The Teacher review: There’s no one better than Sheridan Smith at performing with so much flair and vulnerability

With a certain amount of knowing, much exuberant flair and the usual undercurrent of vulnerability, Sheridan Smith plays Jenna, a hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-living, rather debauched secondary school teacher in Channel 5’s new drama series, The Teacher. It’s set in Bradford and it’s not a flattering portrait of that great city or the teaching profession, I have to say. Smith’s character is the sort of permanently hungover specimen of humanity you might expect to encounter in student halls, journalism, or indeed, from what we hear, perhaps the Policy Unit of Number 10 Downing Street.

Anyway, Jenna is an English mistress, in more senses than one, because she finds herself accused of sleeping with Kyle Hope (Samuel Bottomley), a 15-year-old pupil of hers. Jenna’s chaotic lifestyle usually sees her end up in the amusingly named Lazarus nightclub of an evening, bumping into various of her students (literally and metaphorically), getting so drunk she has a blackout and being raised from the dead by some strange man the morrow, which I suppose is more or less the miracle of Lazarus.

The tension in the story is that, obviously, Jenna can’t remember meeting Kyle in the club, let alone having sex with him. The viewer knows she did at least see him there, if not offer him extra poetry readings in the bogs. So her agony is she doesn’t know what she did, or needs to tell the police when they arrest her for sex with a minor. When sober, Jenna is a gifted, brilliant teacher, a bit of a social justice warrior, and she has made a few enemies around the school – envious colleagues she beat to a promotion and a pupil who’s a wannabe influencer, among others. The school has received malicious anonymous emails (eg “If you want to know what Jenna Garvey does at the weekends go on Pornhub…”) for some time. Someone either betrayed her or framed her.

From watching the first episode, I sort of feel I know what’s going to happen, which is that Jenna will go through an appalling ordeal that will almost break her, but that she will ultimately be vindicated. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t want to see that, because there’s no one better than Smith at knocking out such a performance, her tears flowing into her sauvignon blanc like a salty spritzer. A frequent target of the tabloids, I’m also sad to say she’s probably had plenty of practice of that in real life. Just like Lazarus, Smith is always pulling off miraculous comebacks, and they are gratifying to see.