A Teacher, BBC 2, BBC iPlayer, written by Hannah Fidell and based on her novel.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p08xc504/a-teacher-series-1-episode-1

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p08xc59p/a-teacher-series-1-episode-2

We all know about the meet-cute, when the main characters collide, and we know they’ll later have a romance. In Norah Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally, for example, Sally Albright (Meg Ryan’s character) is sitting waiting in a beaten-up Beatle car filled with junk to give a lift to Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) while he gives a prolonged snog to his latest has-been. Here Hannah Fiddel is more in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita territory with middle-aged literary professor Humbert Humbert having a sexual obsession with his stepdaughter, Dolores Haze, and English school teacher Claire Wilson (Kate Mara) having an affair with her pupil Eric Walker        (Nick Robinson).

The first couple of episodes set things up. Claire Wilson arriving at Westerbrook High and Eric Walker and his school buddies looking on and saying how cute she is. But, of course, she’s ‘a teacher’ and they’re eighteen-year-old boys they know the difference between fantasy and reality. Twelve-year-old Lolita, for example, has still a lot of growing up to do in comparison.

We’re a long way from Texas, but in Damian Barr’s autobiographic Maggie & Me, with Motherwell as a backdrop, he tells the reader how as a spotty sixth-year pupil, one of his teacher was giving him the heavy-come on. Prattling on about her problems at home and how her husband didn’t really understand her. Giving him a lift home.  Does this sound familiar? She didn’t realise he liked boys. Perhaps that would have made a more interesting drama.

Usually, as we know, far away from News of the World type exclusives, in around 99. 9% of cases it’s the male teacher leching after the female student. Age does matter. Who does what to whom shouldn’t matter.  But for this kind of drama, phew, every schoolboy’s wet-dream onscreen. You might want to watch how it develops and how the protagonists don’t live happily-ever- after over ten episodes.  Two short and colourful episodes was enough for me.