The Teacher review: Channel 5 drama goes for woke and ends up missing the target

Which is demonstrably wrong, but sometimes – such as when you're watching The Teacher (Channel 5, Mon-Thurs, 9pm) – you wish at least part of the spiel were true.

This is the third season of the anthology series focusing on the UK's educators, each apparently more implausible in the last.

The first iteration saw Sheridan Smith caught up in an illicit fling with a pupil, only to find that what she thought had happened on a drunken night out might not have been as half-cut and dried as she had first thought.

The second series had Kara Tointon and Will Mellor enjoying a bunk-up in an abandoned greenhouse while supposedly wrangling teenagers on a school trip to the Lake District. Needless to say, while they're playing tonsil hockey, a student mysteriously drowns and Kara and Will have to cope with the fall-out.

Now we have Victoria Hamilton as Helen Simpson, a drama teacher at a minor public school and struggling in the face of her students' progressive attitudes and disliking for Shakespeare and his problematic attitude to women.

“If we jettison every play, every piece of writing that contains something that injures their fragile sensibilities, then where would you be?” she moans to headteacher Simon (Navin Chowdry).

Which is a fair point – how do we engage with classic texts and the problems they contain by banning them?

But The Teacher soon sidelines this in favour of an escalating battle of wits between Helen and a bolshy student, Cressida (Alice Grant).

At face value, Cressida is the empress of woke at the school, pulling up Helen on her misgendering, her dead-naming and her 'anti-feminism'.

But soon she is revealed as a conniving nightmare, secretly recording an outburst by Helen when she finally lose patience with the modern teens in her charge, telling them “you may as well kill yourselves now if you can't cope with the world being harsh and unforgiving”.

This being a Channel 5 drama, Helen's words are taken rather too literally, which leads to lots of scenes of people staring worriedly at other people, or watching various incriminating clips uploaded to social media.

Maybe there are points to be made about our classic art and the problems it contains for the modern audience, and how we deal with those problems.

But, having set up the debate, The Teacher has no interest in pursuing it.

It quickly degenerates into a by-the-numbers thriller, with questions over whether the pupil really did kill themselves, Helen's relationship with ex-husband Terry (Steve Edge) and fishy goings-on between Helen's colleague in the drama department and the pupils.

Meanwhile, Cressida's behaviour is so appalling, you can't help dismiss anything that comes out of her mouth, which makes her arguments about misogyny in A Midsummer Night's Dream totally redundant.

Meanwhile, characters behave inexplicably and the dialogue falls well short of the Shakespearean.

Terry, for example, gives Helen a shoulder to cry on as she gets deeper in trouble.

“Back in our day, we had Annie Lennox and David Bowie, and they dressed different and we just accepted it,” he tells Helen with his rose-tinted glasses firmly on. “You don't have to get so uppity about it. I mean what happened to live and let live?”

The very next scene, he's skulking about in the woodland waiting to threaten Cressida into keeping quiet with the promise of dire consequences if she doesn't.

The programme makers picked up on a few headlines, and instead of examining them, used them as a convenient hook for their half-baked thriller, letting it go whenever it impedes the pell-mell progress of the plot.

Never mind woke, I'm all for gathering the pitchforks and the torches and advancing on Channel 5 HQ if it means they stop making The Teacher.