What books and films do you remember watching during your school years?

Lord of the Flies.....English lit teaching frequently would say "open lord of the rings...errr I mean Lord of the flies at page...". During the year musta happened about a dozen times. It registered with me somewhere that this Lord of the Rings must be pretty good if it is always in the teachers head. I wasn't really into reading, but when I did wander into Waterstones store, I kept going to the place where there kept the LotR books, and ended up buying the illustrated hardbacks and reading it. All because of the frequent mis-takes of the teacher.
 
One Wednesday afternoon when we should have been doing sports, the weather was bad enough for the teacher to let us watch a film on the schools newly acquired video recording machine. One of the very earliest ones with the lever buttons. Anyway, he sent one of the kids up to the newly opened video rental shop to get a film. So spent that afternoon watching Bruce Lee's The Big Boss. Had a brief topless scene in it as I recall, so you can imagine how that went down.

Book wise it was mainly all the Shakespearian classics. I can remember Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, A Midsummer Nights Dream, Twelfth Night, The Tempest. The only non Shakespeare I can remember having to read was Animal Farm, 1984, To Kill A Mocking Bird. Think we had to watch the black and white film for TKAMB as well.

One of my English Lit teachers was Mr McKinnel, who everyone called Killer. He was also the sports master and was one of those "cool" teachers you get who behave like they are one of the lads, even though he must have been in his late 40's. Don't think he was ever Yewtree'd, though there were a couple of others who I would be amazed don't now appear on some lists, if still alive.
 
Nothing much from school itself it was mostly stuff like Kes which I and I suspect we had zero interest in most of my school reading came from what I found in the school library myself much more interesting I remember we got to read a bit WWI war poetry which did raise my interest but only for a little bit he made it clear the smart kids got to go in depth with that and we obviously weren't worth bothering with.
 
Great expectations - ok
Watership down - loved it
Of mice and men - trash
Lord of the flies - trash
Kes - good
Misc shakespeare - trash
Misc poetry - trash

Basically the whole English lit course was a waste of time imo, could have just given us a classics reading list and not spent any class time on it.
 
Our English teacher was also Head of Drama and would basically have been Richard O'Brien if he hadn't become a teacher, so most of the books were supplemented by both the films and occasional trips to see any stage production versions.

Animal Farm, Kes, 1984, Hamlet, Macbeth, Merchant of Venice, Much Ado, Romeo and the Endless Wittering, and finally Journey's End, because many of us were studying WW1 for History lessons.
 
At school, the one that stands out is watching Roman Polanski's version of Macbeth. Firstly, it's a Roman Polanski film so... damn... but mainly it was the head bouncing down the stairs and keeping it's crown on just made me laugh so much.

Oh yeah, our R.E. teacher regularly showed us episodes of Red Dwarf. She was great.

With our history teacher we just used to ask how the rugby was and that was the hour gone. ;)
 
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