The first two seasons concentrated on the Iives of a group of mostly working-class 11-year-old students who started at Grange Hill Comprehensive in I978. Bad boy Tucker Jenkins (Todd Carty) was the show's working-class antihero. His best friend, Benny Green (Terry Sue Patt), a sweet-tempered black boy, battled with the dual problems of racial prejudice and poverty (his father was unemployed as a result of an industrial injury). Although he was a skilled footballer, Benny was stigmatized by poverty as teachers constantly reprimanded him for wearing the wrong school uniform or old gym shoes.

     When Tucker and friends reached their third year in school, a new generation of children entered Grange Hill, Every two years after this, a new class of younger students would share the limelight with their veteran classmates. The second group of Grange Hill pupils included another antihero, Zammo, the Tucker of his generation. A few years later, in the midst of national panic about drug abuse in schools, Zammo became addicted to drugs and engaged in glue-sniffing. This narrative was conceived in conjunction with a national ant- drugs awareness scheme, which was featured on other BBC children's programs such as Blue Peter to educate children on the dangers of illegal drugs.

     Generally, Grange Hill was not well received by parents or critics, who condemned its images of worldly, disrespectful, and disillusioned students. Children, on the other hand, found the series a little too idealistic. After the first season, producer Phil Redmond changed the tone of the show in response to children who complained that "things weren't tough enough." In all probability, the show would have been controversial as it engaged with an issue at the forefront of public debate: comprehensive schools. Labour government policy mandated that these mixed-ability schools would replace the two-tier system of grammar and secondary modern schools by 1980. Comprehensive schools came to represent both utopian and dystopian visions of the nation's future. At the center of it all were the children, a disenfranchised group unable to participate in the molding of their future. Throughout the years, Grange Hill has explored this theme, the idea that children engage with and are affected by politics even though the public tries to protect them or deny their interest in social matters.

     Redmond's Grange Hill spin-offs continued to explore how government policy affected Britain's youth. Tucker's Luck (BBC 2, 1983-85) was aimed at slightly older children and teenagers and dealt with the problems facing working-class youth with few academic qualifications (like Tucker and his friends) in a world of growing unemployment. This series was neither as popular as nor as controversial as Grange Hill, largely because it was shown against the early evening news on both BBC I and ITV.