Every so often, another scandalous story on inappropriate teacher-pupil relations will make the headlines, so that the story played out here will always have a tabloid-type topicality about it. The ubiquitous Sheridan Smith is the vivacious Miss at a secondary school whose unconventional barrier-breaking teaching style and general mildly-rebellious demeanour makes her a favourite with her young pupils. She loves the job, teaching English and is also popular with most of her staff-mates. Away from work however, she's a bit of a mess. Divorced, she likes nothing better than partying all the time and getting into alcohol-fuelled one-night stands, much to the disapproval of her retired widower dad, himself an ex-headmaster, with whom she lives, if less than harmoniously.
Unfortunately for her, her carefree, if not reckless social life is about to catch her up as she becomes the centre of a sex-scandal when one of her young pupils, in whom she's invested a little more time, accuses her of having sex with him in a nightclub toilet when she was out of her face and on her own. Fanned by a zealous female colleague who's the definition of starchy, the matter blows up into a fully fledged scandal and sees her lose her job and then her social position especially after she pleads guilty to the charge to protect, or so she thinks, the boy from further emotional distress.
Meanwhile she hits the bottle even more until she finds rock bottom, forced out of the family home by her unsupportive dad and generally made a social pariah and the butt of cruel attacks by former acquaintances and unsurprisingly, anonymous tabloid-fuelled members of the public who daub her car and jeer at her in public.
But what if she didn't do it and was actually being set up for her fall? As she pulls herself together, she gradually connects the dots in a carefully-orchestrated revenge scheme aimed at her, originating from an incident at a different school some fifteen years before.
If you're prepared to overlook the plot holes here (who waits fifteen years to carry out a sophisticated revenge-crime?) and unlikely plot devices (particularly the one involving Smith's best-friend fellow-teacher, who herself becomes groomed by the perp), this four-part drama had enough twists and turns and minor cliff-hanging reveals in it to keep my wife and I interested all the way through. Smith is good value as usual as the traumatised teacher who pulls herself together to get her life back on track, although, rather like her stalker himself, we certainly didn't see the out-of-nowhere dramatic finish coming down the road.
We all know nowadays that the grooming of children of course is a serious subject and I'm not altogether sure that hanging it on an old-fashioned revenge plot as was done here was completely appropriate, but putting that aside, this on the whole was watchable if not exactly cutting-edge prime-time TV entertainment.
