Bluestone 42
BBC Three
★★★★☆
Waterloo Road
BBC Three
★★☆☆☆
All those people who are up in arms about Channel 4 considering a sitcom about the Irish potato famine: perhaps it’s time to rethink. I know, it’s a period in history for which even the word “devastating” is a laughable understatement. Yet surely it’s not a case of what is “a subject for comedy”, but of how that subject is treated during its translation into comedy?
Just look at Bluestone 42. When it launched in 2013 it was similarly controversial: it’s hard to imagine the workings of a British bomb-disposal unit in Afghanistan being laugh-out-loud funny without being tasteless. Yet as it returned for series three, it rendered the horrors of war into something that is respectful without being worthy; beautifully made and still ringing with gags.
Last night’s opener was even almost arty as the lads (and one lass) became trapped inside an armoured vehicle after a blast, the radio sounding out “Bluestone 42, respond . . .” to near silence and sand-filled air. I wondered if we were going to spend the entire episode in there with the sort of claustrophobia done so well by the BBC Three stablemate Him & Her and so well suited to the front line. This was a confined space that could easily have carried a half-hour, as colleagues worried first whether anyone was injured, then immediately whether they could save their dropped Haribo.
The unit did eventually venture outside and with its usual two defining qualities: the visceral nature of the situation, with enemy bullets flying by, and the base badinage the blokes believably use at all times. I don’t think it’s cockroaches that would survive a nuclear apocalypse, I think it would be banter, and it’s done so well here by the writers James Cary and Richard Hurst.
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The jokes themselves aren’t a thing of sophistication — many of them are about balls, or about kicking someone in the balls — but the way it’s all balanced is certainly skilled. There’s so much comic life in this making-do, mismatched bunch, from posh officer Nick (Oliver Chris) to estate kid “Tower Block” (Matthew Lewis). They are effectively Brits abroad, but in hugely heightened circumstances. The phrase “gallows humour” wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t possible to mine the worst possible situations for their lighter side and I’m glad teams like this continue to very successfully do so.
So to Waterloo Road, which closed its doors (televisually speaking, at least) last night after goodness knows how many years. It was a characteristically soapy finale with a Save Our School campaign to fight, Jane from EastEnders freeing herself up to be Jane from EastEnders again, and all sorts of underdogs proving themselves and some spectacularly not.
“Police, ambulances, paramedics — you know, just your average day at Waterloo Road,” said bad-man teacher George (Angus Deayton), surveying the wreckage of, you know, emotional manipulation, some folk being locked in a freezer and council-led sabotage (democracy doesn’t work, kids . . .).
It tickled me at the end when George raised his fist in a gesture similarly made by Judd Nelson in that great school-based film The Breakfast Club. That’s pretty much where the parallels end, with the stories here unfolding with the subtlety of Brookside in its bad years. Farewell Waterloo Road, a coming-of-age tale whose time had come.
alex.hardy@the-times.co.uk