Boarders ★★★★ Stan*, August 23 I don’t know about you, but I can’t not appreciate a TV series that got the Daily Mail so heated they awarded it a one-star review and furiously derided it as “a finger-wagging lecture on Embracing Diversity”. They were likely just annoyed that the show’s first gag was at their expense, but it’s not hard to imagine the wider “anti-woke” set getting hilariously worked up by this one, too. Jodie Campbell (Leah) and Josh Tedeku (Jaheim) in Boarders .
Credit: BBC / Studio Lambert Media Ltd The UK series Boarders , which aired on the BBC in February, follows five Black kids from South London who are granted spots at St Gilbert’s, a private school trying to rehabilitate its public image following a viral video scandal where a bunch of its foppish lads were caught assaulting a homeless man with a bottle of champagne. “You knew it was bad when even the Daily Mail called it ‘the great British shame’,” quips Gus, the kids’ mentor, played by series creator Daniel Lawrence Taylor. Hence the Mail ’s animosity.
Taylor has said he got the idea for the series after reading a 2013 article about five Black boys from East London who had been sent to Rugby School – where annual tuition exceeds $89,000 – as part of its “social outreach programme” (the initiative was soon extended to other posh schools including Wellington and Eton.) He found a kernel of comedy in the setup. Like his earlier acclaimed series Timewasters �.