General Collapse of Secondary Education, anyone?

Today OTT received a press release from Robins announcing that – after some months of planning – the first series of Moffat’s controversial and (let’s be honest here) critically mauled school sitcom Chalk will be available on DVD for Christmas. This will be the third Moffat-related product from the company, who previously brought out series one and two of his 1990s BBC2 sitcom Joking Apart. Read more about that here.

Here’s the full press release on Chalk:

Chalk, series 1

Firstly, the big news is that by popular request via our Suggestion Box, on December 15th 2008, Replay will be releasing Series 1 of Chalk, Steven Moffat’s inspired, politically incorrect 1997 comedy that drew on his previous career as a teacher. In addition to the six episodes themselves, this release features the most comprehensive list of extras so far on any of our releases – fully 3 hours and 36 minutes of additional material! As well as commentaries on each and every episode featuring seven participants including stars David Bamber and Nicola Walker, Replay has produced a brand-new 45 minute background featurette entitled “After The Chalk Dust Settled” – a look back at the conception, making of and reaction to this controversial sitcom.Chalk Series 1 is available to pre-order now at £13.99 exclusively from Replay’s website www.replaydvd.co.uk and, as with Joking Apart series 2, we will be aiming to despatch all pre-orders early during the week before the official release date.

For those of you unfamiliar with Chalk, if you know Steven’s other comedy series, “Coupling” and “Joking Apart”, then you know what to expect – highly inventive and exceptionally funny farce. Here’s the write-up from the back of the box:

“Following in the footsteps of his award-winning comedies Joking Apart and Coupling, writer Steven Moffat brings us another helping of high-energy farce.

Galfast High School is an ugly concrete carbuncle on the face of education, a paragon of mediocrity. Consistently under-achieving in every league table bar one, schoolgirl pregnancies, if Galfast were a football team it would be relegated every year. Rudeness and bad language are rife, knowledge is non-existent…And that’s just the teaching staff.

Meet Eric Slatt, neurotic Deputy Headmaster with all the charm of a manic Dalek but considerably less compassion, plus a political incorrectness that places him firmly to the right of Genghis Khan (see your history text books.)

His staff drive him to distraction, none more so than idealistic, new recruit Suzy Travis who’s just so annoyingly sane and normal, unlike her colleagues. There’s Amanda Trippley, terminal spinster and music teacher with no pupils and even less ability. Mr Carkdale, Head of English, master of the language of obscenity but fluent in nothing else. Dan McGill, maths teacher, fascinated with statistics – Miss Travis’ vital ones! Mr Humboldt, the PE teacher who would happily use a pupil’s head for a football. And Janet, the School Secretary who appears to despise Eric more than the pupils..

This academic cesspit is unably led by Headmaster Richard Nixon, a powerhouse of ineffectiveness who clearly should have been pensioned off as a student.

It’s a recipe for laugh-out-loud mayhem as the staff plunge from one Slatt-inspired crisis to another.”

BBC America’s contingent consists of the creators and cast of Jekyll, Torchwood and Hotel Babylon and it’s mainly the likes of Steven Moffat, James Nesbitt, Julie Gardener, John Barrowman and Tony Head answering left of field questions as graciously as possible.

Moffat has caused something of a stir in the US for the following exchange probably because of his customary honesty which absolutely goes against the usual policy over there of ass-kissing the network heads:

Reporter: Steven, why was (the BBC) version of Coupling such a success and the NBC version – it tanked?
Steven Moffat: I so enjoy answering that question. I’ve only been asked it 24 times today. All right. I can answer it with three letters, N-B-C. Very, very good writing team. Very, very good cast. The network fucked it up because they intervened endlessly. If you really want a job to work, don’t get Jeff Zucker’s team to come help you with it … because they’re not funny. All right? There you go. I can say that because I don’t care about working for NBC. But I think I’m entitled to say that because I think the way in which NBC slagged off the creative team on American Coupling after its failure was disgraceful and traitorous. So I enjoy slagging them off. That’s the end of my career in LA. I’ll be leaving shortly.
James Nesbitt: Taxi for Moffat!

All of which is probably correct but the first episode of UK Coupling wasn’t as funny as some of the later classics and like many series it arguably took a few weeks, even the whole first run perhaps to bed in and take flight (and even then not everyone was a fan). US television rarely has that luxury unfortunately [via].