Jesus wept. 2 seconds into last night's Waterloo Road (BBC One, Wednesday, 4 March, 8pm), still in the recap, there was gunfire, a major character getting shot and loads of crying. That's how you get someone's attention. No mucking about with amateur dramatics. Just shoot a load of people in a fictional North West England equivalent of Colombine. Holy mackerel. That's always been the draw with Waterloo Road. It doesn't want to portray the real world... that's too boring... it wants to go for the jugular with hyper-reality. It takes what it reads in the Daily Mail and bends it all out of proportion.

Related: More Waterloo Road

As unreal as Waterloo Road is (and, to be honest, if it's anything like school life now, then someone should drop bricks on every school in Britain to make us all safe), there's still something brilliantly real about it. You can smell the disinfectant and acne in every single scene. The faint whiff of coffee seeps into your living room every time a teacher starts speaking. Your own trousers somehow get mysteriously muddy whilst watching, even though you've done little more than walk from room to room (or was that just my school?).

That's the thing that's been missing in so many school-based dramas. It's the thing that Grange Hill used to have. It's all about heavy school bags covered in biro, the bogs smelling like fag-butts, sugar paper and that sick feeling of not having done your homework for a particularly demanding teacher.

Of course, the realism is only a building block for the nonsensical storylines. The head quits, someone pretended to steal a pink and purple camper van, a teacher was on the booze too much... even Neil Morrissey had a go at acting... it's ludicrous. Hang on a minute. People do nick cars, Neil Morrissey does get paid to act, teachers quit all the time and nearly every teacher I've met drinks too much.

Bloody hell. Maybe Waterloo Road isn't that far-fetched after all?

Christ. In a weird way... in all the melodrama, frequent overacting and seemingly relentless gloom, there's something about this show that pleases me. It's obvious and clear that this is complete trash... I mean, it's made by the same team who brought us Bad Girls and Footballer's Wives. How can this be? A stony hearted, sour faced critic like me... liking Waterloo Road? The maths don't add up (incidentally, I was rubbish at maths) at all, but seriously, every time I tune in for this godforsaken programme, I get reeled in.

Waterloo Road? Bloody awful. Bloody marvellous.