Whizzkids Guide

For every junior-aged kid, there's something which looms overhead like a coming storm. Someday, unavoidably, you'll be starting Big School; a bigger building filled with bigger boys. Having fit that demographic myself in the eighties, my expectation was coloured by portrayals, often written by ex-public schoolboys, as post-war landscapes of pet frogs in pockets, japes and pranks, and history masters in mortar boards doling out canings. From Billy Bunter to The Beano to Skool Daze on the ZX Spectrum, I expected to be issued a little red cap and lyrics to the school song on my first day, trusty catapult secreted in my back pocket, but of course, found myself in a place closer to Grange Hill or Kes. Or HBO's Oz.

A big perpetrator of this jolly archetype was the Whizzkids Handbooks. Though published by Armada, Whizzkids felt like an Usborne idea; a kind of school-set sister brand to their Spy's Guidebooks, alongside which they sat on my shelves, with writer Peter Eldin also penning Armada's rival series, The Secret Agent's Handbook. Three volumes of Whizzkids acted as invaluable guide for that coming storm; rebellious tomes of secret knowledge on how to not just survive big school, but get one up on teachers and parents – plus riddles, puzzles and word searches. A sort of junior Anarchist's Cookbook, such was their popularity, within a year of publication, an adaptation was on the air. Debuting on Southern on April 1st 1980, Whizzkids Guide was a series so niche and terrible, even Network didn't touch it before their sad tumble into administration.

Eldin would be sole credited writer for the TV version, which retained the defiant 'down with teachers!' theme of the original, rendering it mildly scandalous to more staid and sensible grown-ups, like CITV's punky teenage sketch show Your Mother Wouldn't Like It would, five years later. I've been working out of a cafe lately, and though I've got headphones on, people often walk past my screen and see, say, Barry off EastEnders being hypnotised, or Andi Peters doing a soft shoe shuffle. This one, I watched at home, as I really didn't want to try and explain why Arthur Mullard was squashed into a school uniform.

It's certainly interesting casting, a group of eleven-year-olds portrayed by literally elderly actors, with Mullard 70, and Rita Webb – hair in pigtails, lollipop permanently in hand or gob – 76 at the time of filming. Sheila White from Oliver!, a comparatively youthful 32, is given the St. Trinians aesthetic, baby-doll voice and blonde hair in bunches, but thankfully they never go down that nudge-nudge path of School Disco paed titillation. Rounding out the cast, saving the best for last, is Kenneth Williams. Kenny was 54 at the time, but always had the vibe of a naughty schoolboy anyway, which is probably what drew me to him as a child, as one of my very first – and everlasting – favourites. Patrick Newell is the lone put-upon teacher, though the cast occasionally double up as teachers and dinner ladies.

There's a sense of the forbidden from the beginning, each episode starting with a warning from a bespectacled boy – the cast's lone actual child – that the following is unsuitable for children or adults of a nervous disposition, advising them to leave the room. But essentially, this is a mix of skits, bar bets, and rotten jokes-for-kids, plus some truly unexpected variety. Adapted from books where most sections run no longer than half a page, it moves at quite the clip over its twenty-minute duration, with a panicked sense to the editing, often cutting halfway through the final word of a scene, hurriedly overlapping into the next bit. Sketches consist of joke-book style material; a teacher calling a pair of latecomers 'the two musketeers,' “because you must-get-'ere on time!” and MasterTwit sections running through every available pun on a given subject – “What fish are you likely to find in a bird cage?” “A perch.” The classroom set's pleasingly comic-strip, with Teach's mortar board present and correct, all sat at those old-fashioned desks which one could hide a mouse in, and with a blackboard wearing two words from a later sketch – CENTIMETRE GRUESOME – aka a description of your dad's cock.

Just as the books, everything relies on playground logic traps nobody would ever fall for, albeit clean ones and not “have you ever touched a BMW?” which is a shame, because I'd love to see Kenneth Williams accuse Arthur Mullard of being an African Bum Cleaner. The loopholes and literalism are at their worst during Mullard's bar bet type gags; wagering White she can't lift a cup using a balloon, or that he can make Webb say 'green'. A teacher's challenged with buttoning up his jacket in ten seconds – “You buttoned it down, you didn't button it up!”

