Two decades on from original transmission, Teachers creator Tim Loane still has the original Channel 4 promotional poster in a frame on his wall – it’s a snapshot of the cast, with a caption reading: “Starts 10pm, Wednesday night.”
“Part of Simon [the show’s original lead character] is always in me, or part of me is always in Simon,” Loane tells RadioTimes.com. “I’m extremely proud of it, but stunned to think that it’s 20 years. Stunned. Gutted! I’m gutted to think it’s 20 years!”
Having written the one-off comedic thriller Out of the Deep Pan for the BBC and later an episode of Ballykissangel, Loane’s next project was to be a series for Channel 4 – located in Belfast and exploring “that moment when people are about to become adult”, it would’ve followed “young professionals just out of college, wanting to change the world, but stuck in a world of hedonism and sexual obsession that meant that they couldn’t”.
Loane had completed six scripts when the project was cancelled. “I was devastated. I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is the end of the world’, having spent maybe two years working on this.”
12 months later though, he was approached again by Johnathan Young, Commissioning Editor at Channel 4, with whom he’d worked on the Belfast-set series. Young suggested relocating the series from Belfast to Bristol “for all kinds of production reasons” and also setting it in a school, with the cast of young professionals recast as teachers. “I said, ‘I would love to do that, that’d be fantastic,’” Loane recalls.
“Everyone has been to school, so everyone has an opinion of school – they either loved it or hated it, or somewhere in-between, but everyone has funny stories, or painful stories… so I thought, ‘My God, this is such an important part of people’s lives – why has nobody made a drama about it?’.”
Loane’s wife was also a teacher, meaning that he had “ready access” to the world. “She wouldn’t thank me for saying this, but I knew how often she was going into work with a terrible hangover back in the early days, so I was very familiar with that.
“Channel 4 commissioned me to write a pilot and a series outline, and they liked them a lot. Then we took it to [production company] Tiger Aspect, and the rest is history – off we went.”
Teachers – as the show came to be known – was Loane’s first series commission and he looks back on it now as a “proper baptism of fire.” “The pressure was unbelievable – it was like, ‘Right, we’ll start filming this in three or four months time, and we’re starting to cast it…’ and there was only one script written! And it had to go through myriad drafts. So it was intense, very stressful, But the end result, I was just blown away by – it’s just magnificent.”
Teachers’ portrayal of the education system was like nothing seen on TV before – the teachers themselves were barely much older or more mature than their students, their questionable decision-making powered by booze and fags. “Most of the friends I knew who had gone into teaching had done so because they didn’t know what else to do when they left college,” Jane Fallon – Executive Producer for Tiger Aspect – explains. “They were only a few years older than the children they had responsibility for and their own lives were messy and chaotic. That was the feeling we wanted to get across.”
The first role to be cast was the lead, English teacher and charming rascal Simon Casey, with Fallon suggesting Andrew Lincoln having previously worked with him on the BBC’s seminal 1990s drama This Life. “The character Simon could be quite annoying on paper – he was a bit of an idiot and desperate to be popular with the kids – but it was important that the audience liked him so we needed an actor who could play against that, bring a funnier, more charming side to Simon.
“I remember sitting in a meeting with the writing team, talking about this problem and suddenly realising Andy would be absolutely perfect, so I left the meeting and put a call in. Once we had him in our heads the character really came to life.”
“I remember meeting Andy, who I was aware of from This Life,” says Raquel Cassidy, who played Psychology teacher and Simon’s best friend Susan Gately. “He was really fun and lovely in the audition – I’m sure he was like that to every other potential Susan – but it wasn’t difficult to like him, which is a great testament to his ability to make someone feel at ease, which is perfect for Simon but also very much a trait that Andy has.”
Cassidy was offered the part of Susan after three auditions, but wasn’t sure whether to accept as she was still waiting to hear back on another job where she was one of three finalists. “[Casting director Di Carling] said, ‘You can have it, or you can wait and see if you get the other one, but I’m not gonna wait for you,’ – I did see the other series unfold and I did always wonder if they would’ve offered it to me, but I think [Teachers] was very much the right choice and well done Di for forcing me to make it!”
Nina Sosanya, cast as no-nonsense English teacher Jenny Paige, was already familiar with her future co-star Lincoln as the pair were appearing in different productions at the National Theatre at the time she was auditioning for Teachers. “I’d had two callbacks, but the closer I got to getting the part the more nervous I became.
“My last audition was a chemistry read with Andy – the thought of not getting the job and having to pass him at work was a bit excruciating – my nerves started to literally paralyse me to the point where my eyes started to close involuntarily. It possibly came across as Jenny’s withering indifference to Simon and got me the job.”
“My first audition, I thought it was a disaster,” says Navin Chowdhry, who played perpetually horny IT teacher Kurt McKenna. “I came out of that feeling so low – I remember going out for dinner with some mates and genuinely feeling like, ‘F**k this, I can’t do this anymore.’
