Saved by the Bell

SAVED BY THE BELL
Made by: NBC
Shown on: Channel 4
Years shown: 1988-2000

Theme tune: "When I wake up the morning, the alarm gives out a warning/And I know I’ll never make it on time/By the time I grab my books and give myself a look/I’m at the corner just in time to see the bus drive by/It’s all right, cos I’m saved by the bell/…When the teacher pops a test, I know I’m in a mess/And my dog ate all my homework last night/Riding low in my chair, she won’t know that I’m there/If I can hand it in tomorrow, it’ll be all right/It’s all right, cos I’m saved by the bell."

Sweet mother of God, how did Saved by the Bell make it in here? Well, unfortunately, it started early enough to constitute a mention, and somehow lasted for over a decade. But did you know that the programme was originally a Disney comedy called Good Morning, Miss Bliss, which starred Hayley Mills as a teacher at John F Kennedy High School? When the series was dropped after one season NBC picked it up, changed the name, sacked Hayley Mills and hung on to a few of the kids.

Anyway, this teenage comedy series in its best-known incarnation was set at the fictional Bayside High School on the American west coast, a squeaky clean place with no guns, drugs or violence. There was no graffiti on the lockers, no security guards on the front doors, and no smoking dope in the long-jump pit. The hero was the street-wise joker Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), with highlighted blond hair; he was, presumably sarcastically, nicknamed Preppy by his buddies, who included Slater and Screech. Albert Clifford ‘AC’ Slater (Mario Lopez) was an army brat and the school wrestling champion; with his long, curly hair and tiny vests, which showed off his unnaturally (for a 15 year old) built-up chest, he looked like a porn star in the making. The third amigo was Samuel ‘Screech’ Powers (Dustin Diamond), a curly-haired first-degree geek, who didn’t have a clue about anything, but existed primarily so he could fail and make even Zack look proficient at school. There were a gang of girls, the objects of the boys’ affections, including Zack’s on-off girlfriend, Kelly Kapowski (Tiffani-Amber Thiessen), the red-headed cheer-leading captain. She was friends with Lisa Marie Turtle (Lark Voorhies - what a name!), an ultra-rich black princess, and lanky good-girl, Jessie Spano (Elizabeth Berkley.) Rather ironically, Jessie was a radical feminist, or at least fancied herself as such, but Berkley would go on to star in the Paul Verhoeven sleaze-fest, Showgirls.

Anyway, the gang were constantly riling the Bayside principal, the incompetent and moronic Richard Belding (Dennis Haskins), and getting into all kinds of scrapes which always ended neatly, with a suitable moral or ‘hilarious’ set-piece, inevitably involving Screech. One of the most irritating things about Saved by the Bell was the live studio audience, who were obviously responding to idiot-boards, which directed them to gasp if any character did something morally ambiguous, and “woooo!” if one of the boys, usually Zack, got a bit of ‘action’. We might have been yelling for them to stop the torture, or at least willing the kids to graduate as soon as possible, but there was to be no natural end to Saved by the Bell. As the kids moved on to college, so did the series. Saved by the Bell: The College Years, joined Zack, Slater, Screech and Kelly at the laid-back California university they all attended where the story-lines were just upgraded slightly to accommodate the change of scene. One amusing thing was that Mark-Paul Gosselaar had obviously decided to try and rival Mario Lopez in the muscles stakes, but his attempts at body-building just made him look fat - so the programme makers took away his gym membership. The end of Zack’s story came when he married Kelly in a Las Vegas special - but we all knew it wouldn’t last, considering he was still the same work-shy he was in his freshman year at high school.

Dustin Diamond took his parents to court, claiming that they stole from his earnings while he was a minor, which is perhaps why he felt it necessary to appear in Saved by the Bell: The New Class. Oh yes, back we went to Bayside High, where Principal Belding had hired Screech as his administrative assistant, and was contending with a new set of polished, teenage irritants. To ensure minimal effort on the writers’ part, the story-lines were diligently recycled, and the new kids were personality clones of Zack and his friends, representing the very worst that American TV has to offer us.

SQUARE EYES RATING: 2/10

(Thanks to wikipedia for the borrowed pic)