Advent Calendar 2021 Day 10: Palace Hill, 1988

Now this - from which the very end is missing and one bit gets very briefly recorded over, sorry about that - is a Children's ITV curio. Spun off from John Gorman-aided sketch show Your Mother Wouldn't Like It hence the bit in the title song, Palace Hill was a spoof school sitcom initially a vehicle for their royal manque characters, hence the title, but quickly span off into oddness and general low-level anarchy involving a bullies, swots, exchange students, a kid caught in a timewarp from circa WWII (played by future voice of CITV and Da Bungalow producer Steven Ryde) and so forth. It was another one scored up for the Central Junior Television Workshop, that unknown, unknowable Nottingham mecca for a generation of children. This doesn't catch the periods when Samantha Morton, Felicity Jones, Vicky McClure, Joe Dempsie or Lauren and Michael Socha were attending but we do see Mark Dexter (The Bletchley Circle, Charles Babbage in Who, Tony Benn in The Crown, currently Hilary Wyndham in Industry), albeit the people who were expected to graduate as stars from this group given how often they were used - Oliver Hawker, Julie Schatzberger - weren't. From the end of the first series, inexplicably American computer geek PC - who, oh yeah, should have mentioned this, is played by Alison Hammond - has just discovered the demonic headmaster is a computer while the self-defining Bonnie and Clyde - the latter is Johann Myers who's been in a good few things as an adult including Silent Witness, State Of Play and Small Axe - are throwing a carol concert.