Gordon Grimley (James Bradshaw) is an intellectual but feeble schoolboy who has a crush on his teacher, Miss Geraldine Titley (Amanda Holden; Samantha Janus in the pilot).

Their father Baz (Nigel Planer) is a bone-idle British Leyland car worker, who injured his back on his first day at the Longbridge plant and went on strike on the second.

[7] He is particularly infuriated by Gordon's artistic leanings and is determined that he should do "a man's job" rather than go to university, unlike their hard-working mother Janet (Jan Ravens).

The Grimleys' next-door neighbours are the Titleys, consisting of Geraldine, plumber uncle Reg (Paul Angelis) and his son Shane (Simon Lowe), a Bay City Roller lookalike and self-styled ladies' man with a clapped-out Vauxhall Viva car.

Other guest stars were Bamber Gascoigne as the school's headmaster; Johnny Ball as a maths teacher in another school; Michael Cronin as "Bullet" Baxter (the role that he had played in Grange Hill); William Woollard as science teacher Mr Woollard; Elizabeth Berrington as a school inspector; Ron Atkinson as the manager of an opposing football team; Stephen Lewis playing a coach driver very similar to his character Inspector Blake in On the Buses; Jim Bowen as a militant trade unionist; and Pam Ayres as herself.

Doug Digby's character is killed off in a gym accident in the first episode of the third series, and he is replaced in Geraldine Titley's affections by the scheming, manipulative woodwork teacher Dave Trebilcock (pronounced "Trebilco"), played by Craig Kelly.

Gordon is now working as a trainee teacher at the school, where he is bullied and insulted by the pupils, many of whom, including his brother, Darren, are dressed as punks.

Their mother, meanwhile, has walked out on her husband and taken up with Neville Holder, who has now become the school's headmaster, leaving Gordon as the family's sole breadwinner.

on a piano in the episode "The Bionic Boy" and performs an acoustic version of "'Coz I Luv You" over the end credits of the Series 2 finale, "The Prime of Mr Doug Digby".

The second album featured punk, post-punk and new wave songs from the late 1970s, and was titled The Official Soundtrack to the Hit TV Show The Grimleys.