Brooke warns the boys about the evils of bullying, but this has little impact upon Flashman and his gang, who roast Tom over a fire and toss him in a blanket, causing him injury.
Tom Brown's Schooldays originally screened on the BBC1 Sunday afternoon slot, which often showed serialisations of classics aimed at a family audience.
"Clean-up TV" campaigner Mary Whitehouse claimed that the programme broke the BBC's guidelines on the depiction of sadistic violence.
[3] After its 1971 premiere on the BBC, the series was later shown on Masterpiece Theatre in the United States in January and February 1973 through a grant from the Mobil Oil Corporation.
[1] In his review in The New York Times, critic Howard Thompson wrote, "Two previous film versions of Tom Brown's Schooldays (one from England) pale beside this home‐screen project, which so far (two chapters) seems almost too good to be true, even from Masterpiece Theater.