She really is a nasty piece of work.

What then happens is rather shocking and some viewers will find it difficult. It is also utterly unexpected. I'm also not going to tell you what it is but let you find out for yourselves.

Miss Smith is played by Patience Collier, who will be familiar to readers as the fluffy old lady in the Sapphire and Steel assignment about a house party. She plays a quite different character here, much more steely, and was obviously a hugely versatile actress. Unfortunately my desire to start a Patience Collier Season came to nothing, because looking through her IMDB most of her television output looks as if it would have been wiped.

There is also a fascination for me in the classroom. Most of the episode takes place in her classroom, which is upstairs in one of those massive schools the Victorians built in urban areas and were designed to have the shit kicked out of them and not show it. The walls are tiled part way up and it is very plain apart from some books and plants, and some of the children's artwork (of course you know Miss Smith only put up her favoured children's artwork, don't you). It has rows of old fashioned desks with inkwells and looks hugely old fashioned now. In fact it looks very like the infants and junior schools I went to, which had had a few improvements including ceilings painted in vibrant seventies colours like orange or purple. The mere setting is so atmospheric it is bound to bring up memories in the viewer as it has in me.

I don't know whether you can technically describe this as a bottle episode, although it does take place mainly in a confined room and only uses the actual school as its location with a limited speaking cast and some extras. However it does serve the effect of a bottle episode: it really ramps up the drama, has the potential to bring things up in the viewer, and ultimately creates an effect of confinement and entrapment.

I have two very minor criticisms, which are probably indicative of what quality this is. The first is that obviously I don't know if this was done deliberately but Patience Collier's make up is done in such a way that her face is quite a different colour from her neck. If intended to give the impression of falseness it certainly succeeds. The other is that the returning former pupil, played by Clive Swift, has something slightly wrong with his accent, at least to my ear (this isn't an objective criticism and I wouldn't go to the stake for it). Collier speaks faultless RP throughout so it could either have taken place anywhere in the country or more likely down south, possibly London, but Swift's accent has a slight hint of Birmingham to my ear. Again, it's only now and then but there's something wrong with it and it can't be his own accent because he was from Liverpool.

All in all, an excellent drama, which has proved unexpectedly fruitful to blog about.

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