One of the big cliches of Hollywood films is the liberal teacher going into a school of poor children with a set of firey ideals. Sincere presentations are a dime a dozen – the most famous one is probably Freedom Writers starring Hillary Swank, though I always end up thinking of The Ron Clark Story. These are fawning presentations of idealistic crusaders who fight active corruption, bureaucratic indifference, and the children’s own trauma by the deployment of righteous speeches – furious when addressing the first two, kindhearted and occasionally furious when addressing the latter. When they succeed, it’s often played as a reward for their innate goodness, and we are expected to hope that more people will take up the goodness of these teachers. This very easily feeds the parodies, in which the teachers are delusional in either their success rate or their goals; most famously, South Park parodying the whole affair by having Eric Cartman screech “HOW DO I REACH THEEES KEEEEEEEDS?!”, though there’s also a parody on Family Guy in which Brian Griffin finds himself in deep over his head trying to teach. The parodies tend to play the teacher as wildly out of touch with reality; sometimes it goes far enough that they snap under the pressure because the kids are simply too difficult, and this is gleefully played as hypocrisy.

Which is what makes Please, Sir! so strange. I have only seen the film – based on the sitcom of the same name – but it presents its teacher, Bernard Hedges, performing pretty much the same actions that you would see in any righteous teacher story. The film kicks off with him furious to discover his class of students – all from poor or working class backgrounds – are not being considered for a field trip like the other students, which he attributes to discrimination against them, and he successfully browbeats the faculty into allowing him to take them on a field trip same as everyone else. At the same time, whenever he’s actually spending time with his students, he’s constantly insulting and berating them, and what’s really strange is that there is absolutely no ideological drive behind presenting these seemingly contradictory traits. Please, Sir! is a product of the British television industry, and say what you will about British culture, it’s something where everyone knows exactly what their job is supposed to be.

I’ve always had a deep admiration for how clear-eyed British television and film tends to be, no matter the genre or the position a person is in. It’s most visible in the spear carrier roles – not only do the actors go out of their way to embody the character in only a few minutes of screen time, the writers structure the story so the character has a specific purpose, both as people with motivations and as gears turning the engine of the story. I think of that theatre saying – you ask the guy who plays the gravedigger what Hamlet is about, and he’ll tell you it’s about a gravedigger who meets a prince. Please, Sir! is not interested in proving any kind of a point – it is genuinely only interested in delivering farce plots and funny one-liners, and it uses a teacher in a poor/working class environment as a vehicle for that much as Are You Being Served? uses a department store. Hedge’s righteous speeches and cutting insults aren’t part of a larger point, they’re just behaviours we’ve chosen to follow.

This makes the story feel human and like it squares the difference between idealism and pragmatism in an interesting way. Hedges believes 100% that his students deserve the same chance to go on a field trip that any other student would get, and he believes 100% that his students are, in practice, really annoying, and he believes 100% that the second condition does not cancel out the first. There are people in this world who do not have ideals – who don’t even understand the concept of ideals – who often sneer at people like Hedges because they know they personally would give up at the first inconvenience or unpleasantry; they are the people who write lines like “HOW DO I REACH THESE KEEEEEDS?!”. Any half-competent idealist like Hedges takes initial inconvenience in stride (even if they snark their way through it) because they know it’s the price you pay for doing good. Just because the kids squander their chance doesn’t mean they didn’t deserve it. A real idealist doesn’t run from suffering – they pick the suffering they’re willing to put up with.