Here’s the brief: self-styled painted rock demon, Gene Simmons of Kiss takes on a group of classical music students who attend the Christ’s Hospital School in Horsham, West Sussex and attempts to turn them into wannabe rock stars. Here’s the snag: none of them actually wants to be a rock star.
Christ’s Hospital is one of the oldest boarding schools in England, and whilst the school is at pains to stress they are not a posh, public school for the blue-blooded elite there’s really no escaping the fact that they cater for those aspiring toward same said status. The difference? Well, it’s fairly negligible. Christ’s Hospital School is a 450-year-old independent school, funded by a charitable foundation and serving 850 children, largely from deprived areas and set up by King Edward VI in the mid-fifteen hundreds to provide ‘a little learning’ for peasant children and bastard-cases alike. Sounds like your average Comprehensive School? Wrong. The difference with Christs’ is that your average little common or garden bastard at this school can’t go back to Mum and Dad’s every night to knock back a few Bad Jellies and monopolise MTV on the tele, they have to stay and attend Vespers in flamboyant Tudor style regalia – naturally transforming The Cramps’ seminal ‘I Wanna Get In Your Pants’ into ‘I Request An Audience With Your Breeches’. It’s a ‘worlds collide’ kind of thing, a Pygmalion in reverse: an attempt to transform a loquacious crock of gold into delinquent base metal, or a bass metal band, if you prefer.
But is it any good? Well yes and no to be fair. Whilst you have to bear in mind that this is a reality show for kids, and as such necessarily avoids all the furtive, gritty strokes the genre usually pulls off, it’s a fairly superficial and cynical affair, edited and staged-managed to death and hampered by all the usual devices that digital, satellite media can offer: repetitive intros and total recaps, extended location shots and gratuitous soundtracking. If we were being honest, we’d have to say that Rock School could have pretty much been condensed into an intriguing one and half hour special. But across six half-hour episodes original content seems somewhat thin on the ground. It just doesn’t let rip, in my view. It’s too safe.
The upside, however, is the hilarious Gene Simmons and the unintended comedy of the pupils themselves. Take Josh, for instance: he plays trumpet, likes classical music, speaks Elvish has only this to say: ‘I’m not into rock music, I think it’s vulgar.’ Or Dudders, for instance, neurosurgeon in the making and multi-instrumentalist: ‘I think he’s a bit of a weirdo’. True, it’s one prolonged and running joke – the wise, loquacious twelve-year old pitted against the crude, uncouth rock veteran – but its successful because of its pathos, and an because of an underlying tension: the humility and quiet determination of old and precious traditions in the face of mounting pressure from an increasingly hostile modern world. Even if the programme fails to tell you that Gene spent four-hours in rehearsals the most memorable moment of the show is when the wild-man of rock takes take hymn practice in chapel and inspires 450 flamboyantly frocked pupils with a ten-minute version of ‘God Gave Rock n’ Roll To You’. It’s a classic.
Think Harry Potter meets The Osbournes with just a dash of Deads Poet Society – and you have a close approximation of the show.
Have we anything left to declare? Oh, yes. Dudders is so BUFF!
Features include: 90 mins of unseen footage, deleted scenes, video diaries, a bonus episode, a meeting between Gene and the Deputy Head, Gene’s Hotel Tour and Rock School Revelations