This fish-out-of-water school comedy is smart, biting satire

Boarders
★★★★
Stan*, August 23

I don’t know about you, but I can’t not appreciate a TV series that got the Daily Mail so heated they awarded it a one-star review and furiously derided it as “a finger-wagging lecture on Embracing Diversity”. They were likely just annoyed that the show’s first gag was at their expense, but it’s not hard to imagine the wider “anti-woke” set getting hilariously worked up by this one, too.

Jodie Campbell (Leah) and Josh Tedeku (Jaheim) in Boarders.Credit: BBC / Studio Lambert Media Ltd

The UK series Boarders, which aired on the BBC in February, follows five Black kids from South London who are granted spots at St Gilbert’s, a private school trying to rehabilitate its public image following a viral video scandal where a bunch of its foppish lads were caught assaulting a homeless man with a bottle of champagne.

“You knew it was bad when even the Daily Mail called it ‘the great British shame’,” quips Gus, the kids’ mentor, played by series creator Daniel Lawrence Taylor. Hence the Mail’s animosity.

Taylor has said he got the idea for the series after reading a 2013 article about five Black boys from East London who had been sent to Rugby School – where annual tuition exceeds $89,000 – as part of its “social outreach programme” (the initiative was soon extended to other posh schools including Wellington and Eton.) He found a kernel of comedy in the setup.

Like his earlier acclaimed series Timewasters – a sci-fi comedy about a South London jazz quartet who accidentally time travel to 1920s London, where bigotry was, uh, big – Taylor mines comedy from Boarders’ fish-out-of-water premise, and from racism so insidious that it plays as absurd.

Creator, writer and director Daniel Lawrence Taylor also plays the kids’ mentor Gus. Credit: BBC / Studio Lambert

Looking like Hogwarts, St Gilbert’s is the sort of gilded place where future kings and PMs are made, where hallways boast paintings glorifying colonial oppression, and where institutional racism is as old as the building’s foundations.

Our quintet is immediately assailed by floppy-haired schoolmates less than eager to share their elite status. “It’s not our fault underprivileged Black boys are in at the moment,” says Toby, the crew’s street-smart wisecracker (played by Sekou Diaby).

They face all manner of microaggressions, including classmates who exoticise and objectify them (“Stormzy!” is the catch-cry), a bumbling headmaster way over his head, and a Tory mum on the school’s board who prefers the status quo and is on the lookout for a scapegoat. There’s also the school’s freshly employed PR department, which follows the kids around endlessly looking to snap images of them showcasing their “Black excellence” for the school’s social media feeds, a desperate bid to shore up St Gilbert’s public optics.

Future stars: Aruna Jalloh as Femi, Jodie Campbell as Leah, Myles Kamwendo as Omar, and Sekou Diaby as Toby.Credit: BBC / Studio Lambert

At just six episodes, the plot lines can feel forced, pushing as they do towards dramatic denouement, but the characters do most of the heavy lifting: there’s warmth and emotional truth to their interactions. If race is the overarching prism, they’re also dealing with the usual coming-of-age things: sexual awakenings, family pressure, cyberbullying, ambition.

The series even extends its compassion towards St Gilbert’s privileged monsters: generational wealth must be nice, but it’s no cushion to personal and familial trauma, especially for kids still finding their way in the world.

The show’s young cast are future stars-in-the-making, especially Jodie Campbell as the confident, forthright, socially conscious Leah, and Josh Tedeku who in street-tough Jaheim, the group’s unofficial leader, exudes the onscreen charm and authority of a young John Boyega.

Even as Boarders goes broader (we get robot wars, mushroom trips, paintball battles), Taylor weaves depth into the shenanigans.

This is a show about the fumbling ways elitist institutions have started to redress decades (or, in some cases, centuries) of racist and sexist segregation, and the struggle – both social and internal – around upward mobility for minorities who’ve been granted permission into spaces that long excluded them. That it’s all done in the guise of a playful teen comedy is impressive.

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