This shows what comprehensive schools were really like in the 80s. Forget the unrealistic Grange Hill with the goodlooking cast of rough but good hearted working class kids, Birth of a nation shows the disturbing truth. Class after class of ugly, aggressive teenagers. Thick, hateful savages with speech impediments. It felt like I was watching a documentary.

Birth of a nation was clearly made as a piece of political properganda that focuses on how corporal punishment doesn't work. And how qualifications in comprehensive schools are worthless because there are no jobs for unemployable thickos who spend their days smoking behind the bikeshed and extorting money from younger children.

Thank God for smartphones and zero hour contracts, because apparently bored school leavers who couldn't get jobs in those days would hang around outside the school gates to be antisocial. What saddos. Wouldn't they be happier at home in front of the TV?

Jim Broadbent (aka Roy Slater in OFAH) was believable as a teacher because he was so ugly. But I found some of the messages in this film bizarre. Like how one of the teachers pulled his pants down on school grounds while looking at a poster of a naked women and then proceeded to wear a thong. Were they insinuating he's gay and getting off on spanking the boys?

Despite how miserable and bleak it was, I actually enjoyed watching it because I felt like I was watching something real, not the fake, sugar-coated, rubbish that tries to cover up reality.

I just watched 'Birth of a Nation' again for the first time in over 30 years after buying the DVD set. This is the film that led me into becoming a teacher along with Leila Berg's book 'Risinghill - Death of a Comprehensive School'. In fact, the sex education scene in BOAN was almost certainly inspired by an identical real-life lesson described in Berg's book. There was a time, many years ago, when the likes of Loach, Clarke, Watkins, Jackson & Hines and of course Leland used television as a medium to try and change society for the better, and amazingly the BBC and ITV (and C4) backed them. Now we are fed a diet of repetitive thrillers and unreaity shows so that the 1% can maintain their dominance and keep the rest of us in perpetual serfdom. Television has truly become the opiate of the people, just as well we have DVDs and the BFI.