The books and show play to that childhood fantasy of putting an adult in their place with your big brain, leaving them seething and humiliated, so there's lots of 'proving' sums wrong – “Please sir, I can prove that 3 plus 3 equals 8!” or “Please sir, I can prove that 19 takeaway 1 is 20!” In the latter, 19's written on the board in Roman numerals – XIX – with the middle I rubbed out, leaving XX, presumably forcing any teacher who fell for it so mortified, they've no choice but to hand in their resignation. In the Whizzkids world, teachers are easily defeated creatures of habit, with the series functioning as equivalent to a Gamefaqs guide for beating an end of level boss.

As a Beano-reading lad, I had a notebook with 'ULTIMATE DODGE GUIDE' scrawled on the cover, containing a hand-written collection of Roger the Dodger's weekly dodges, and had I seen this show, I'd have been all over their How To Cheat At sections. There are sneaky scams for topics like writing lines or cheating at exams, with the latter suggested pupils write answers on the inside of an eyepatch, at least giving us Kenneth pulling a funny face, before bumping into a teacher after doubling up with two. If that doesn't work, write the answers on your friend's back. Then again, anyone who read the Young Ones book knows there's a better way of cheating. Right kids?!

Just two minutes into the first episode, the Dingbats acrobat troupe show up yet again on this Patreon for some pre-taped tumbling, with another routine of pommel horse-vaults in fancy dress under comedy honks and whistles. Everything's broken up with very short animated segments, slightly Python-esque in their silly anarchy; a pupil getting completely covered with an enormous dunce cap; a dinner gong cracking as it's rung; a monster quaking in fear while reading a book of horror stories. Fights are clouds with fists and feet poking out, and words like BASH and BIF, and teeth fall from the mouths of overweight schoolboys – one of whom, thanks to a G resembling a C, I initially thought was carrying a sack of cum.

The boffin from the opening periodically shows up, sat behind stacks of leather-bound books to share 'interesting trivia'. He doesn't interact with the rest of the cast, solely reeling off zingers from American presidents, reading out letters from the Scientific American in 1865, or excerpts of savagely bad school reports, revealing the subject grew up to become Einstein or Emlyn Hughes. These are breathlessly nervous deliveries, never making it through a segment without falling over his lines, (“salt was velly valuable commodity”) and the choice of topics lacks any connective thread, veering from the word juggernaut's country of origin, to a piece about the Indian rope trick –  “modern magicians believe it is merely a traveller's tale.” As a rope in his hand snakes its way to the ceiling, he asks “is there an Indian boy handy?”

Most incongruous are the weekly songs from extremely wacky comedy folk jug band The Brownsville Banned, who were once agented by Jasper Carrot; songs like My Identikit Girl, about a copper assembling a photofit of his dream woman, backing singers in helmets adding “allo allo allo allo!” In a complete bubble outside the rest of the show, filmed on a normal stage and not the school set, they seem like they've been accidentally cut in from another tape, all wigs and funny waistcoats, presumably with the thinking “they're silly, so kids will like it.” During one honest-to-god toe-tapper, as a singer strums away on a mandolin, another band member baits a fishing rod at the side of the stage, lifting the singer's hat off to reveal a plastic bald wig adorned with an X of two sticking plasters, before filling the hat with orange juice and glugging it down. One number's about Cairo, all in sheik head dresses – “sand bags, wind bags, camels with the hump; fat girls, thin girls, some are looking plump” – with the singer dropping his trousers, though the camera stays ankle height.

And then it's back to the classroom and “Who can name two days of the week beginning with T?” “Today and tomorrow!” and a Mullard MasterTwit where time stands still. With such yawning great pauses between lines, you think he's died in the chair like Sid James, poor paramedics having to heave him onto a stretcher by the blazer. Honestly, there is a guilty pleasure in this great big bull of a man not adjusting his manner at all in portraying a schoolboy, growling infant one-liners in his regular Yus, My Dear voice, veiny old legs hanging out of shorts, red cap balanced on the pumpkin he calls a noggin. “What do you get when you cross a mouse with an elephant?” “GREAT BIG 'OLES IN THE SKIRTING BOARD.” “What is a metronome?” “THAT'S A DWARF ON THE PARIS UNDERGROUND.”

