The more I think about it, the more I like about the premise of Class as well. It’s like tragically, grimly accidental continuity.
Coal Hill is just this school, in a formerly working class, quickly gentrifying area of London. Full of kids, teachers, living their lives. But, a jerk in a time machine has punched enough holes in the universe that unspeakable horrors have begun to pour in.
So the school has turned into a place of incomprehensible danger and fear, that people have no rational way of quantifying. What can you do? Put up a memorial to the dead and the vanished, renovate and modernize, try to rationalize, try to keep living. But everyone knows. What had just been a normal school has turned into an urban legend, a place of dread… that still remains in operation.
What had randomly been the location for Doctor Who’s first episode, then a subtle continuity touchstone for decades, is now a character. Coal Hill has become mythologized in its own right, as a casualty of the cavalier adventure narrative of the parent show.
And into that mythology step a few brighter-than-average kids, who through it face horrors they are unequipped to cope with. THANKS DOCTOR.
When you see the Coal Hill emblem now, it comes not just with dry geeky recognition but with a sense of living menace. It has been corrupted. What had been benign, slightly wonky continuity has become a hostile mythology. It has taken on its own life, and that life is tragic.