With a certain amount of knowing, much exuberant flair and the usual undercurrent of vulnerability, Sheridan Smith plays Jenna, a hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-living, rather debauched secondary school teacher in Channel 5’s new drama series, The Teacher. It’s set in Bradford and it’s not a flattering portrait of that great city or the teaching profession, I have to say. Smith’s character is the sort of permanently hungover specimen of humanity you might expect to encounter in student halls, journalism, or indeed, from what we hear, perhaps the Policy Unit of Number 10 Downing Street.
Anyway, Jenna is an English mistress, in more senses than one, because she finds herself accused of sleeping with Kyle Hope (Samuel Bottomley), a 15-year-old pupil of hers. Jenna’s chaotic lifestyle usually sees her end up in the amusingly named Lazarus nightclub of an evening, bumping into various of her students (literally and metaphorically), getting so drunk she has a blackout and being raised from the dead by some strange man the morrow, which I suppose is more or less the miracle of Lazarus.
