Waterloo Road (BBC1)

The Road To Guantanamo (C4)

THE headmaster is on the roof of the school doing a very good impression of a man losing his mind.

Perhaps it was double maths that drove him over the edge. Whatever the reason, Waterloo Road Comprehensive needs a new boss after the head is sectioned under the Mental Health Act.

His name is Jack Rimmer, although he's apprehensive about the turning around an educational establishment with poor results and unruly pupils. "It's like taking over the Charge of the Light Brigade mid-gallop," he admitted.

He has other problems including a French teacher - teacher of French, to be strictly accurate - wanting to practise her French oral on him and a new deputy intent on doing everything by the book.

Waterloo Road won't win top grades for originality as it recycles cliches about schools, teachers and pupils we know and love from series like Teachers and Grange Hill.

But this latest creation from Shed Productions (perhaps that should be Behind The Bike Shed Productions as we're back at school) is very entertaining, not least because it's been cannily cast with familiar faces from other series including Denise Welch, Jill Halfpenny, Angela Griffin and Jason Merrells.

The opening episode wasted no time detailing the turmoil at school and home, with car-stealing pupils, a wedding, a classroom punch-up and a love triangle between teachers.

I'm surprised incoming deputy head Andrew Treneman (Jamie Glover) didn't take one look at this educational war zone "slap bang in the middle of hoodlum-land" and leave. Its achievements include 22 pupils on Asbos, goodness knows how many on drugs and the highest underage pregnancy rate in the country.

Rimmer should extend zero tolerance of bad behaviour from pupils to his staff, notably English teacher Tom. He's marrying fellow teacher Lorna but fancies drama teacher Izzie, who turns every drama into a crisis.

"I can't make you happy any more. I'm not in love with you," he tells Lorna. She seems unable to understand plain English and marries him anyway.

When he gets home, she's waiting for him - lying on the bed in her lace undies and informing him, "Your foxy lady is back". Tom refuses to put his personal needs before his educational duty. "I have some marking to do," he tells her.

There were lessons to be learnt in The Road To Guantanamo, the story of the Tipton Three - the three British men held in custody in Guantanamo Bay for more than two years under suspicion of having links to the Taliban.

We've heard of Guantanamo but know little about this prison where inmates appear to be kept in conditions resembling a dirty dog pound. The film, directed by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, brought the grim place to life through the words of the three men themselves and pictures supplied in dramatised scenes.

This hardly made for easy or pleasant viewing and I suspect ITV1 viewers didn't desert Footballers' Wives in their droves to watch it. But it was important as an insight into this prison hell.