Review

Culture

Education

7 September 2023

6 min read

Back to school on the big screen

It’s back to school for many. Yaroslav Walker picks his favourite films capturing the friendship, the drama, and the expectation of school life and beyond.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

School students walk across a playground confidently talking and laughing with us

The History Boys.

BBC Films.

The summer is coming to an end, the last BBQ embers are sputtering to sleep, the weather…appears not to have been told, at least in London! Sweltering! Most importantly of all, our children are back to school, nursery or college. In light of this momentous time of year here are my top five back to school film choices, one each for the last five decades, and some honourable mentions.

1970s - American Grafitti

A teenage couple dressed in 1950s clothes sit on a kerb in deep conversation.

Charles Martin Smith and Candy Clark in American Graffiti

American Graffiti isn’t just a lovely piece of nostalgia now, it was back then. A misty-eyed look back at 60s Americana, this film is packed with slicked-back hair, classic cars, diners with roller-skating waitresses, and the complexities of teenage romance. Four friends meet on the last day of summer to experience the joys of a California evening one last time before two of them jet off to college ‘back East’. Curt is unsure about his future and is even considering staying in his hometown. Steve is hubristically thrilled about the prospect of fleeing his humdrum life and even shedding his loving girlfriend for new conquests. Terry is insecure and simply desperate to prove he is as good as everyone else, and Milner is the older friend who never left town and is a local-legend drag-racer. Over the course of a long night they go their separate ways, have adventures, and finally find some closure to their ongoing anxieties: one finds new confidence, another begins to take risks, another learns to be happy with his lot, and Milner wins a drag race…oh, an learns the genuine happiness that can be found in adult responsibility. It's too long, but it is a lovely atmosphere to meander about in, and is edited superbly so it never really drags. With superb performances and a soundtrack bursting with 50s and 60s hits, this is well worth a watch.

1980s - The Breakfast Club

Five glum students perch on stools in school room.

Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, and Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club.

Well what else could it have been!? In many ways the film set the classic pattern of US High School living (which did and sometimes still does inform UK attitudes) and the High School movie. John Hughes didn’t invent these archetypes and wasn’t the first to put them on celluloid, but he was the master of crystallising them. The Breakfast Club presents an all-day detention that just so happens to have a representative from every social caste of the High School system: Andrew the jock (Emelio Esteves), Brian the nerd (Anthony Michael Hall), Allison the weirdo (Ally Sheedy), Claire the popular girl (Molly Ringwald), and Bender the burnout (Judd Nelson). These five kids have nothing in common but their dislike of the domineering Vice-Principal (Paul Gleason was born for this role!)…OR DO THEY!? Whereas American Graffiti explored the process of maturing into adulthood and the taking charge of one’s sense of self (with a background hum of Vietnam paranoia and the end of golden Americana days), The Breakfast Club is much more forthright in demonstrating just how difficult being a teenager is. These kids don’t need help ‘growing up’, if anything they need to be allowed to be kids. Over the course of the day their defences break down and they learn that each of them has expectations and pressures that seem overwhelming, and grown to have genuine respect and compassion for each other. A script that is sometimes on-the-nose and prone to soliloquy is saved by the sheer bravura of the performances. A go to comfort film, that will always be iconic. Any film which ends with Simple Minds is a 5 star affair for me.

1990s - The Faculty

Two students walk down a school corridor, one looking away.

Elijah Wood and Jordana Brewster in The Faculty.

We move to slightly scarier fare with the 90s. The Faculty asks the question you were all asking…what if Invasion of the Bodysnatchers took place in an American high school? The answer is subtext; a lot of subtext and allegory. You know, when you’re a teenager, everything can seem quite tough. The world can seem like it's against you. It can seem like everyone you know has changed overnight and you’re lost in a sea of hostile faces. It can seem like a parasitic alien is using your school as a beachhead for a planetary takeover. The Faculty is cinematic junk-food and unapologetically so. It is camp and silly and fun. It takes those Hughesian archetypes, puts them on steroids, and then throws them into a plot joyfully riffing on the most classic sci-fi and horror tropes - all held nicely together with a quip-filled Kevin Williamson screenplay. An underrated Robert Rodriguez directorial effort which shows that he can work well across genres, and an excellent opportunity to see early performances from Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Jon Stewart, and…wait…is that Usher in that film!?

