Despite a warning from Ken that “the loony lefty stuff won’t wash up here”, she wants to inform the kids about colonialism and systemic prejudice, so she has purloined a statue of a Victorian plunderer and brought it into school. Similarly, a subplot about the new English teacher Ms Farooqi (Laila Zaidi) – an archetypal Firebrand Who Is Really Going To Ruffle Some Feathers – doesn’t so much take inspiration from recent news headlines as cut them out and glue them directly on to the script. “This could start a culture war!”įretting over the loss of her virginity … Robyn Cara as Kayla. When Marina takes things up a notch by performing a provocative, livestreamed stunt on the school campus (“Have you seen this? I’m trending!”), we get one of several lines of dialogue, where it is not clear if we have veered deliberately into spoof: “A bikini car wash?” says officious school inspector Ken (George Potts). Fizza’s response to being targeted by a malicious online hot-or-not poll is to literally do a speech, standing on a chair in the school cafeteria, about the dangers of objectifying girls and shaming supposedly ugly ones on the internet. Everything is written out for us on the whiteboard slowly, in large capital letters, double-underlined.
In this latter-day Ackley, big issues are approached with the view that subtext is for cowards. A run-in with her equally forthright but less conventional nemesis Fizza (Yasmin Al-Khudhairi) is enough to tip Marina over the edge: she is going to dedicate herself to being aggressively hot on social media. When headteacher Martin (Robert James-Collier) – who, in the best Ackley Bridge tradition, is conducting a semi-secret relationship with Marina’s mother – complains that she’s, like, failing all her A-levels or whatever, Marina takes it badly.
#Cara spoofing series
Thankfully, the series hasn’t turned into a cavalcade of swearing and nudity, although both halves of the opening double bill are, in one way or another, about sex.įirst we follow Marina (Megan Morgan), the best looking girl in school, who arrives every morning whipping her hair back and forth in slow motion, flanked by acolytes and warmed by the gaze of a hundred distantly lustful nerds.
The savvy portrayal of culture clashes was still present, with characters from the Traveller community now in the mix alongside the white and British-Asian families, but older viewers had much less adult drama to chew on, and teenaged fans, at whom the show was now narrowly aimed, were presented with a less challenging, less dramatically varied, less entertaining version of what they had enjoyed before.įor the new, fifth season, Ackley Bridge has moved in the schedules again – whatever significance that has, now so many viewings will be via All 4 or on TikTok – to 10pm, raising the unwelcome prospect of a Hollyoaks Later-style festival of naughtiness. Archetypal firebrand … Laila Zaidi as Asma, with Hareet Deol as Hassan.
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