Frances Grant: Grime and punishment

You have to feel for the younger generations. What are the products of touchy-feely, self-esteem-respecting education system going to have to revel in when they're adults sitting round the dinner table reminiscing about the horrors of their school days?

"Do you remember the time Brittany and me got time out?" the well-nurtured ones will squeal in horror.

"Do you remember when the headmaster said my tattoo wasn't a powerful expression of identity but just a sign I was a silly fashion victim? I've been in therapy ever since."

No, there never was and never will be any heroism in being sentenced to counselling or scoring a detention.

Those who had the good fortune to be taught by the likes of David Benson-Pope, however, have tales to match history's bloodiest oppressions.

I still remember the excitement and admiration, for example, of those who survived the old mouth washed out with soap routine. I'm ashamed to admit the delight shared by all the Standard Two girls when the teacher tied a particularly horrible, snotty-nosed boy to his chair. Yes!

Our generation didn't need horror movies like the Scream franchise to get the old ganglions jangling. Not when you still get a frisson of horror over the way our jack-booted teachers dealt to us, the poor snivelling victims.

Trauma brings out creativity. One of my ex-Catholic schoolmates, still feeling sore about his treatment at the hands of the nuns, has made up a slogan for the order: "Cruelty without beauty".

It brought out inventive ways of describing the nature of our tormentors. "Part goat, part boot, part exhaust pipe", is my mate's memorable description of one classroom beast who ruled with an iron hand.

In the timely way telly often has of predicting the headlines, the latest sitcom has given us an odd echo of the Benson-Pope affair, a throwback to sterner times in the schoolroom in the form of Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby.

David McPhail's relief teacher Mr Gormsby isn't one for feminist nonsense or getting down with the brown. He's a paragon of racism, homophobia and male chauvinism all in one little blazered and moustachioed bundle of ex-Army fortitude and discipline.

Mr Gormsby's tirades are truly gobsmacking.

Insults flow freely from the "half castes" in the class to "gooks" to his description of a gay man as - when did local comedy get so brash? - a "vagina decliner".

The insults are jaw-droppers. But the show does have lines which are real laugh-aloud crackers. For example, Gormsby's pungent way of telling a young boy he's just sentenced to "latrine duty" to count his blessings: "Count yourself lucky, Hundertwasser hasn't been in here after eating his nuclear-free sauerkraut." The Hundertwasser referred to is the German on the teaching staff, but I'll never visit those toilets in Kawakawa again without thinking of this line. Brilliant.

The problem with Gormsby and his hate speech is that compared to the other awful teaching cliches littering the staffroom, you can't help liking, almost admiring the guy. Beside the double-crossing righteous union delegate, Gormsby is a model of decency and honour.

He has the comic charisma, too, of the man who has an extraordinary tale of his own derring-do for every occasion. "I once delivered a baby in a rickshaw in Calcutta, sterilised my hands in my own urine ... " he tells a colleague on learning she's pregnant.

Mr Gormsby is a dangerously attractive creation.

The sitcom set in Te Papawai Boys High revels in getting stuck in to the political correctness besetting education. But there are times when we are just too onside with the bigot. Despite all the racism, homophobia and male pig chauvinism, old Gormsby is making much too much common sense.

And you get the feeling, those under his thumb in the classroom aren't quite sure either whether he's a likeable old curmudgeon or a terrible monster.