After the first five minutes of Bad Education, right after the ­Abbey Grove School sexpot started flirting with useless teacher Alfie Wickers, I stopped this Jack Whitehall comedy to dig out my DVD of Please Sir!, the 1960s classic where such a scene was played out weekly involving John ­Alderton and Penny Spencer. Sharon Eversleigh! You were ever-present in my double-physics daydreams with your Cremola Foam pout and your wet-look boots. So the rest of Bad Education was going to have to be good, and mostly 
it was.

Mr Wickers is the kind of teacher who gets his trainers nicked by the school bully, forcing him to continue lessons in purple Crocs retrieved from Lost & Found. He'll say things like "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder - that's Shakespeare, Chantelle" and the super-intel­ligent Chinese girl will have to correct him: "It's actually from the Bible, you idiot."

Mathew Horne's headmaster will chime with anyone who ever had to endure a teacher trying to be "down with the kids"; Michelle Gomez is the soor-ploom-faced deputy who's got it in for Mr Wickers. Their scenes together are the best thing about Bad Education. When she burst in on his classroom, everyone asleep including our hero, he desperately tried to rescue the situation thus: 
"...and that is how quiet Anne Frank and her family had to be to evade capture by the Nazis."

Whitehall plays a posh balloon - the kids nickname him 'Downton Abbey' - not unlike 
his character in Fresh Meat. He may only have one trick but it's a good one.