Picture this: you’re an average English teacher in a struggling, deprived comprehensive in a big city. One day, you come across an advertisement in the newspaper inviting you to "learn how to be a writer". Curious, you enroll in a correspondence course and begin writing short stories. After sending a script to a TV soap opera and persistently contacting them until they finally read it, you land a contract as a dialogue writer. You earn enough to give up teaching and establish your production company, creating some of the nation’s most successful TV series, including one based on a school similar to the one where you previously worked. Your company eventually goes public and is valued at £44m, with offices in four cities, including Los Angeles, and you relocate to an enormous house on an expensive, leafy private road in Islington, north London.
This is the inspiring story of Ann McManus, whose series, Waterloo Road, is currently in the midst of its fourth BBC1 season, consisting of 20 hour-length episodes. Though not everyone is a fan of the fictitious comprehensive in Rochdale, Lancashire portrayed in Waterloo Road, with the Association of School and College Leaders condemning the show’s "oversexed and unflattering" depiction of school life as harmful to parents’ trust in comprehensive schools. McManus remains unbothered by such criticisms, remarking that professional organizations exist to defend their profession. Regardless, the current series features 4.5 million viewers, and the BBC has already commissioned a fifth season.
Television dramas based on doctors, nurses, police officers, and veterinarians have been successful, but those centered around teachers often struggled to connect with audiences. The only exception was shows like Grange Hill, which heavily focused on children and was meant for kids. Teachers, as McManus describes it, were relegated to walk-on textbook figures or implausible heroes. In contrast, Waterloo Road flips this traditional narrative, introducing flawed, nuanced adult characters and portraying the children through the lens of the teachers, typically as very good or very bad. The head is well-meaning and idealistic but has a sordid past, including working as a prostitute and appointing her sister to a senior position within the school without disclosing their relationship. The governor’s chair, a local police superintendent, fudges drug tests results to protect his daughter. Many current educational topics, such as academies and exclusions, are discussed. Only someone with several years of experience working in a staff room could have crafted and written such a series.
Shed Media, McManus’s production company, posits that Waterloo Road is based on a school "on the scrap heap" near the bottom of every league table. The parents of the pupils assault teachers in front of their classes. Students throw food during breakfast club, while others die in stolen cars while joyriding. Some students hop in and out of bed with classmates as their parents look on. At one corner of the playground, a boy supposedly runs shady business deals. Meanwhile, teachers accuse one another of racist and homophobic actions while a terrified boy is forced to kneel and shine another boy’s shoes at gunpoint in the locker room. In one storyline, a girl dumps her boyfriend, and he retaliates by shooting her. Many of these dramatic plotlines have occurred in some manner in British schools, as McManus notes, citing the cases of Karen Matthews and Alfie Patten.
McManus, a co-founder of Shed Media along with Eileen Gallagher, her partner, greets me warmly, and I sit on a cushy couch in her Islington home as she talks a mile a minute in a thick Scottish accent, occasionally pausing due to a barking dog. She was born in Ayr in 1957 as one of six children in a family of educators, including her mother, aunt, and two brothers. She attended a Catholic comprehensive and struggled academically. "I was a difficult child, and my parents were strict disciplinarians," she admits. "My mother was only five feet tall, and we were all scared of her. For me, school was an opportunity to let loose, and I had a great time every day. I never did homework. Frankly, my school lacked ambition for its pupils. No one ever suggested that I go to university."
In 1984, after completing her training, McManus began working in Castlemilk, a deprived area south of Glasgow. The area had high rates of teenage pregnancy and single motherhood, which McManus found disapproving. She worked in a fashionable school, but her political views were traditional, as she believed traditional teaching methods were more effective. She found herself working alongside a Tory parliamentary candidate who also acted as her department head, and they got along surprisingly well. In staffrooms, there was an uneasy alliance between the Thatcherites and the far left. McManus noticed drastic changes in schools compared to when she was a student. Children now ate crisps and drank Coca-Cola, which was not allowed when she was younger. She believed children’s rights should be limited to safety and not being hit. She also insisted that pupils stand up and greet the teacher when they entered the classroom, which was considered middle-class and right-wing at the time. McManus later taught in other areas of Glasgow, where the students wore uniforms and where the environment was miserable. Eventually, she became disillusioned with teaching due to the visible effects of Thatcherism. She noticed that the buildings were deteriorating, regulations were becoming more difficult to follow, and her salary was decreasing. She also felt that teachers were no longer viewed as professionals, and she became desperate to get out of the profession. McManus began working on scripts for Take the High Road on STV and then progressed to Coronation Street. She later established Shed Media, where she produced programs like Bad Girls and Footballers’ Wives, but Waterloo Road was the most successful of them. Despite its elements of soap operas, with two-dimensional characters and scene changes, McManus insists that the show is pro-teacher. The program highlights the difficulty of the teaching profession and shows the value good teachers bring to society. Although there are less than exemplary teachers portrayed in Waterloo Road, they are a minority.
Who knows, perhaps even you could acquire a spacious dwelling in Islington accompanied by a workplace located in Los Angeles.
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