First thought - High School Ripoff?

Second thought - after the first fifteen minutes - jury still out.

Half way through; it's not bad, I hate the clever modern cutting; I'm not a Mark Benton fan; music is OK...

Three quarters in; going off it; the script is horrid - every cliche in the book - and the kids are so wooden...

OK - the problem with the first show was that the production, choreography, music, styling and editing are too slick and the script, plot, acting are nowhere near good enough.

3/10.

They failed to get someone involved who is a writer of musicals - David Ian / team of choreographers under Arlene / Harvey writing : all of them great talents but none of them have written a serious musical !!!

What was missing : The Back Story was non existent - referred to but it meant the characters have no depth ( hence your comments about cliches - with a back story any cliche would have had a character reference to give it reality )

So what happened - we were dropped into an office block school with jumping around and singing and dancing and no explanation of what this school was about either - was it the best in the UK ? We needed proof of this before hitting the first day story......

High School Musical is so much superior - the back story was established at a Ski Holiday where the two main character were introduced with their families and their life stories AND a decent song BEFORE the action moved into the High School ( hence it suceeded )

My qualifications for saying this - in a past life I co-wrote the cult High School Musical "Stage Struck" ( 1995)and a few other shows one of which had a short West End run - you can google it if you want & you can still pick up scripts in the USA and UK ( the new HSM3 actually has a very similar song to the opener in that show )

The saving points for Britannia High are the lead teacher and the lead student - both incredibly brilliant. She can really sing! so I will watch it just for that next week. Songs very weak this week - but they could get better.

Jury is out - but the first episode compared to the FAME and HSM series would get only 1/10 from me....the Yanks do it best.

Terrible ratings - 3.6 million, prime time ITV heavily promoted...

I'll try again next week but if it doesn't improve enormously I'll forget it.

Re, ratings, the best game in the world ever,cricket, which the USA media teams have been attempting to turn into baseball for quite a long time, is also failing as a result, not relevent to this thread? Wrong!

The tv media is failing at representing tried and tested formats and changing them for dramatic affect.

The highest rated shows of all time, will always be "comfort tv" and not "shock factor" tv.

And BR, in the case of cricket, the "Yanks" as you say, do not do it best, their infiltration of one of the only UK institutions left, which I`m sure they will destroy as a result, have ruined it all with too much money and introduced egos to the game.

No dis-respect meant BR my friend, but we do have to look at the whole media picture which we are presented with.
We have a million channels available to us and still low quality programming at large.

Fame and High School Musical - along with Grease - have set the standard for "all singing and dancing" yoof musicals. They are all USA produced.

Like JK I will give the show one more whirl this weekend and if it is just as bad then that will be the last episode I watch.

It is a real shame because they have good cast - good production team - yet have missed the point completely with a show like this in the first episode.

I really wanted to like it.......

When I googled I found that my "High School" musical is available in Danish - how strange. It was published in 1997 as well - got the date wrong in the orginal post.

Give me Antiques Roadshow any day. The viewing figures speak for themselves.