Bringing Back The Smiles (TV Times, 29 January - 4 February 2005)
Julie Walters stars in the inspiring true story of the woman who tamed one of Britain's toughest schools with courage and humour.
Failing and gang-infested, the London school that had won national infamy when headmaster Philip Lawrence was knifed to death in 1995, needed a miracle to save it from being closed down. What it got was Lady Marie Stubbs, a sixtysomething retired headmistress with a crusading zeal and some unusal ideas.
On the set of Ahead of Class - ITV1's inspirational drama telling Marie's story - actress Julie Walters is preparing for her next scene.
"How does this look?" she asks, adjusting her baseball cap for maximum laughs. "And how about this?" she adds, pulling stringy trails of gum out of her mouth and then blowing a balloon-sized bubble.
"Marie actually did this at a packed parents' evening to demonstrate why children shouldn't wear baseball caps and chew gum at school. One of the great things about her is that she often got her message across with humour."
Julie, it has to be said, has a huge admiration for Marie, who in 2000 was called out of retirement to tackle the problems of St George's, a Catholic comprehensive school in Maida Vale.
"By the time Marie arrived the school was on Special Measures, meaning it was facing closure," says Julie. "At that time, teachers were afraid to leave the staffroom at break. There was fighting, stealing, truancy, gang culture, kids escaping over the wall. Both the staff and pupils were in a state of depression; you could sense it in every corner of that school."
Marie arrived not just with a new broom but with a new paintbrush, brightening up the corridors, classrooms and dining hall. She also had the courage to take the school back to basics, demanding politeness, good attendance, punctuality and a uniform.
"She could be old-fashioned, but at the same time she had an amazing understanding of modern children," says Julie. "For her, every child was unique and needed to be seen and heard as an individual."
When the role was offered, Julie accepted immediately. "In these rather negative times for education I wanted to be part of something that would inspire and show how good teachers like Marie can make a difference."
Julie herself should know. Both her elder brothers are teachers and her mother-in-law was a headmistress. At one time - long before she became one of our most successful actresses - Julie, too, trained as a drama teacher in Manchester and experienced a baptism of fire when she was sent for teaching experience to a sprawling comprehensive.
"On day one I was in the canteen when a fight broke out between a teacher and a big burly girl," she recalls. "The girl threatened the teacher and then, shockingly, landed a punch. Next thing they were rolling over and over on the floor, heading towards some stone steps outside. They rolled down these, with the girl banging the teacher's head on every step. I've never forgotten it."
It was a sharp lesson, she says, in the everyday perils of teaching.
"And when I think about what Marie took on at St George's, it seems terrifying to me. It took incredible courage to do what she did."
Julie captures Marie's courage and humour perfectly - helped, she says, once she got into a smart black suit (Marie believed she and her teachers should always look completely businesslike at school) and set about mastering her clipped Scottish accent. "In the end, though, it didn't seem vital to get the accent exactly right," says Julie. "What mattered was showing how well she was able to communicate with the children."
Filming Ahead of Class marked the end of a work sabbatical for Julie. She's taken most of the previous 12 months off to be at home with her daughter Maisie, who, at 16, was going through her own education dramas sitting her GCSE's.
"I felt it was really important for me to give Maisie my undivided attention. In the end, she passed eight GCSE's and her dad and I were ecstatic for her," she says, mentioning her husband Grant Roffey not for the first time in our interview.
Thought both parents are in favour of state education, they chose private schools for Maisie, who was seriously ill for several years after being diagnosed with leukaemia at the age of two.
"Maisie has been sheltered in that sense. We just felt that she's had enough to deal with, being ill for three years, and we wanted to make school as easy as possible for her," says Julie.
The family live on a Sussex farm where Grant runs an organic farming business. "It's been a lovely upbringing for Maisie," says Julie. "My only regret is that she didn't have any sibling because I would have loved that. But I had her when I was 38 and then, when she became ill, I couldn't have got pregnant then."
Now aged 54, Julie's in the menopause years and cracks hilarious jokes about hot flushes, night sweats and '"living with my own microclimate". "But, you know, one of the things I loved about playing Marie is that she's such a brilliant role model for older women," says Julie.
Hopefully, it won't spoil viewers' enjoyment of the drama to know that, in the end, Marie Stubbs was successful. Within 18 months of her arrival, the school was back on its feet again.
"Can you," Julie asks, "blame me for wanting to play her?"