Britons are already worried about "Heartbreak High", the TV school drama being exported from Australia - and it doesn't even go to air until mid-September.
'Inevitably,' says its producer, forty-one-year-old Ben Gannon (ex-'Hair', 'Jesus Christ Superstar', 'Rocky Horror Show') 'people in England are going to be offended.'
They already have been. Some words long since devoured by huge Australian viewing audiences have caused raised BBC eyebrows. So they have been re-scripted and re-spoken for early evening Britain. 'Because,' sighs Gannon 'they are "considered inappropriate."'
Words like "Wog" -'almost a term of endearment in Australia, when it's applied to Italians,' he points out, 'you don't expect them to turn round and punch you. But in England it is apparently considered to be in very bad taste.'
And "crap" (when an Australian doesn't believe something and says so); censored in the UK for reasons of alternative interpretation.
'And,' says Gannon, who has no children, ' "wanker", which is a derogatory term for a fool in Australian schoolyards. The BBC would not have it.
British viewers will discover that 'Heartbreak High' is long, unkempt hair. Kissing in the corridors. Wild, untidy dressing. Kissing in the schoolyard. Abusive classes. Kissing. Cuddling. Unbuttoning of blouses. And - more kissing.
The same night I chatted to the now rich theatrical whiz-kid who made the multi-million pound show-deal with the BBC, the ‘acting headmaster’, a man with an eye-catching bodybuilder's physique - pigeon chest, very little neck and tiny waist - was asking if one of the kids if he would pick the absent headmaster's filing cabinet lock for him.
A serious Latin lad and an innocent, fresh-faced blonde had moved their schoolyard snogging into a motel room to take their rising affection to a climax ('You don't have to do this if you don't want to'). Furiously unbuttoning her boyfriend's shirt, the blonde star of the hour-long film breathlessly gave him his answer.
(CU of naked couple in bed. Fade...)
Children brawled in class. A counsellor threatened to vomit in the staff room because of something unpleasant she'd been told. And a waif-like teacher, who looked younger than half her unruly, headphone-festooned charges, tried to stand up to the bullying bodybuilder whose role is school Nazi. (There could have been innuendo in the close proximity of their heads, eyes flashing in anger, or some other passion, but it might have just been the camera angle or the imagination of this out-of-touch-with-reality wrinkly).
But sexy it is. And real it is, insists Ben Gannon, who helped shock London 20 years ago with full-frontal nudity in 'Hair' when he was Company Manager for the Robert Stigwood Organisation. 'It seems silly nowadays that it caused such a stir. But the uproar was huge at the time. It was one of the things that made the show so successful. The cast became stars and celebrities when - with a few exceptions - they were not actors as such. Some were just singers.
'"Heartbreak High" treads a very narrow path trying on one hand to explain through TV about schoolkids and their mores, and yet not offending.
'There are people saying that disciplining their children is hard enough as it is, without having such behaviour depicted on a television show; life imitating art. But I don't think that is a worry,' said Mr.Gannon, who spent eight years in the London theatre world.
