For everyone TV review: Educators
Like much good comedy, Educators is much larger than life, but buried at the base of each joke is a soupçon of truth – and this just makes it all the funnier, particularly for those working in education.
This New Zealand comedy show, featuring faces recognisable by fans of What We Do in the Shadows, centres around a group of secondary school teachers bumbling through the trials and tribulations of their daily work.
Amazingly, the award-winning TV series – shot on location at a West Auckland intermediate during school holidays – is entirely improvised. And yet it feels well stitched together.
The humour comes from the wildly inappropriate capers the staff get up to. In an early episode, when the PE teacher’s mum (Magda Szubanski) is visiting from Australia, he’s forced to confess to colleagues that he’s told her he is the school principal in an attempt to make her proud. The principal agrees to swap places while the mum drops in for a visit, and the episode unravels from there, with the PE teacher randomly signing for important things he shouldn’t, and the principal running some very spurious lessons in physical education.