2000s - The History Boys

Yes, we move to British shores at last. Alan Bennett’s stage-play is brought to beautiful cinematic life by original director Nicholas Hytner, who has an excellent track record of translating Bennett’s work from stage to screen. It’s another flash of nostalgia (which all such films are, as adult writers and directors look back to their own school days and teenage angst and adventure) which transports the viewer to 1980s Sheffield. A group of friends at the local Grammar School have all done very well in their A Levels and are now put to the task of preparing for the Oxford entrance exams. All are lovers of History (well, maybe not Rudge) and have received an enviously eclectic education in the full gamut of culture from the eccentric and long-suffering Hector. Like all the films above, The History Boys explores the challenges of adolescence, but with a specific focus on ‘doing well’ in a particularly British way. Sporting excellence or popularity aren’t the measure of student success - Oxbridge is. The teachers don’t push the young men nearly as much as they do themselves, seeing a place at Oxford as the best form of advancement. The witty and moving script also touches on the issue of infatuation, attraction, sexual fluidity, and chaste reciprocity: Posner’s love for Dakin being encouraged only so far in some sort of mutually agreed stand-off, Dakin’s willingness to sleep with the substitute teacher Irwin, and (of course) Hector’s tradition of giving the boys a ride home on his motorcycle and…appreciating them aesthetically. Not easy subject matter, but written and directed and shot and performed with such sensitivity that you can’t help but fall in love with every character.

2010s - The Inbetweeners Movie

Two students look at each in in incomprehension.

Blake Harrison and Simon Bird in The Inbetweeners.

We end with crudity. Crudity and friendship and a booze-filled week in Crete. Lovers of the TV show (I was one) - which explored the trials and tribulations of four unpopular, unremarkable, and unfortunate teens at a British comprehensive school- were well served by this upgrade. TV comedies, like plays, rarely translate well; The Inbetweeners Movie is an honourable exception. Will, Simon, Jay, and Neil have come to the end of their school days and decide that they need one final hurrah before they go their separate ways. The proceeding 90 minutes is a torrent of drunken antics, foul-mouthed discourse, and crass toilet humour, all threaded together by hapless and fruitless sexual intrigue. 90 mins of that might seem like it would wear thin, but The Inbetweeners Movie is too kind-hearted to go stale (unlike its successor which was a genuinely squalid and unpleasant affair which had me questioning humanity). The four young men are so pathetic in the true sense of the word, that you can’t help but cheer for them. The overall message of friendship as a virtue that transcends the ups-and-downs of life give the salty humour a sweet edge. For a certain generation - mine - this might be the definitive British school movie.

Honourable Mentions

Grease

Sort of like American Graffiti…but better. I’m talking Travolta, I’m talking Newton-John, I’m talking songs that are bullet-proof! Graffiti is on the official list because it speaks to the many cultural and political undercurrents of the time…but Grease is so much more fun. If you can only see one of the two, see Grease!

Gregory’s Girl

Pipped by Breakfast because of the archetypes and Simple Minds, but probably one of the finest British rom-coms ever!

Mean Girls

Obviously. It's so fetch!

Article

Culture

Fun & play

Holidays/vacations

22 August 2025

5 min read

How were your holidays, Molly-Mae?

How to deal with the disappointment of influenced vacations

Susan Gray

Susan is a writer specialising in visual arts and contributes to Art Quarterly, The Tablet, Church Times and Discover Britain.

Where next?

@mollymae

The thrill has gone. So gone. Holidays, once the highlight of the year have become bottomless seas of disappointment. When the luxury travel bestowed on influencers like Molly-Mae Hague amounts to “not done one fun thing”, how can holidays become joyful again?

Travellers’ tales have always dappled dark through the light. Whose heart does not go out to the Wedding Guest, cornered into listening to the Ancient Mariner’s story of seafaring mishaps in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem? Even St Paul found some of his Eastern Mediterranean journeys trying: “in toil in hardship, through many sleepless nights, through hunger and thirst, through frequent fastings, through cold and exposure.” Taking a different tack, Chaucer’s seasoned pilgrim the Wife of Bath, with Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago under her belt, advised seizing whatever opportunities for pleasure your location afforded:

“I made my visitaciouns, To vigilies and to processiouns, To prechyng eek, and to thise pilgrimages, To pleyes of miracles, and to mariages.”

Admittedly the scope for miracle plays and marriage proposals is limited in a travel landscape of overcrowded airports beset by delays, ‘lively’ cruises and plane rage. Other people and sky-high expectations are travel’s inescapable bugbears.

A mother of two who left a Mediterranean cruise early, because of fellow passengers’ drinking and raucous behaviour, according to reports had paid £3,000 for a fortnight’s family holiday. Working out at less than £72 per person, per day it’s difficult to know how the cruise company could cover the costs of providing full board and sailing around the Med, let alone supply staff for the allegedly tardy vomit cleaning on deck.

