That'll Teach 'Em: Boys Vs Girls (C4)

WHO needs the nanny state when television will raise your children? There's a programme to suit every age. Supernanny for the youngest, while older ones can be sent to brat camp or finishing school. If all else fails, give them a dose of national service in the Bad Lads Army.

And there's C4's educational series That'll Teach 'Em, which adds something new this time - the battle of the sexes.

In other respects, this is school business as usual with 30 modern teenagers subjected to the harsh discipline and short haircuts of the 1950s grammar school.

The feeling of deja vu is reinforced by the pupils' futile attempts to hide contraband in the dormitory. The boys' stash of chocolate was hidden under the bed and carpet. One girl showed more ingenuity by hiding bars of chocolate inside sanitary towels.

She'd reckoned without Matron's beady eye at the school whose motto "Only the fittest survive" would have to be changed to "Only the fattest survive" if they'd eaten all the chocolate.

School in the 1950s, for those who don't remember, was notable for discipline and academic rigour. This is being reproduced at C4's Charles Darwin Grammar School, where staff have been trained in the methods of the period.

Thirty boys and girls are being taught separately. They'll remain apart outside class under the six inch rule, which sounds like a job qualification for male porn performers but refers to the distance by which boys and girls must stay apart.

Just like at brat camp, jewellery and piercings must be removed, along with make-up and long nails. The boys all receive the regulation short back and sides.

There's no room for individuality, which inevitably causes problems with teenagers at an age where they don't want to toe the line but do their own thing.

After only a few days, Brennon was demanding to go home. Matron wasn't impressed, reckoning he'd thrown in the towel too early. "Probably a mummy's boy," she muttered, unsympathetically.

Other words applied to pupils so far include idiot, numskull and fool. These seemed quite appropriate in the light of the results of their 50s-style physics, chemistry and biology exams. They did disastrously, or as their teacher put it, "a complete and utter disgrace". One girl managed to score zero out of 20.

They may be academic high-fliers today but all but one of the girls would have failed the exam in the 1950s. No wonder that today science in schools is in crisis.

There was worse to come as pupils had to plunge their hands into a tank of maggots during biology, which was more like a Bushtucker Trial than a lesson. The maggots they collected were put on a piece of meat so the pupils could study decomposition, thus teaching girls to be good housewives and not leave food uncovered in the kitchen.

The girls didn't want to do it, presumably deciding that composition in English was okay but decomposition in biology wasn't.