[2] The story centres on Johnny Jarvis (Mark Farmer) and Alan Lipton (Ian Sears) who are two teenagers in their final year of secondary school at a comprehensive in Hackney.

The pair successfully leave school brimming with hope, but soon find that the harsh reality of Britain in the late 1970s has little to offer them - they are soon both unemployed school-leavers struggling to make progress in the world and the part they play in it.

This linear storyline has a thriller-esque sub-plot concerning a mysterious drug dealer, known as "The Colonel", holding Lipton to ransom in his mother's tower-block flat at the same time that Jarvis' fortunes are no better, minding his child in a bed-sit whilst his girlfriend, the complicated Stella (Johanna Hargreaves), brings in the sole wage in order to support them all.

School associates of Jarvis and Lipton, skinhead Manning (Jamie Foreman) and black carpenter Paul Turner (Alrick Riley) provide an intertwined story of inner city racial conflict which highlights that period of street disturbances in British History (1981-1985).

The principal message of the series is a thinly-veiled attack on (then) Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's Britain and the wasted resource of schoolchildren emerging from education to find no jobs and precious few prospects awaiting them.