“Then I got a call a week or so later, still feeling embarrassed about how it had gone, and they said, ‘It’s between you and somebody else, they want to see you again’ and I was like, ‘What?! They’re actually going to have me back in the room?’ – and that’s when I met Adey [Adrian Bower, completing the original five-strong line-up as doltish PE teacher Brian Steadman] for the first time and then it worked.”
In featuring both Chowdhry – who is of Indian-origin – and Sosanya – born in London to a Nigerian father – as leads, the Teachers cast was more diverse than many similar shows airing in the early 2000s, something executive producer Fallon says was “always an aim and, thankfully, not one I had to push for.”
“I also wanted to see a lot of new faces, not the same old actors you see pop up in everything. Di Carling the casting director – who I’d worked with on This Life – was brilliant at assembling both diverse and unknown actors for us to audition.”
“There’s still well-documented issues about multicultural casting, but 20 years ago, you’re going in thinking, ‘There is no way they’re going to give this to a person of colour’,” says Chowdhry. “But they were courageous. I mean, to have me and Nina in the ensemble was unprecedented – in trade magazines like Broadcast and Screen International, there were articles about the poster saying, ‘Look, you’ve got five young leads and two of them are of colour’ – that was a massive thing at the time.”
The five leads were ably supported by a larger cast of established actors as their fellow teaching staff and a number of rising stars as their students, with the likes of Kara Tointon, Ashley Madekwe and James Corden making early screen appearances. “I don’t think I ever imagined school secretary Liz (Ellen Thomas) and her side kick Carol (Ursula Holden-Gill) would become such a great double act,” says Fallon. “Similarly older teacher Bob, played by Lloyd Maguire. Once you see how brilliantly an actor can flesh out a character and make them funny you inevitably start to storyline more for them.”
The chemistry between the leads – who lived in a hotel together in Bristol during filming – was, according to Brian actor Bower, “pretty much immediate”, with the cast’s off-screen antics not a million miles away from what viewers ended up seeing on-screen. “A lot of the pub scenes, we would do for three, four or five days on the trot – and we then go to the pub for real after filming,” Chowdhry recalls.
“We’d be learning lines for the next day in the pub,” echoes Bower. “Usually, a lot of the scenes, we were supposed to be bleary-eyed from the night before anyway – we went a little bit method!”
!["Navin]("https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/3/2022/03/teachers-channel-4-973e171.jpg?quality=90&crop=44px%2C0px%2C1081px%2C720px&resize=620%2C413" "\"teachers-channel-4\"")
“I remember trying not to laugh, sitting in a staff room scene trying to hold on to Jenny’s humourless and reserved thing, while Ade and Nav got the giggles,” says Sosanya. “Nav is the best/worst – everyone got a bit hysterical but he was literally crying and the more we got told off the funnier it seemed to be, and then he got sent out. So, you know. Irony.”
Though ostensibly a series about the lives, loves and hangovers of its twenty-something leads, Teachers was also marked by a touch of the surreal. In the early series, Simon would experience stress-induced hallucinations, while each episode also featured appearances from live animals – including lions, penguins and donkeys – something the teachers and students appeared completely oblivious to.
Many of these visual quirks were the brainchild of director Richard Dale, who helmed the show’s first three episodes and, according to Bower, held the idea that schools were “institutions that were quite weird, wacky places, from the outside looking in”.
“Sheep and donkeys didn’t phase me, but some of the kids were freaked out, I don’t think some of them had ever been near a sheep, why would they?” says Sosanya. “But this was the era of Ally McBeal, where the surreal enhanced the comedy and the drama.”
The series was also noted for its acclaimed soundtrack, featuring the hottest British indie bands of the time – the likes of The Bluetones, Shed Seven and Ash. “It was such a British show so we wanted to really focus on British bands,” says Liz Gallacher, music supervisor on Teachers. “It was also important to try and find up-and-coming artists/bands and showcase some new talent.”
“Music was a huge part of the show,” agrees Jane Fallon. “I wanted to use it to help bring an upbeat feel so my remit was ‘indie and jangly’. Nothing schmaltzy. I worked a lot with record companies to get them to give me early copies of CDs of young indie bands and, by series 2, everyone involved on the show was chiming in with suggestions, and hopeful bands were putting themselves forward.”
Belle and Sebastian’s 1998 track The Boy with the Arab Strap was the show’s theme song and, both for fans of the show and those involved in making it, remains inextricably linked with Teachers. “Whenever I hear that song, it just sort of flicks me back to that moment,” says Adrian Bower. “Just a really great, fun time. In my memory, it was always sunny. I’m sure it wasn’t, but it always seemed sunny.”
Teachers launched on Channel 4 on 21st March, 2001, with series creator Loane remembering that the show was less an overnight success and more of a sleeper hit. “I just remember enormous relief that it worked. It was an enormous relief and enormous pleasure.”