Cheap travel always comes at a price. But we wish it didn’t. BBC’s Race Around the World is wildly popular because it presents budget travelling with the tedium edited out, or at least fast forwarded. And with medical teams and security advisers on hand, to protect contestants from serious harm. This is a world away from shoestring travel as we know it: getting transport and arriving at times of day nobody would choose, waiting in the freezing cold or boiling heat and weighing up the loos’ likely state against your growing desperation. Budget airlines let us travel amazing distances at, sometimes, amazing prices, but the hard currency we pay in is time, as protracted boarding, cabin bag size cat-and-mouse at the gate, peripheral runways and middle of nowhere airports, devour the hours.

But media exhortations to ‘see the world’ and digital nomad lifestyles, regardless of resources, airbrushes this reality away. Except when travellers fall ill having ‘forgotten’ or trimmed travel insurance from holiday budgets. Then their Go Fund Me appeals, complete with hospital bed photo, are treated with derision, echoed by rafts of comments delighting in the misfortune and pain that ‘serve them right’.

Into this moral soup of self-pity for our own travels’ pitfalls, scorn for those even less successful at having a good time than we are, and envy towards travellers who buy their way free of inconvenience, land influencers such as Molly-Mae and sister Zoe-Rae.

Instagram’s illusionary nature does not diminish the hard work and talent needed to create an endless stream of beige outfits and bikinis by the pool image

In July Molly-Mae lamented to her 8 million Instagram followers that she had “not done one fun thing all summer”, despite sharing trips to Budapest, Dubai, St Tropez and Disneyland Paris. Notwithstanding flying by private jet, Disneyland Paris was at times “unenjoyable” due to the school holiday weekend crowds, and visitors surreptitiously taking phone photos of the influencer and recently reunited partner, boxer Tommy Fury. A more recent trip to the Isle of Man in a new £86,000 motorhome, acquired by Tommy so their two-year-old daughter Bambi could experience more “normal” holidays, also had its challenges. The “spontaneous” journey from Cheshire “literally booked the ferry to the Isle of Man an hour before we needed to leave”, was marred by ferry delays, navigating to the camp site, and their toddler’s vocal displeasure at a disrupted routine, resulting in Bambi being “so unhappy”.

Also in July, Molly-Mae’s fitness influencer sister Zoe-Rae, told her 645,000 followers that Uluwatu in Bali proved so disappointing, she and husband Danny abandoned their anniversary trip after 48 hours. Zoe’s chief lament was the difference between their experience of the resort and what social media had led them to anticipate. “We came here with high expectations... Lovely places to eat and beaches, and lovely gyms and coffee shops. But I don't think the reality of Bali is shown much at all, and I do think it is down to a lot of influencers posting the more luxury side of things.” Zoe’s “lot of research” was not enough to bridge the gap between the reality of being in densely populated Indonesia, ranked an upper middle-income country by the World Bank, with wide income disparity and welcoming up to 16 million tourists this year, and Instagram’s filtered images.

For sisters who make a very good living from social media, it is intriguing the staged nature of Instagram images did not overly inform their travel decisions. Influencers’ shots of travel perfection come from, sometimes physically, pushing out people and necessities of everyday living from scenes. What is presented as relatable or aspirational is fantasy.

Instagram’s illusionary nature does not diminish the hard work and talent needed to create an endless stream of beige outfits and bikinis by the pool images. But the aspirational, five-star lifestyle this is supposed to represent feels like something dreamed up by marketing or algorithms, rather than a true representation of individual desires. Influencers’ flurry of bizarrely timed ‘luxury’ travel should be read more as work contracts than recreation.

Succession creator Jesse Armstrong deliberately created the world of media mogul Roy family to be bland, beige, corporate luxury, with each under-appreciated home around the globe looking like the other. Community, local culture and people other than the Roys go unacknowledged. In an event with Armstrong, former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said the phrase “boring as hell” is no accident, and that to live life purely for our own pleasure and gain, without connection to others, is a living hell.

The rise of ultra endurance sport holidays such as the UltraSwim 33.3 in Croatia, recreating the distance of swimming the Channel, marks a trend for travellers seeking transformation rather than relaxation from time off. Humans evolved through facing challenge and adversity.

And such transformation is not only the preserve of the sporty. Last year on a tour of eastern Romania’s painted monasteries, a monk showing us Neamt Monastery’s candlelit, skull-filled catacombs said travel taught two things: life is lived in days not years, and to learn to be patient and accepting of each other, however long it took. If Molly Mae’s family fancied taking their new motorhome on eastern Romania’s authentically surfaced roads, discovering the joy in each finite day, and finding locals’ and fellow travellers’ inherent worthiness, rather than irritants to be airbrushed away, that’s a post we could all relate to.

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