Ackley Bridge series five review

The Yorkshire high school drama now features characters who talk in utterly bizarre language. Add in soapy plotlines and an inferior cast and it's far past its sell-by date

Seasons one to three of Ackley Bridge (Channel 4) were an ideal lockdown box set for families with teens or tweens. Set in a Yorkshire academy school created by merging a predominantly white secondary with a predominantly Muslim one, the drama never lost sight of its core mission to examine multiculturalism as experienced by teens and educators.

But it did widen out into an accessible panorama of life in post-austerity Britain that was juiced with soapy storylines – the head teacher cheating on her PE teacher husband with the unduly influential "sponsor", who was bankrolling the academy; the tearaway girl hiding the truth about her home life from school staff and social workers. Undercut with sly comedy, it was a perfect school saga, deftly juggling domestic and institutional issues, teaching kids how adults think, and vice versa.

But just as a school that has long been outstanding can soon slide into requiring improvement if the wrong headteacher takes over, Ackley Bridge is not the show it was. In its fourth season last year, it underwent a radical overhaul, dropping back to an early-evening slot in the Channel 4 schedule, cutting episodes to half an hour, and focusing on an influx of new students who had to try to compensate for an exodus of the original cast. The reduction of on-screen talent is significant: you can't lose Amy-Leigh Hickman, Jo Joyner, Paul Nicholls, Adil Ray, Poppy Lee Friar, Liz White, Arsher Ali and Sam Bottomley and expect to carry on at anything like the same level.

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.

For 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. 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.

First 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. 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. 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.

In this latter-day Ackley, big issues are approached with the view that subtext is for cowards. Everything is written out for us on the whiteboard slowly, in large capital letters, double-underlined. 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.

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). "This could start a culture war!"

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. 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. When Ken's prediction comes true and the statue caper backfires, Ms Farooqi defiantly shouts "Power to the people!" – again it is not obvious whether this is a strange joke, or really how the writer thinks "loony lefty" types talk in 2022.

Episode two offers a less hysterical narrative about 16-year-old Kayla (Robyn Cara) fretting over the imminent loss of her virginity, but leads the audience along a worn path of story beats that even inexperienced viewers will be able to predict. All the grit that made the show great has been replaced by pure soap. Ackley Bridge has nothing left to teach us.