Trading Places is a kids' docusoap following comprehensive pupils as they sample life at a private school. It may look like harmless entertainment but Danny Leigh thinks it brutally exposes the hypocrisy of our education system

Guardian

Educated by the taxpayer, yet with a professional life dominated by posh kids, I often find myself pondering the truisms. You know, the ones about public schools breeding arrogance. Pomposity. Self-satisfaction.

That kind of thing.

Oh, and condescension. Insularity. Hubris. Lack of empathy. (And no, before you ask, I seldom waste my time on the fanciful chestnut that we spawn of the shared textbook have some kind of chip on our collective shoulder).

Which is probably why my ears pricked up at Trading Places (today, 5.10pm, BBC1), a spry pubescent docusoap wherein a quintet of pupils at Newcastle's Kenton Comprehensive - the "eighth biggest in the country" according to the cheerfully classless voiceover - mingle with the gentry-to-be at Dauntsey's, a blueblood barracks sprawled across a sizeable chunk of central Wiltshire.

Of course, said MacGuffin is itself the purest cliché, a Prince And The Pauper culture clash played strictly for laughs. Tune in for a giggle at shabby old Kenton, with its underfunded, overcrowded classrooms full of French crops and tracksuit tops, a Madness lyric made rowdy, teacher-baiting flesh. All the better for basking in the telegenic spectacle of the Dauntsey's trout stream, school boat - the Jolie Brise - and nine-hole private golf course: available, should any well-appointed family be eager to know more, for just £12,000 a year (if nothing else, the show makes great free advertising for its hosts' extramural facilities).

So far so-so. Stripped of any wider context, none of this amounts to more than a neutered, Easter holiday-friendly take on the ostensibly grown-up Living With The Enemy, where buying your offspring a head start is simply another bland parental lifestyle choice, like plumping for Petite Bateau rather than Gap Kids.

Except it isn't, is it? Despite the fond Blairite invocation of a Britain in which childhoods of all budgets are united by Pokémon and the internet, we remain a country where 7% of the populace gets fast-tracked from the age of five, while the remainder pin their GCSE hopes on the munificence of the crisp industry. Somewhere behind the show's ceaselessly jovial facade lurks the fact it still takes zeal (and luck) to avoid a career in retail after state school, and an even more impressive resolve to successfully come a cropper if mum and dad did shell out for prep. In a faux -egalitarian Jerusalem where every establishment bastion worth the name (Parliament, the legal system, the liberal media) is merely a fee-paying common room writ large, Trading Places suddenly takes on an entirely different complexion.

Barely have the Kenton five bumbled through the cod-Grecian pillars of their new alma mater, for example, before the chasm between theory and reality yawns beneath their feet. Look closely at the dead smiles of the Dauntsey's staff and you'll see the same nervous, pre-fab bonhomie usually reserved for young offenders on day release at a nursing home.

"And today," comes the cautious announcement at morning assembly, "we welcome five pupils from" - small intake of breath - "Kenton Comprehensive School, in" - slightly larger intake of breath - "Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. And, ah, good luck to you!" For both teachers and pupils, it appears, the arrival of the Geordie cuckoos in their luxuriantly feathered nest is less lightweight sociological experiment than trial-by-plebeian bad manners. "They all start shouting and swearing at each other", laments a fretful boarder. "It scares me."

For the oiks, moreover, the whole experience constitutes a hard lesson in the shape of things to come. "They're probably a lot more intelligent than us", remarks a Kenton refugee halfway up the gravel driveway of Dauntsey's Manor House, not a preconception likely to be reciprocated among the natives. Which is kind of the point: that the lurching chaos of your average comp lends its alumni precious little of the cold-eyed self-assurance necessary to compete in a world run by chaps (and the occasional chapette). As the patrician vowels of a pair of Dauntsey's prefects echo down the hallway en route to sorting out a dorm-room pillow fight - I'm not making this up - it's a reminder that no matter where you find yourself in adult life, a public schoolboy will be looking down on you.

Meanwhile, if anyone wants a peek into classroom practicalities, look no further than the awed incomprehension of the gatecrashers when presented with Dauntsey's array of enthusiastic, one-on-one tutors ("Hang on, back in a tick_ Fantastic !") Then shake your head dolefully as Nick - a Kenton prole whose insurrectionary dander soars inexorably throughout the programme - remonstrates with a gaggle of well-bred queue-jumpers at the tuck shop, only to be greeted with a mixture of bafflement and inveterate piss-taking.

Really, it's cruel. Cruel because the punchline is, of course, the five interlopers' eventual return to Kenton: away from the trout stream and the smiling, supportive teachers, back to being just another fun-sized headache among 1,999 others. And it's also sad. Sad that a show like Trading Places can still be made, that such a ridiculous, anachronistic fissure across the face of Britain can still exist.

Still, there's at least one sly moment of karmic high comedy on the horizon. At the same time next week, we're to be treated to the sight of five pupils from Dauntsey's sampling the state education system in scenic Newcastle-Upon-Tyne.