The lack of laugh track leaves all these hoary old gags DOA, but I have to remind myself this was aimed at children, some of whom may have laughed, at least in recognising the cadence of a joke, if not understanding it; the sort of uneducated eight-year-olds who don't know what the Paris underground network's called. Idiots! But I have to single out a couple of extraordinarily bad ones. “Why is an empty jug like a road vehicle? Because it's a jug o' naught!” and “Why do we buy clothes? Cos we can't get em for nuffink!” Lines like that are probably what finished off Danny Kendall.

Mullard's a peculiar presence at the best of times (“Everyone else in the world says 'yes'? Then I'll say YUS!”), but even more-so in a classroom setting. Fist for a face and the posture of an ape, age and lumbering physicality aside, there's an extra element of queasiness seeing him in a school uniform after his daughter's allegations of abuse, which laces all dialogue with terrible subtext; like when he bellows “I'm gonna show you something you've never seen before!” And at no point, does anyone want to see Mullard dressed as a headmaster, patting a supposed schoolgirl on the head with a “there's a good girl...”

Whizzkids Guide is profoundly irritating, as you're essentially stuck listening to a bunch of know-it-all children for two hours, but despite describing the filming in his diaries as “a day of appalling tedium,” Kenneth breezes everything along on his charm, and it's always lovely to see him. Even when he's doing something he hated (which was pretty much everything), he's still giving us the Kenny classics; the flared nostrils, the laugh, the snide voice, rolling his Rs, skinny little knobbly knees on show. There's a bit where he challenges the others to draw a dot in a circle without taking their pen from the paper, and you know as soon as they yelled cut, he was saying “cor, looks like a pair of tits dunnit?!” One of the most intense Proustian rushes of my life gut-punched me with his description of beans on toast as “skinheads on a raft,” and few sights are as joyful as Kenneth Williams leading a sing-song of “if you stay to school dinners, best throw them aside, a lot of kids didn't, a lot of kids died!” He even gets Mullard with the old “what is frozen ink?” last seen in Copy Cats.

The show's at its best the scant moments it feels like a live action Bash Street Kids; a world of pea shooters and dinner ladies whose dumplings crash through the floor. Late in the run, James Bond music leads us down to an underground factory where the kids build their practical jokes, mixing stink bombs in test tubes, and more worryingly, showing Kenny and Arfur tipping chemicals into a round bomb marked 'explosives' like there's going to be a school shooting. But the teacher who mistakes it for a football is left – as such scenes always should – soot-faced and smoking with shredded clothes. I wish they'd done more of these cartoon physics, which is mostly left to the Dingbats, like in a How To Cheat at PE, where a 100-metre sprint's aided by fireworks strapped to a plimsoll, leaving a man-shaped hole in a brick wall. Episodes end with the four main cast stood in a row singing the school song in tuneless assembly style, as credits roll over the top.

Whizzkids are the winners

Whizzkids is our name

We trampled on our teachers

Until they cry with pain

We wore them out and poke

A finger in their eye

Whizzkids are the winners

We never have to try

Whizzkids are the leaders

Whizzkids are the tops

We never are the losers

We never ever flop

We bend the rules a little

We always win the game

Whizzkids are the winners

Winning is our game

Hooray!

If you actually could convince anyone to fall in the trap of saying “just like me” after every sentence, and successfully drop a “and then I saw a monkey...” then it's very much a win that's been earned. But I find a strange phenomena with older 'big school' media from back when I was yet to step through its doors, and don't know if it just applies to me. Though I'm now older than half the teachers, bigger boys in these things still feel like bigger boys, and if I see some vintage Grange Hill from the era I'd yet to join big school, Gripper Stebson feels like my elder; like he could push my 40-something head into the bog and there's nothing I could do but splutter on piss. Who knows how I'd have felt about leaving juniors had I watched Whizzkids Guide, leaving me thinking fourth-formers looked like Arthur Mullard, expecting a voice like a flushing toilet coming from the back of the classroom with a “OI KNOW HOW TO PLAY A TRICK ON TEECHA,” before gluing a penny to the floor and tearing a sheet of paper when Sir bends over. Did I make the right decision watching this privately? Oh yus.