Do you remember Zammo? If you’re in your forties or fifties, you probably will, and with great vividness. If you’re older, the chances are you’ll recall his impact on your children; if you’re younger, you may have been bored by your older siblings or parents talking about him.
The storyline that dominated kids’ TV show Grange Hill throughout 1986 and 87 was astonishingly hard-hitting by the standards of the day. We followed Zammo – played by Lee MacDonald – as he battled heroin addiction and a descent into petty criminality, with any number of memorable moments along the way. The episode that ended with Roland finding his mate slumped in a back room at the arcade, clutching drug paraphernalia, eyes glazed, was genuinely harrowing – to me at least.
It made drugs seem painful and isolating – a shortcut to lonely despair. But while the dramatic telling of Zammo’s story felt very real, it was quite a distant reality. His character was a few years older than me, and the urban setting wasn’t exactly reminiscent of my Cambridgeshire village. Drugs didn’t seem like something that was even faintly on the agenda for me or my friends. I remember a lesson at school about the dangers of glue sniffing, and by year 11 we all knew there were a few people who were into smoking weed at the weekend. Even so, drugs seemed very remote throughout my childhood.
