User:Selfburner

Character Profiles
Character profile from archieved version of the CBBC Website. (Link)


 * Josh Irving - Josh is a talkative, confident bright soul, almost to the point of irritation. He's a keen comedy fan, remembering routines after a single hearing and reciting them verbatim next day if no-one stops him. He comes from a Jewish background, and while his parents are not strictly orthodox they respect their family traditions wherever they don't intrude on their Spacecruiser, IKEA, Conran lifestyle. They've recently moved into the catchment area for Dad's job. Parents Jonathan and Ruth are New Labour through and through and Josh exudes all the confidence and cockiness of a solid middle class family unit where their Jewish background has always been an advantage rather than a hindrance.
 * Martin Miller - Martin is Ben's little brother, a quiet and withdrawn child who has always had difficulty making friends. Usually shy, he lacks social skills and can have occasional fits of rage and more frequent spells of sadness or depression, sometimes taking the most innocent criticisms to heart. Ben excels in Maths where he occasionally startles teachers with his speed and lateral thinking. His hobbies are calendars, diaries and engineering plans. To the other kids and much to Ben's embarrassment he's just weird. In actual fact, the last series revealed that Martin has Asperger Syndrome.
 * Ozzie - Bad to the bone, somewhere between Peake's Steerpike and Lear's Edmund. Not a bully as such because it's a waste of his energy and he knows it would bring him unwanted attention. Ozzie's machiavellian - if he senses a weakness he can exploit for his own ends, he will, but never for its own sake. Blackmail, spying and extortion are just as ready weapons as a good kick in the teeth. Ozzie’s parents are somewhat ineffectual but by no means a dysfunctional family. If anything they’ve a tendency to spoil him slightly because he was such a bright young lad. It’s this intelligence that framed his character - boredom at over achieving led him to channel his intellectual energies elsewhere and his good academic results form a perfect cover from the usual stereotype of the thick villain.
 * Clare Chaplin - Afro-Caribbean middle class girl who's determined to take on the world on her own terms. A keen athlete, she doesn't believe in mixed race relationships. She might be attracted to a white guy but won't go out with one. She wants to preserve the individual culture of her race - as she would like to believe it is. In fact, she comes from a privileged background but doesn't want to admit that to herself or her peers. Her father is a barrister and would have preferred Clare to go to a fee paying school, but Clare wants to feel part of the black community. So she denies her real life and plays at being part of the more stereotypical, under-privileged, discriminated against, poorer black girl. She believes in saying what she thinks, without necessarily thinking things through. What might be perceived as wanting to be included in national identity can also be seen as racist bigotry.
 * Danny Hartson played by Max Brown - Danny’s new to the Hill having transferred to the sixth form after miraculously leaving Leaburn, the local sink school, with 6 GCSEs. Leaburn has no sixth form college - it wasn’t so much burned down as blown up and Danny’s about the first kid to arrive at Grange Hill and think it’s a bit posh. He’s cool, he’s good looking, but he’s got attitude. He hates seeing kids smoking and sees it as his mission to stop older kids exploiting younger ones by getting them hooked on fags. Eventually, we’ll find out why he’s such a crusader.

He’s learned certain behavioural principles from his Dad. He won’t grass on anyone and seems to keep himself to himself, adopting a James Dean look. He doesn’t know how to mix and doesn’t believe people will be nice to him.