A Very English Education

Regular readers will doubtless not have missed within these postings the frequent references to those venerable institutions – the English public schools. Those without these shores – should they feel moved to investigate a little more closely – may find that any preconceptions that they hold concerning the nature of these august establishments and of the type of characters they attract – and indeed breed – are at best partial. Safe to say that the stereotype of the English public school boy – whilst indubitably having at least some basis in truth – paints a somewhat misleading picture.

Those wishing to know more would have done well to catch – on the BBC last weekend – a splendid documentary by Hannah Berryman entitled “A Very English Education”. The conceit behind the production was the revisiting of some of the subjects of a previous BBC documentary series – first shown in 1979 – which examined the daily lives of a group of young men then attending Radley College. The purported intent was to discover the effect that a public school education had on the lives of these privileged youths, and to that end the first part of the film took them back their younger days to observe and to comment – in the light of their later experiences – on these rarified schooldays spent in the bucolic Oxfordshire countryside.

The programme provided – as one might expect – a fascinating insight into the nature of such an education. As it progressed – however – it became apparent that the true heart of the piece lay elsewhere. Ms Berryman astutely withheld until the very last segment the revelation of what had become of these entitled scholars as they journeyed through life. When their fates were finally revealed – in what proved an unexpected and delicately moving series of sequences – it became apparent that the real subject of the piece was considerably broader than had first appeared – on childhood and growing up – on the nature of ambition (or lack thereof), success and failure – of family and of its echoes across the generations… In short, the stuff of life itself.

“A Very English Education” was beautifully judged and expertly made, proving far greater than its initial impression promised. You may – if you act quickly – be able to catch this excellent piece on the iPlayer. If that proves impossible this review by the Guardian’s Sam Wollaston catches the tone. Don’t read it if you have a chance to catch the programme though…

I missed the first showing and had to catch up on the iPlayer myself. That was enough to reduce me to tears, but then – I am a notorious softy!