You get to see a lot of Jack Whitehall in The Bad Education Movie. His naked bum, his testicles (though they may be prosthetic ones) and even a fleeting glimpse of his penis, (which probably isn't a prosthetic). Of course none of this is supposed to be in any way erotic. It’s all part of the grand tradition stretching back to the first Bad Education TV series on BBC3 of finding new and extraordinary ways to humiliate Whitehall. And he co-writes the whole thing.
Thankfully the movie version takes this mission even further. The set-up is that Jack’s character (Alfie Wickers) has a reputation for being the worst teacher in the WORLD, and his exploits are so legendary that one of the pupils' parents (loveable Joe’s fierce mother, played by the great Joanna Scanlan) insists on accompanying him and the kids on their last school trip, originally planned to be to Las Vegas, but changed at the last minute to Cornwall.
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They somehow get involved with a bunch of radical Cornish separatists led by Iain Glen off Game Of Thrones and it builds to an all-action climax.
It's a bit like Braveheart meets Die Hard with more of Jack Whitehall’s bottom thrown in.
Along the way, scriptwriters Freddy Syborn and Whitehall himself weave in a plentiful supply of suitably outrageous set-pieces. Any film which opens with a skit set at the Anne Frank Museum in Amsterdam involving magic mushrooms is clearly going to testing the boundaries of taste and decency. But the great trick of Bad Education is that its heart is always in the right place.
As there always have been in the TV series, there are myriad politically incorrect jokes dealing with sexuality and ethnicity, but at its core the whole thing is celebration of diversity. In which Jack Whitehall molests a swan. The film could do with more of Sarah Solemani’s character Rosie, Jack’s gf, always an oasis of decency in Bad Education’s anarchic world, but quite rightly the focus is on Alfie and the pupils (who each get their moment to shine).
And while one or two of the slapstick moments don’t quite work, it doesn’t really matter because the pace is so breezy there’s always another funny bit about to come along. As for the thorny problem of making a TV show come to life on the big screen with a limited budget, director Elliot Hegarty does a fine job of giving the film scope so it feels properly cinematic rather than just three TV episodes stuck together.
The same goes for the script, which develops and deepens the characters while never forgetting it’s all about being funny. Best of all, the film picks up where the final TV episode left off in terms of daring to be surprisingly sweet and moving, in between all the unashamed vulgarity. The scenes between Whitehall’s Alfie and his chief buddy in class, Ethan Lawrence’s Joe, are a particular joy, and there’s also a rather lovely anti-bullying message which comes from an angle you might not expect.That’s not to say Bad Education has suddenly gone all sentimental and cloying. The predominant tone is still childishly silly and preposterous. And thank heavens for that.
The Bad Education Movie is in cinemas now