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Hearing that school trips are only for privileged kids, teacher Bernard
Hedges (John Alderton) personally sees to it that his class, the
"problem" class 5C, a rowdy melting pot of working class kids,
coloured kids and kids from other cultures, is allowed on this year's
school trip - which means of course that he has to supervise the kids for
two weeks, and of course the kids get into all kinds of the usual trouble
while he has to duck the advances of colleague Miss Cutforth (Patsy
Rowlands) and try to get on the good side of pretty local girl Penny (Jill
Kerman), who originally thinks he's a racist, but the two warm up to one
another pretty quickly - it's just whenever they want to go out on a date,
the boys and girls of the 5C have caused another ruckus. However, when the
class learns how Mr. Hedges has stood up for them to try and get them onto
the trip, they show their best behaviour - or fake their best behaviour at
least, which also includes stealing the assignments from the kids of other
schools to present them as their own. Then though another class's class
allowance is stolen and pops up in 5C's room, which seems to be a new low
for the class, until it's revealed that a befriended pre-teen gypsy boy
(Nicholas Locise) has done some friendly redistribution without the
knowledge or approval of the class. Finally, Mr. and Mrs. Dunstable (Peter
Bayliss, Eve Pearce) come for their son (Peter Denyer) come to fetch their
son as he has joined the trip under a pretense and with a forged signature
- but somehow they're convinced to let him stay. And of course, in the
finale, Hedges gets the girl - Penny that is ... Now the
feature version of the series Please Sir! doesn't exactly
break new ground - but then of course, it wasn't supposed to, its whole
purpose was to translate the concept to the wider scope of the big screen
for some additional bucks, and as such the film worked out rather nicely.
That said, the whole thing is held together less by an actual story but by
the by now well-known premise of the series, which is why the film seems a
bit of a succession of gags rather than a coherent story, and has an
episodic feel to it, so how much you enjoy it probably depends on how much
you enjoy the series, but in all this translation to the big screen - and
while the series was still on air - turns out to be a very successful one.
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