Waterloo Road

The show started off a little slow, but it has improved a lot over the years. It is a gritty and compelling look at pupils and teachers at a comprehensive school and the situations they get into. The series is well filmed, with excellent photography and the school itself looks imposing. The writing is engaging and well written, and the stories are compelling and well structured. And the acting is surprisingly good, not the amateurish sort of acting I have seen but it is good. Denise Welch is excellent as Steph as is Angela Griffin and the students are all quite believable with good chemistry. The music is also good, it does stick in your head and is easy to remember.

Overall, a great show. I have seen a lot of good shows and dramas on BBC and this is luckily one of them. 9/10 Bethany Cox

I absolutely love this programme. As a 15 year girl in year 11, it really appeals to me. But to be honest, its 10 times worse than my school. But i think it is a great school for a city school.

Anyway, its basically about a run down school, were the pupils are really badly behaved, and the teachers cant control them. The head teacher appoints Andrew as the new deputy head teacher. Andrew is a Oxford graduate, and used to teaching private schools, not bad public schools. Andrew tries to bring authority, and eventually it works... and just loads of different things go on... like Dante and Chlo's car crash story line... and the love triangle between the 3 teachers (cant remember there names... Izzy, Lorna and the guy...) Ill be sad to see this end. I hope it comes back for a 2nd series!!

I was hooked from the first episode and hadn't missed a single one except from the second to last one of the first series! I was gutted! Waterloo Road had been compared to Channel 4's Teachers but I hadn't seen it - I had wanted to watch Waterloo Road because Jill Halfpenny was in it and I think she's a great actress after seeing her on EastEnders and Chicago in London.

Waterloo Road tackled many different story lines in the first series with the main one being the court case of Donte Charles. The story lines involved many different situations including bullying, homosexuality, father's rights, guilt and grief.

I found the story lines very gripping to watch especially the love triangle between Izzy Redpath and Tom and Lorna Clarkson - I was so glad when Tom and Izzy finally admit their love and they get together in the last episode! Despite this, I still feel a bit sympathetic for Lorna.

It was definitely an entertaining watch and I recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it before.

OK I have been watching Waterloo Road for quite a long time now. Back in the day this is what everyone was watching and I could understand why. It was very entertaining with the characters having their own dedicated episode at times and other factors of school life. But from 2009 to now I don't really know what to make of the programme anymore. The characters have all changed and so had the management. The issues that came up with either too far or unrealistic. And now the programme is quite unrealistic to me. I personally don't understand why they changed so much and involved diar situations like murder, fire and freak accidents that you simply wouldn't see. Also the situations between characters are also verging on either weird or simply cheesy which I simply cannot watch because I am embarrassed for them. Overall Im still watching but I think that it is unfortunate in what is happening with the programme overall now.

Waterloo Road is a show I've been watching since the beginning in 2006. It was about a troubled school where students were beating the living crud out of each other and the teachers struggling to cope with the students, and their own personal matters.

Now In my opinion the Series 1-4 were the shows best years, it showed the school progress from a school in special measures with a beat up everyday, to a school that went out of its way for its pupils to have a better life at school, and in general.

Series 5 was decent, but then on-wards the show seemed to take a very different turn. At first it was a pretty dark drama that I would really only suggest to parents and teenagers but it went from that to a lighthearted family show, at least that what it feels like to me.

For example, in the first few series, there were more fights, more deaths, more arguments and most importantly, more drama, now conflicts get resolved in the space of an episode and the pacing just seems really off. The show went from 8 episodes in Series 1 to 12 in Series 2 to the standard 20 Series 3 on-wards, and these series felt very well paced with a overarching story line coming to a big climax at the end of the series, you just don't get that with Series 5 on-wards, in fact I had to look up when a series had finished because the finale's after Series 5 just felt like normal episodes.

The pacing and different direction also might be in part to all the different writers, as the original writers and creators of the show stopped writing halfway through Series 3 I believe. Its still good TV, and with the series ending next year after its 10th series, its a good time to go back and re-watch the earlier series and see how the show has changed,its just a shame to see something once to relate-able become so different.