Sophie Gee

Right.

So this is the Dr. Arnold moment.

This is the equivalent of Dr. Arnold's sermon in Tom Brown's school days, but it couldn't play out more differently.

I'd be really happy to hear your Yorkshire accent, John Teeley.

So, you know, he's obviously an unsympathetic figure, but the teachers are part of the system.

And the one teacher who shows real humanity to Billy and the other boys is Mr Farthing.

And sort of the iconic, in some ways, the climactic scene of the novel is where he's in one of Mr Farthing's English classes and he puts the words fact and fiction up on the blackboard.

And I think that that is a shout-out slash reference to hard times, Jonty, where Mr Gradgrind is totally obsessed with facts.

There's only facts.

And he drums the facts into the students' minds and so on.

Mr Farthing is knowingly or unknowingly sort of rebuking grad grind and that education system by including fiction and fact.

And to demonstrate the difference between the two, he asks boys to say something that people wouldn't know about them, that nonetheless is fact.

And one of the boys tells this very odd story about pulling handfuls of tadpoles out of a pond and filling his...

gumboots up with them it's a kind of moving story that's a bit of a kind of tangent in the tale but then mr farthing starts picking on billy thinking he's got nothing to offer you know tell us a story tell us a story and billy finds himself telling the story of training kes and

and the whole class is spellbound.

And Mr. Farthing himself is spellbound, really impressed by what Billy is saying.

And he gets Billy to spell the technical terms for falconry, and he writes the words up on the blackboard.

And it's a real moment, a real turning point moment for Billy.

It's the moment in the book where Himes asks us to think, if this was a Dickens novel, this would be the moment where the whole situation turns around.

This would be