Terrifying smartphone apps! Blackmailed teens! French exams! This entertainingly disturbing BBC drama about Bolton school leavers could well have a second series in it
School’s out and French is over! The annual British festival of unlearning any foreign languages you picked up in class can begin. “J’ai voudrais un vodka,” says one monoglot schoolgirl as she prepares for a summer of getting off her nut with her mates in Bolton. Think it through, young lady. You don’t use an auxiliary verb when conjugating in the conditional. Somebody is going to be in for a disappointment when GCSE results come out later this month.
As is our heroine, Rochelle. “That last question?” she tells Wren of the exam paper. “I copied down all the French from the back of that,” she says, waving her mineral-water bottle. How disappointing for an examiner who had been looking forward to a run-through of the plot of Camus’ L’Étranger only to be confronted with the ingredients for Volvic.
