TV: Jamie’s Dream School

Channel 4

In the wake of Jamie Oliver’s first great crusade against the inexorable direction of society, 2005’s Jamie’s School Dinners and the reprise a year on, the 3 Michelin starred Marco Pierre White labelled the campaign a “publicity stunt” run by “a fat chef with a drum kit”, adding he would take Oliver seriously when he gets his own Michelin star.

These bitter comments smacked of a jealousy that, given the trajectory of his recent efforts, Jamie seems not to return. Ever since the unarguably successful School Dinners – Tony Blair pumped £280 million into school kitchens as a result – Jamie has divided his time between expanding his empire and becoming the nation’s premier tele-activist.

But Jamie’s Dream School is crucially different; it has nothing to do with food. Oliver plays curator to a six-week faculty of celebrity experts; Robert Winston does Science, Daley Thompson does PE, David Starkey does History etc. Facing the whiteboard are not competition winners or super-swats, but twenty of British education’s forgotten children – those who, like Jamie, left school with less than 5 good GCSEs.

The premise is simple but brilliant, the aim clear but daunting: to get these yoofs believing in education.  “We’re used to people hanging on our every word, but they don’t give a shit!”  muses Oliver while Simon Callow wades through the thick white noise of Shakespeare being force-fed to the great unbovvered.

It’s no revelation that a fine teacher needs more than academic intelligence, but surely it helps to be Commander of the Empire for services to your field? Consider then, the standout line from episode one, “You’re so fat you can barely move.” Thus spake Dr David Starkey, CBE, 66 to Conor Harris, Key Stage 3, 17.

In his first class, Starkey gets it all wrong and the tension between his competitive intellectual elitism and the collective evil eye judging its every minor manifestation reduces the good doctor to a rubble of patronising clichés.

To be fair, most classes at Dream School get messy. Pale-faced pukers run screaming from Professor Robert Winston’s live autopsy of a pig, Alastair Campbell’s efforts at an impassioned debate descends into a playground brawl, and Callow’s field trip to the theatre ends inevitably in a shouting stand-off with the general public.

But episode two is a triumph, featuring the rehabilitation of David Starkey into a competent teacher, and a photography project with Fashion snapper that yields some truly moving work.

Cheesy and suspect as these moments would be if they stood alone in the edited weekly hour, they are justified and deepened by the wealth of material available online. The essential content of all the lessons, including Andrew Motion and Tinchy Stryder’s “Rhyme and Rap” class and a sister campaign compiling the brief revision guides of real teachers.

Far from marking the point where the much-derided Oliver moves beyond his remit as a celebrity chef, Dream School is a fascinating concoction, blending primetime entertainment, social experiment and a state-of-the-nation documentary, all gift wrapped in the many limbed output of modern television.

What’s more, it proves Marco Pierre White could learn a thing or two from Jamie. I wonder if there’s a vacancy at Dream School. Dinnerlady, perhaps.