There is a revealing moment towards the end of the first episode of The Leaving - the new E docu-drama made by Graph Films for RTE which charts four adolescents' pained passage into adulthood that is the Leaving Certificate - when a schoolgirl attempts to explain why she has set her heart on studying medicine at university. "It's just something I always wanted to do . . . I have always wanted to work with people," she falters, china-doll features flushed with a curious melange of dread and soured exhilaration, the earliest pangs of exam-panic. It was as if it were the first time she had ever considered the question.
Her hesitant justification offers a perfect summation of the state of feverish absurdity to which the Leaving Certificate drives so many - pupils, parents, teachers. Our young go-getter wants desperately to get into medicine but is unable to explain exactly why. Not that the attractions aren't perfectly obvious; "med" is top of the academic heap, and its Herculean points requirements make it unattainable for most students. Isn't that - the confused glimmer in her eyes seems to say - reason enough?
The Leaving is awash with such unselfconsciously bleak vignettes; the documentary stumbles doggedly through real-life scenes, often oblivious to the nuggets of insight it exposes. If the experience is by turns a dull and listless one, infused with that sort of stultifying dreariness peculiar to a double physics class on a Friday afternoon, then perhaps it is because the film-makers have succeeded in captured some of the monotony of the points race. School is a drag, we are told, a dispiriting trudge through the muck of frayed textbooks and foolscap notepaper. And when two school principals are shown proffering an assembly of sixth years the tired maxim that the Leaving Certificate is not the most important thing in the world, it is obvious that their underlying message is the exactly the opposite.
Independent documentary company Graph Films is also responsible for D- Watch, this year's fly-on-the-wall portrayal of life in a Dublin fire station. Here they consciously place themselves in the background; unlike most docu-soaps there is no resorting to pat voiceovers. The Leaving's "softly, softly" approach renders the experiences of its subjects all the more affecting.
In episode one our quartet of guinea pigs appear as eager youngsters, brimming with tigerish optimism. As the series progress and autumn turns to winter, winter to spring, their ardour dampens visibly; one student who nurses ambitions of becoming a journalist reveals he has decided to plump for another course - one in which he isn't really interested - because . . . well, there's no point in setting your sights too high - is there? His jaded pragmatism is deeply dispiriting, reflecting absolutely the Leaving Certificate's capacity to strip away the last vestiges of childhood's essential optimism.
It is only when the producers attempt to enliven proceedings by adding a dash of class conflict that things go awry. Through focusing on two schools - upper-crust Scoil Mhuire in Cork city, and working class Jobstown CBS in Tallaght, Dublin, they attempt to foist upon the viewer a cloddish argument about the relationship between wealth and academic achievement. Lingering shots of Corkonian country manors juxtaposed with drive-by footage apparently designed to make Tallaght look like South Central LA grate throughout.
The Leaving, like the events it seeks to portray , is at once darkly fascinating and mesmerisingly humdrum. Inevitably, the core business of examinations: the study, the endless cups of coffee, the lonely nights, the unmitigated slog are merely touched upon. It is impossible to convey fully the sheer, laboured, tediousness of the Leaving Certificate to someone who has not sat it, just as nobody who has come through this peculiarly Irish ordeal - and may have endured more formidable challenges in later life - can really explain what it is about the event which makes it such as an arduous rite-of-passage.
But The Leaving does at least show, that many young people, no matter how determined to "get" a high points course or toil their way into university, don't really seem to know what they want.
The Leaving begins on RTE 1 on Monday at 8.30 p.m.