Shakespeare in school

I really wanted to like When Romeo Met Juliet (BBC2, Friday). Television loves new clichés, and since the success of Gareth Malone in The Choir it has decided that getting a bunch of people who wouldn’t know art from a hole in the ground and persuading them to do something artistic makes for great viewing. Up to a point. It also proves that people will do almost anything — even learn to sing, or memorise a script — if they might get on to television. This remains true, even though there are now something like 90 channels. As a friend of mine put it, rates on some of these are so low that you could advertise your missing cat, except that nobody would see it.

Clichés have their own internal clichés, known to the pretentious as ‘the grammar of television’. There have to be cynics, who have no time for whatever it is they’re being asked to do. As one boy put it this week, ‘I ’ate Shakespeare.’ They go on to become the most enthusiastic participants. There is the discovery of a hitherto hidden star: ‘I have seen worse performances on the professional stage.’ They will get the lead roles and make everyone cheer. There will be disasters along the way; someone has flu, or their Mum won’t let them give up the Saturday job. And at the end, in this case episode three, the show must be a triumph with much whooping and blissful tears running down the cheeks of people who didn’t know they had it in them.

Trouble is that a school production of Romeo and Juliet is not the most thrillingly original notion on which to base three hours of television. It has been performed in schools before, sometimes very well.