Radio Times promised that the new series of The Teacher (Channel 5) would be “tense and steamy”. This turns out to mean it’s a thriller that involves a mysterious drowning, a spot of blackmail and Will Mellor’s naked bottom. What more could you want on a Monday night?
You may remember the first series, a ratings hit for Channel 5, which starred Sheridan Smith as a frequently drunk teacher accused of having sex with a 15-year-old pupil. And if you don’t – well, no matter, because this sequel offers an unrelated story.
The theme is the same though: teachers behaving badly. Kara Tointon is art teacher Dani, who takes a bunch of teenage pupils on a residential school trip. The school trips of my youth involved illicit cigarettes and snogging; in 2024, it’s all vaping and selfies.
Instead of watching them, Dani sneaks away for some illicit sex in the boathouse with Jimmy (Mellor), a fellow teacher. She returns to find that one of the boys has gone missing, and he’s soon found floating face down in the lake. As Dani has a husband (played by Emmett J Scanlan, an actor who has cornered the market in characters you can’t trust), she decides that the best thing to do in this situation is lie to the police, saying she had just nipped away for a five-minute loo break. It won’t be long before this story unravels.
The story plays out as a whodunit over four episodes. I’ve watched the lot and the ending isn’t bad – I didn’t guess the identity of the villain – but the quality of the drama is pretty schlocky. Nobody seems to care about the details; the sex scene takes place in a boathouse which appears to be in the middle of a forest. All the characters are too closely linked: Dani is a close friend of the drowning victim’s mother, Jimmy has a son on the trip who becomes a suspect, and so on.
Tointon has two modes: dreamy and artistic (sketching the view from her cabin window while wearing tasteful pyjamas in episode one), or anguished and panicked (every scene in episodes 2-4). Mellor deploys the same likeable, everyman quality that proved so effective in Mr Bates vs The Post Office, but he needs a better drama than this.
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