Gradually though, across its first eight-episode series, the show generated a substantial following – positive critical reviews followed, as did a number of prestigious awards nominations. “Looking back I guess it was pretty huge, but 20 years ago the social media thing hadn’t taken off – I was still in a blissful bubble of ignorance then so really had no idea,” says Nina Sosanya. “Raquel and I went on the Big Breakfast – I was totally out of my depth and they had my old science teacher come on air as a surprise. It didn’t go well. I think I swore on air.”
The reaction from the teaching community itself was more mixed. “Half of them said, ‘This is an absolute travesty and you’re not taking my job seriously – it’s an insult to us and the teaching profession’ – David Blunkett was Education Secretary at the time and at one point castigated it, which we took great pleasure from!” Loane recalls. “The other half said, ‘That’s exactly the way it is’ – they can’t both be right!”
Though it was quickly re-commissioned, Teachers faced a significant obstacle in its second series as Andrew Lincoln decided to leave the show, with his character Simon appearing in only eight of the 10 new episodes. Though on-screen Simon’s departure left the English department in the lurch, that wasn’t quite the reality off-screen.
“It could have been a disaster,” acknowledges Fallon. “But, by then, the ensemble was working so well that it made sense to focus on them rather than bring in a new lead.” “The other characters had started coming to the fore, so it didn’t feel like it wouldn’t be able to move on,” agrees Bower. “If it had happened at the end of the first series, that would have been problematic, because that series was very much through the character of Simon’s eyes, but they started to edge away from that in the second series, anyway.”
When a third series followed in 2003, only Bower and Navin Chowdhry remained of the original five, with Raquel Cassidy and Nina Sosanya also departing Teachers after the second series. “There was more pressure on the second series because the first had done well, so it felt different,” Sosanya recalls. “And Jenny had served her purpose, she was softening up and I liked her better when she was a force to be reckoned with. I really missed the actors and crew.”
For Cassidy, “a mixture of things” led to her decision to exit the series, including her mother falling ill. “I was a little bit worried about being typecast, but a large part of it was personal – my mum wasn’t very well, and I didn’t want to be in Bristol. It did end up being the last year of her life, so I’m really glad that I didn’t take it.
“However, if we could take that away and that weren’t in existence, I would go back and say to me, ‘Do it, it’s a good show, you won’t get typecast,’ but at the time there were conflicting emotions.”
While Lincoln’s Simon got an on-screen farewell, no explanation was offered for Jenny and Susan’s disappearance, though both Sosanya and Cassidy believe their respective characters would’ve quit the teaching profession. “I had Jenny down as the type of person who enjoys competitive Orienteering,” says Sosanya. “Outdoor Pursuits with a Girl Guide zest. She’d be organising relief projects in war-torn countries, hanging off the sides of helicopters with piles of official documents clamped under her arm. Shouting.”
“I think she’d burn out as a teacher,” Cassidy says of Susan. “Having climbed the career ladder and after some wandering (and wondering) in the wilderness, I think she would find her way, possibly to a remote island somewhere, being absolutely fine on her own, running a donkey sanctuary, possibly, and lighting up endless fags…”
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The third series saw the Kurt and Brian double-act become the show’s main focus, but after that, Navin Chowdhry and Adrian Bower decided to follow their fellow cast-mates out the door, with the fourth and final series of Teachers featuring an entirely new lead cast. “We’d had such a wonderful time and the material was great,” Chowdhry recalls of his final series. “Brian and Kurt were at their peak in terms of the double act. I was on set one day and just thought, ‘It doesn’t get better than this’ – we had the time of our lives on that show, but it was the right time for us to go out on a high.”
“I don’t think there was ever any doubt that three would be the limit,” says Bower. “For me and Nav especially, we were just like, ‘If we do the third, that rounds it off and that’d be perfect’ – the idea of doing a fourth… we never thought of that, really.”
Teachers’ spiritual predecessor This Life returned to screens a decade on from original transmission for a one-off special which reunited the original cast, including Andrew Lincoln – so could a school reunion ever be on the cards for Teachers? “People have mentioned it,” says Cassidy. “I would absolutely love to revisit it, but I’d also be just as terrified, because it did so well. I’d be horrified by the idea of it not working.”
“I know for a fact that we would all love to work with each other again – we all have ideas and things in the air that might work out,” adds Chowdhry. “We haven’t specifically spoke about Teachers but I think if something came on the table, now there’s been a lot of space from it and the fact that we have such fond memories… who knows? I don’t think any of us would say no to at least working together again.”
“Some of us still see each other quite regularly,” reveals Bower. “Obviously, Andy’s been in America, but when he gets back, we all meet up and sort of fall back into things – we play a lot of poker and go bowling and go-karting and things we used to do back in the day. I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to talk about Teachers. It was such a fun time.”
“You often think of writing drama as being… not disposable, I would reject that word, but being temporary,” says Loane. “It’s of the moment, and for a moment. It’s ‘that’s that, move on to the next one’ but with Teachers, you go, ‘Oh my God, people are still looking back.’ That warms the cockles of my heart.”
All four series of Teachers are available to watch now on All 4 – find something to watch now with our TV Guide.
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