The History Boys

to the cinema to see the film adaptation of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys. It concerns a group of boys in a Northern comprehensive who hope to go to Oxbridge, and the way their teachers guide them, particularly when the headmaster brings in a young tutor specifically to coach them in how to impress dons at the prestigious universities. While not as anachronistic, embarrassing and misleading regarding Oxford and Cambridge’s classism as the trailer made it seem, it was still a pretty awful film. I’ve never felt so much like a fifty-year-old as I was when I was expected to swallow this old fart’s view of what youth are like, how easily categorisable and understandable, even when they’re being sexually deviant or trying to outfox their elders. Never have I seen a more unlikely group of boys passed off as gritty and real. Never before have I seen three adult characters so totally defined by the values and interests they’ve had tacked on to them while all being of essentially the same flat character and verbosity, each defined far more by their actor than their written character. It was patronising, dull, contrived and contained about 30% of the good jokes it needed to sustain it. Oh, and teacher-pupil relationships really should’ve been explored in more depth than groping and sordid invitations from the boys. Yes, you can present it as a tragic yearning and a rather pathetic character flaw, but at least go into the issue of abuse of trust just a little bit, eh, Alan?