Gritty stories meet silly dance routines (Britannia High)

Member Name: leetemplar

Product:	Britannia High
Date:	16/01/09 (78 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some of the songs are well-written, some eye candy

Disadvantages: Everything else

This review may be highly unfair of me to write, as it's based on watching two episodes that were forced on me by my girlfriend. Maybe the episodes I didn't see were groundbreaking television, and I caught it on off-weeks, so if that's the case I wholeheartedly apologise.

The premise of the series is based around a school for preening tossers, or stage school as I believe it is known. Here several unfathomably attractive young things pirhouette around, taught by the bloke who plays the rubbish bank manager on the Nationwide adverts. His less than lovely visage makes him look like a warthog stumbling into a flamingo convention.

The plot of the first one I saw centred around a gurning peacock who was called Brad or Buddy or Johnny or something, who was the class dreamboat and irresistible to the girls in the school. The fact I was used to the actor playing uber-gay Maxxie in Skins detracted from the realism here. It transpired that he was secretly illiterate, couldn't read a single word, and on discovery (due a contrived Q&A session with two members of Girls Aloud) he launched into a weird song and dance dream sequence, in which he sang earnestly about his dyslexia while dancing letters pranced around behind him. I had to check no-one had put anything in my tea.

In fact that's the weird thing about Britannia High - it's obviously influenced by happy smiley American smugfest High School Musical, but bizarrely juxtaposes gritty storylines with silly dance routines.

The second episode I saw was based around the token black lad of the crew, who, as every patronising cliche would have it, was from the streets and had a brother who didn't respect his prancey lifestyle and was into guns and shooting and gangs 'n' all that. In the episode we had to endure the characters wrestling between wanting acceptance from his low-life brother's gang and from the gang of pirhouetting dandies he went to school with. Rock and a hard place, eh?

Eventually the brother was shot dead off screen, leading to about four minutes of soul-searching, a bit of a song and dance routine, and then everything was OK again. Huzzah!

Like I say, maybe I caught the bad episodes, and the rest is the kind of ground-breaking TV that will define television drama for decades to come. I seriously doubt it though!

Summary: Baffling