‘I find racism quite funny’: the Black teen comedy savaging UK private schools

Tone-deaf teachers, paintings of slaves, and effortless hilarity … BBC sitcom Boarders puts five Black teens in a boarding school and lets the carnage unfold. Its team explain why it hits close to home

The first thing you notice as you enter the school gates are the turrets. Huge, spiky turrets that look as if they might impale a passing bird. The grounds stretch out, endless and glistening emerald in the afternoon sun, stripes carefully mowed into the lawn for cricket. It’s the sort of place that might once have housed royalty; a church combined with a castle, all stained glass windows and stone. But it’s also the location of a brand new BBC comedy called Boarders, about five Black teens from inner-city London who receive scholarships to an elite boarding school, St Gilberts, and the hurdles and shenanigans& that& follow.

The show’s creator, Daniel Lawrence Taylor, didn’t pluck the idea from nowhere. A few years back, he’d come across an article from 2013. Five Black boys from east London had been sent to Rugby school – a private boarding school costing about £15,000 a term – as part of their “social outreach programme”. The idea struck him as ripe for comedy. He reached out to the boys. They’d had a great time, he said. It reminded him of his time at university, when he’d moved from Lewisham to the gilded halls of Royal Holloway, University of London. But also of being a Black TV writer in a largely white industry. “When Black people are in white institutions, we deal with it in very different ways,” says Taylor. “That’s what I wanted to do with the characters. When you put them in these environments, how do they survive? Some try to assimilate. Some rebel against it. Some play it to their advantage.”