Waterloo Road: Why BBC school drama is back after eight-year break

BBC iPlayer’s most popular shows in the pandemic included a school drama that ended years earlier. Waterloo Road has now been rebooted, with some familiar faces returning, although another long-running drama was axed to make way.

Adam Thomas was one of the first people to find out Waterloo Road was reopening its doors after its very extended school holiday.

The actor played Donte Charles, the original school tearaway, before going on to star in Emmerdale and set up a restaurant in Manchester.

“I never saw it coming,” he says of Waterloo Road’s comeback. “I was literally in my restaurant doing dishes at the time that I got the phone call. It’s mad how things work out.”

Thomas is one of several old faces returning for the revival.

He is joined by Katie Griffiths, aka Donte’s sweetheart Chlo Grainger. “There’s clearly been an outpouring of love for the show, which I was oblivious to during lockdown,” she says.

“I had no idea how popular it was. So it felt very exciting that they wanted to bring it back again.”

Donte and Chlo had many ups and downs during their original time at Waterloo Road, which ended with them having a baby. So it’s heartwarming to catch up with them at the start of the new series – still together, a happy family, with their daughter Izzy about to have her first day at the school.

“They’re in a happy place, as it stands,” Thomas grins.

“Then obviously things take a little bit of a twist.”

Thomas and Griffiths were in the cast when Waterloo Road opened its doors in 2006. The turnover of pupils, teachers and parents provided the show with a constant supply of enjoyable, relatable drama – with just as much unruly behaviour and as many rampaging hormones in the staff room as the classroom.

The show helped launch the careers of Bridgerton’s Phoebe Dynevor, Doctor Who and Victoria star Jenna Coleman, The Walking Dead’s Tom Payne and Lucien Laviscount from Emily In Paris.

Those playing teachers included another Bridgerton star, Regé-Jean Page, plus Denise Welch, Neil Morrissey, Amanda Redman and a wonderfully waspish Angus Deayton.

It ended in 2015 but became a hit again during lockdown, with 45 million streams in 2021 making it iPlayer’s fourth most popular series of that year, ahead of Doctor Who, Death In Paradise and RuPaul’s Drag Race UK.

“For the BBC, it is a brand that has a lot of affection and a lot of love from an audience,” says Waterloo Road executive producer Cameron Roach. “So it felt ripe for reinvention.”

Another familiar face to return is Angela Griffin, who plays teacher Kim Campbell.

Kim has now been promoted to head, and the actress did her research about the demands of the top job by speaking to real head teachers.

“It’s very different, being a head, to being a teacher or the head of the year or the pastoral care teacher,” Griffin says. “They are under incredible pressure right now.”

There have been big changes in education, children’s lives and wider society in the eight short years since the show was last on.

The new Waterloo Road doesn’t shy away from reflecting the impact of Black Lives Matter, social media and Covid, and fast-evolving attitudes to mental health, sexuality, gender and race.

“Waterloo Road was conceived as a campaigning show with social realism in its DNA,” says Liz Lake, who wrote numerous previous episodes and has penned the first instalment of the comeback.

The new series begins with a student protest against an olden-days slave trader.

“So much has happened since Waterloo Road closed its doors nearly 10 years ago,” Lake continues.

“The enormous amount of history that’s happened – culturally, socially, internationally, globally – in that period of time has been so huge and so impactful, and it would be disingenuous and dishonest not to reference it and not to include it in the incarnation that we have now.”

“It is holding a mirror up to society right now,” adds Griffin. “But we’re still an eight-o’clock drama. There is still fun to be had. We’re not a documentary. This isn’t some kind of big, heavy tomb of a piece. This is an entertainment show.”

The actress admits she did need some convincing to return. “I didn’t go into that meeting going, ‘I’m going to go back to Waterloo Road no matter what’. I was very much intrigued to know why they’re going to bring this back.”

Roach impressed her with his ideas for her character, she says. But the “clincher” for her was how he planned to use the show to develop new talent both in front of and behind the cameras in the north of England.

“That excites me as much as what was going on on screen,” Griffin says. “I come from Leeds, didn’t go to drama school. I went to a council-run drama group. I don’t know how those people get into the industry now.”

Twenty trainees with no previous TV experience got placements on the new series, which was filmed in Swinton, Greater Manchester.

Another big reason for bringing Waterloo Road back is so the BBC makes more shows outside south-east England.

However, in order to find the funds to relaunch Waterloo Road (and make another, as yet unannounced long-running drama somewhere in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland), the BBC decided to end Holby City, which despite being set in Bristol was filmed at Elstree studios, near London.

The BBC said it made “the difficult decision to bring the show to a close in order to reshape the BBC’s drama slate to better reflect, represent and serve all parts of the country”.

But Holby co-founder Mal Young denounced the hospital drama’s demise as “a purely political decision”, telling the Telegraph his show was doing well but was “a short-sighted and unnecessary victim of the new BBC dogma”.

Waterloo Road ticked other boxes for BBC executives. Given its school setting, it attracts sought-after young viewers who identify with the characters and the setting. The show was first filmed in Rochdale, then moved to Greenock near Glasgow, and is now in Swinton.

“It’s so relatable,” Adam Thomas believes. “Not just the storylines and the plots, but also just the characters. There are so many different characters that people can go, ‘Oh my gosh, she reminds me of that person.'”

The series will also start conversations among its young viewers about some of the difficult subjects it covers, the actor hopes.

“I think we need shows like this, for the kids especially,” he says. “They will go back to school and talk about these topics, and there are some topics that you wouldn’t necessarily talk about. I think it’s important to ask those questions.”

Waterloo Road is on BBC One and iPlayer on Tuesdays from 3 January.