Ackley Bridge: It’s back to school with Nas and Missy as a family saga comes to an end

When it was launched two years ago the school drama Ackley Bridge aimed to capitalise on the success of reality-based shows Educating Yorkshire and Educating Essex.

The series began with two schools merging under headmistress Mandy Carter (Jo Joyner), and it followed the progress of two girls who were neighbours and best friends. Nas (Amy-Leigh Hickman) has a Pakistani Muslim background and Missy (Poppy Lee Friar) is white English, with complications.

That, roughly, is where we are now, except that the head is pregnant, and Nas is apparently on the verge of going to Oxford to study medicine. She rehearses her diction in front of the mirror, saying: “How now, brown lesbian?” to her unconvinced reflection.

Missy’s ambitions are simpler. Whatever it is that she ends up doing, she doesn’t want it to spoil her nails (painted, she notes, by Britain’s Got Talons).

The school, nicknamed Tandoori High, is in turmoil. It has been taken over by a trust run — inevitably — by an idiot. There is a new deputy head, Martin Evershed (Robert James-Collier) and a new director of behaviour, Sue Carp (Charlie Hardwick), who tries hard to live up to her name. The school is under pressure because it has suffered staff cuts and is being forced to take on problem students from other schools in the group. “Practically a migrant camp,” carps Mrs Carp.

Everything goes roughly as you’d expect. Clever Nas goes goes to Oxford for an interview, taking Missy along for moral support, and feels intimidated. The gulf between the aspirations of the two girls threatens their friendship.

Meanwhile, the school suffers some routine drama, some graffiti, an exploding car, and a visit from problem parent Mrs Murgatroyd (Natalie Gavin), who seems to have washed in from a kitchen-sink drama about women with anger management problems.

Ackley Bridge, like some of its students, could do better. The best thing in it is Poppy Lee Friar, who has silver trousers, gold shoes and a frosty demeanour. And then a shocking thing happens.

In Russell T Davies’s near-future drama Years and Years, ambition has been less of a problem than tone. So keen is the show to remind its audience that the dystopian years of the title — we are up to 2029 — are merely extensions of where we are now, that it forgets to create a compelling narrative, opting instead for the comforts of an implausible liberal fairytale.

It’s no surprise to discover that populist politician Viv Rook (Emma Thompson), the charismatic despot, turns into a pier-end Donald Trump, though the finale does its best to give everything a moment to shine. Anne Reid makes the most of it, as her character — Muriel, the grumpy grandmother — is given the speech which holds the thing together.

Poor Muriel, her failing eyesight restored by science, looks back to the Millennium, a point when she was able to think to herself: “Well done, the West, we’ve survived.” And Jessica Hynes, as the activist Edith, has a go at a smartphone revolution. Monkey flu is rampant but Notre Dame is rebuilt. The leaning tower of Pisa fares less well.