It’s hard to imagine she wasn’t always this bubbly and outgoing. Every teacher is her “favorite teacher.”Įnergetic from the moment you meet her, Kat welcomes everyone in with a smile and a desire to know them better. The 16-year-old greets and hugs nearly every person who walks by. Teachers is available to watch on demand via Channel 4.Talking with Kat in the charter school courtyard at Methodist Children’s Home is not a simple task, but for good reason. If you’ve got penguins queueing up to act with you, you know you’re doing something right. The penguins were super smelly and quite shy. They put a real lion in the boys’ toilets. It was fun doing all these ridiculous things, like having my knees painted, trying on moustaches, and pretending to be a girly girl to impress another younger teacher my character fancied, and not being able to walk in heels. It was such a gift to have Teachers as my first TV show. I’d be like: “Why don’t you get it? I’ve told you once. The irony is that I would make the world’s worst teacher– I don’t have an ounce of patience. You wouldn’t catch her with a cigarette, but going to work is much easier on a broomstick than sitting in rush-hour traffic. To date I’ve played four teachers, including Miss Hardbroom on CBBC’s The Worst Witch. ‘The penguins were super smelly’ … Raquel Cassidy. He told me that our world always looked a lot more fun to teach in than his reality. Then the backlash became: “Real teaching is not nearly as much fun as you said it was.” I’m filming a new show with Greg Davies, who used to be a teacher. Real teachers reacted against it at first, but then people went: “Hey, teaching’s cool.” Apparently it led to this big surge in teacher training. I’ve never smoked an actual cigarette in my life. We couldn’t drink alcohol at that rate and still manage to do all the different takes, so the alcohol was all fake, as were the cigarettes. The script said: “Susan is just lovely.” I thought: “How can I be that? I’ve been totally miscast.” Susan cares about teaching but she loves smoking and drinking. The publicist said: “You’re going to be on billboards and it’s gonna change your life.” I’d never done TV before, so he’d have his hand on my back, pacing me along corridors and stopping me on my mark. There hadn’t been anything like Teachers before: a comedy drama with fantasy elements such as lions and penguins wandering about. She said: “You won’t tell anyone, will you?” I went: “No, no.” But I thought: “That’s going straight in the show.” Raquel Cassidy, played Susan One of my favourite teachers was still there, now in her 60s, and still climbing up on the roof to have a sneaky cigarette at break time. That had come from me visiting my old school in Slough to remember what it was like. Most liked being seen as real people, but others complained that teachers would never behave that badly, especially the smoking. I liaised with record companies and listened to all the upbeat indie I could find, and left a pile of CDs in the editing suite. People really hooked on to the music, like the title track: Belle and Sebastian’s The Boy With the Arab Strap. It was so successful, Channel 4 commissioned four series in all. The joke was that the teachers were so self-absorbed, they never noticed anything outside their little group. Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The GuardianĬhannel 4 let us go crazy, which is why it got madder and madder, with things catching fire and a donkey wandering through the school. ‘That’s going straight in the show’ … Jane Fallon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |