School ties that bind

TV Review: 'Buy hyacinths to feed the soul," Lady Marie Stubbs advised a staffroom of demoralised and exhausted teachers.

Stubbs was the tough, maverick headmistress who came out of retirement to rescue St George's Catholic School in Westminster, London, five years after the stabbing to death of its former head, Philip Lawrence, at the school gates.

Ahead of the Class, UTV's drama première, based on Stubbs's real-life account of her time spent turning around the sinking school, became an efficiently skilful star vehicle for Julie Walters.

In the years between Lawrence's murder and Stubbs's arrival there had been another head teacher, whose attempts to control the violent, dysfunctional school, which the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) school inspectors had placed on "special measures", had failed. In her wake was a ragged staff unable to cope with curriculum or students, and pupils rotting in delinquency.

Enter Walters, prim and tenacious like a bulldog in court shoes.

Stubbs and her two deputies were more than some of the staff could swallow, and by the end of her first year as head she had 18 resignations on her hands.

With rallying cries such as "The Past is Over" and "Moving Forward Together in 2000", the recalcitrant teachers might have been forgiven for thinking they had woken up in the wrong assembly hall and were in fact at a political party conference.

One of Stubbs's main detractors was the hirsute and disillusioned Mr Styles, played with bristling antagonism by Tony Slattery, but when Stubbs, with missionary zeal, said to him "we are accountable to an authority higher than OFSTED", even he looked defeated enough to shave.

Stubbs opened St George's to the children, igniting them with the task of saving their own school. She inspired loyalty and commitment. She made a cohesive educational institution from children with disparate backgrounds, abilities and languages (everything from Arabic to Urdu was spoken in the school).

At her first assembly, she stood in front of her hostile and suspicious students. "To whom does this school belong, Carmichael?" said Stubbs to a kid slouching against his chair in a baseball cap. "The Pope?" Carmichael offered. "No, Carmichael, this school belongs to you."

We got the gift-wrapped version of what surely was a long and collaborative struggle. Inevitably it was simplified, and there was something slightly manipulative in the way we were asked to swallow uncritically Stubbs's account of her heroic uphill struggle. This feeling was crystallised near the end, when Stubbs, against all odds, organised a ball for the final-year students in "a top London hotel".

The students assembled in feather boas and satin cummerbunds and, without a joint or a baseball cap or stick of chewing gum in sight, oohed and aahed at the chandeliers. Then Stubbs proposed the toast: "To St George's, the children - and the Queen." The students obligingly drank down their orange juice - and good clean fun was had by all. But did anyone check the toilets . . .

PRESUMABLY THERE WAS more than a glass of juice to be had by Adi Roche and the Presentation girls of Clonmel's class of 1973 at their reunion dinner. RTÉ's new series, Class Reunion, began by reuniting Roche, founder of the Chernobyl Children's Project, with the 26 girls she had met on her first day of primary school and who remained with her until Leaving Cert.

"And here is your host" had been dragged out of retirement too; the dusted-off Gaybo is looking great and is as friendly, professional and compassionate as ever.

The show's format is to introduce public figures to their old classmates and to examine the influence of school friends and teachers on the subject's life. Byrne held the big red book of class photos and the guests materialised on to the set through big sliding doors just like Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhuru about to save a galaxy.

Only there was no galaxy. Class Reunion was altogether more pedestrian. We met some very pleasant people, including Toby (who was Roche's long-haired date for her debs ball and who is now a neatly trimmed local bank manager) and the convivial Sister Alfonsus (who once recorded the dawn chorus for her girls). It was all pleasant to the point of somnambulism, a bit like being at a wedding where you barely know the bride and don't recognise the groom. Nice party, but why am I here? I hope they all had a lovely time at the post-show bash. It was chicken and ham with stuffing, I think; there was one for everyone in the audience.

ELSEWHERE ON RTÉ, the excellent Arts Lives strand continued with a film on the life of Jack B. Yeats, by German film-maker Barbara Dickenberger, which explored the landscapes of Sligo and Dublin that inspired Yeats's paintings.

This sumptuously shot film, unobtrusively narrated by painter Robert Ballagh, was beautiful to watch, with real landscapes and characters dissolving cleverly into Yeats's expressionistic paintings.

The English art critic, John Berger, said "Yeats appears too mobile, too spontaneous, until one has watched the west coast of Ireland". The "speed and spontaneity of Yeats's works that flowed on to the canvas with enormous rapidity, using fingers and thumbs, the intense concentration that produced even a large canvas in two or three days" were echoed by film of the rapidly changing weather patterns along the west coast, where Yeats (son of a painter and brother of W.B.) spent his childhood and adolescence.

"Nobody creates," Yeats said. "The artist assembles memories." There were black-and-white photographs of Yeats, who, when living on Fitzwilliam Square, would take Fridays off painting, put on his Homburg hat and walk around Dublin collecting images, a sketchbook and pencil in the deep pockets of his coat. He was, we were told, a quiet and restrained man who "cast a cold eye" on his subject matter.

Yeats lived with the tacit disapproval of more formal Irish artists, but was liked and understood by contemporaries such as Samuel Beckett and James Joyce.

Joyce, who bought two of Jack B.'s paintings, responded to an art critic's verbose academic investigation of the work by saying: "There are great silences in that picture, Mr M."

Yeats died in 1957 and is now seen as one of the leading figures of 20th-century Irish art, his canvases selling for up to half a million pounds. Eat your Homburg, Mr M.

THE VERY FUNNY, astutely observed and meticulously researched The Rotters' Club continued this week. Based on Jonathan Coe's novel of the same name, the three-part adaptation follows a group of teenagers in a Birmingham comprehensive in the mid-1970s, their families and the political climate in which they lived.

The first episode, having lulled us into a nostalgic trance that could almost have had us reaching for a Peter Frampton album, ended abruptly with the Birmingham pub bombings.

The story's narrator, Ben Trotter - or "bent rotter", as he's known to his friends - has a road-to-Damascus religious conversion over a pair of swimming trunks in episode one.

By the start of episode two, however, with his sister having lost her mind and fiancé to the bombings, he wonders if he has been praying to the wrong god.

But things begin to look up. His sister starts to recover and the object of his fantasy, the angelic-looking Cicely (with hair made for tossing) starts to fancy him (for his mind). He leaves his band and starts writing his novel.

Meanwhile, his mate is invited to go to London by the music mag NME; not only does he get to review a punk band for NME but he ends up having energetic sex in Chelsea with a horsey girl called Ffion ("Back to my place for rumpy-pumpy?"). He didn't think twice.

Counterpointing the optimism and earnestness of the younger characters there is a darker adult world - growing industrial unrest, racism, the rise of the National Front - and the personal betrayals that shatter lives.

A goofy Mark Williams suspects (not without reason) his wife of having an affair with their son's art teacher, a treacherous, pretentious, floppy blonde with velvet flares and a wrist-band who holidays in Corfu (the art teacher, not the wife). "She says it's platonic," the husband tells his friend. "I looked it up in the dictionary. It means they haven't done it - yet."

Priceless.