OfSTED puts Waterloo Road into special measures: grades it Outstanding.

Apparently there are seven teachers.

Like gas, Waterloo Road returns when you least expect it. I don't usually watch it because it presses my buttons like a flautist on Benzedrine, and I don't like that normally. From the outside it looks like a normal school, and then about ten seconds pass beofre something happens that has me somersaulting on the couch and shouting like an intemperate old man. Usually something absurd has happened. All drama involves willing suspension of disbelief, after all, and even the driest of reconstructions requires the viewer to dislocate some sense of scepticism. But this goes beyond Magic realism, and makes the Magic Roundabout look like Pinter.

I'm sure that the show has some perfectly good advisers who help the construct some form of narrative skeleton. The school looks like a school, and the kids look like kids, albeit with the usual Dawson casting. But even in the most outlandish of escapism, the science can be as bollocks as it needs to be- it's the human dimension that has to ring true, otherwise you're no longer watching a human narrative, but the irrelevant actions of toy soldiers. Exhibit A-Z: WR.

It's depraved- last time I looked, the asisstant head was gaily sleeping with a GCSE student (the Head's daughter, no less, which probably gets him some special level of Dante's Hell), and inexplicably NOT being clapped in chains like les oubliés. The Spanish teacher did pounce on some A-level giant, but that was OK, apparently because it was a pretty, female teacher nailing a young man, so no child protection issues there, no-siree. Then there was the unlovely scowling harridan in year ten who accused the dinner lady's son of rape. Cue: police, etc. But at the end of the episode she broke down and admitted it were all a laugh, and like an episode of I love Lucy, everyone hugged it out at the end and agreed to say no more.

Pass me the spanner. The large one.

The teachers only have to say 'To the cooler!' and the kids, no matter how feral, march off without further ado. Brilliant! I suppose that watching kids endlessly, relentlessly failing to follow simple instructions doesn't make great telly, but that's what normally happens when a kid wilfully misbehaves. Off they tramp, good as gold. Maybe they're scared the teacher will make a pass at them if they don't.

The kids, inexplicably, staged a roof top demonstration at the end of the last season. Which would have a school shut down in about five minutes, I reckon, as they bayed at the Head of the LEA to reinstate the Head. Dear God, that woman; I'd have gladly spannered her.

(The corridors and public spaces look like Mallory Towers; hundreds of well-behaved youngsters biddably sauntering in total silence from room to room.)

The Unemployables. Except maybe Tom. He's safe.

Pupils get expelled in the time it takes to say, 'She's LYIN!!!' Then , usually reinstated in the same breath when it's found that the pupil is looking after a family of refugees while working two part time jobs to support their Dad's crack habit. I'm not saying that the kids at Waterloo Road have complicated, dramatic lives, but...I am. I know this is unavoidable- if a character wants to stay alive in telly land then you can bet within a few years they'll have married, divorced, cheated, gone to prison and changed sex a few times, just to maintain our interest. I feel sorry for them. If they're not getting tortured for our amusement, they get written out, or if they're marginally less lucky, written into that horrific spin-off series on BBC52online or something, where they all live in a tower block in the same three rooms. If they've been righteous, they get parts in Holby (although I notice this process has been going in reverse recently...)

I know I shouldn't let it bother me- it's a fairly trivial thing to be bothered by. I just worry that anyone would watch this and let it become absorbed into their general perspective of the modern teaching profession. Like life, the real thing involves a lot less drama, and lot more sitting around, paperwork and repetitive conversations about hats and effort. I suppose we could always try to invent a new genre- the educational-procedural- but I don't hold out high hopes for a show about phoning parents to remind them that Jasmine needs to remember both gym shoes next time, or ordering stationery. Hill Street Blues it ain't. Or some kind of House spin-off, where a kid isn't reaching their target grade, and the brilliant (and in my head, Scottish) teacher of philosophy works out why minutes before they have to sit their Cambridge entrance exams or something. I'm working on it.

No there are enough bunny-huggers and armchair educationalists running education, thanks very much. Waterloo Road is a nightmare of unrealism (a movement I've just invented), where nothing is as it should be, the desire for a reassuring narrative replaces reality, and nobody seems to know how to actually teach children without resorting to homilies and jargon.

In actual fact, maybe it is the real thing.