School Swap: UK to USA review – full of beautiful moments that make you cry big, blobby tears

The Guardian

11-03-2025

'There are still pockets of liberals in the community,' says David Maxwell, principal of Mena high school, Mena, Arkansas, USA. He's in a contemplative, serious mood – you can tell because he's not wearing his cowboy hat. 'But that's fine, you have to have that. You don't want everybody one way.'
Mr Maxwell is on British telly as part of School Swap: UK to USA, a documentary that sets up a good old-fashioned exchange trip. At first, it seems it might be a cheap, even dangerous stunt: teenagers from the racially diverse Elmgreen school in Tulse Hill, south London, are sent deep into the American south, Trump country. It's five hours to the nearest airport, everyone has a gun and Confederate flags are proudly flown. And the south London kids are coming here…
But Mena high school and Elmgreen, and their teens and parents, have been cleverly chosen for a social experiment that will make you laugh, cry – big, blobby tears that fall when you're not ready for them – and repeatedly change your mind. You're appalled at Arkansas and proud of south London; later, it's the other way around. Then you flip back a couple more times before thinking: maybe it's time to be less appalled and less proud.
Episode one tackles the question of racism in Mena head-on, but before that, we have arrivals and introductions. Dae-Jaun leaves London, travels 4,500 miles to Mena, and is shown into the bedroom of his absent opposite number Waylon, who owns six guns, a crossbow and a drawer full of knives – although Waylon's mum and dad, Stephanie and Justin, stress that all the above have been locked away for Dae-Jaun's safety. 'We had to go behind each door, make sure there wasn't a gun back there!'
Waylon's room is a woody, scratchy mess with skulls of deer the boy has shot mounted on the wall. Dae-Jaun, missing his mum and visibly wondering if he's walked on to the set of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, waits for Stephanie and Justin to leave, then stands there and cries.
Meanwhile, in London, Waylon is confidently regaling his host family – he's not at Dae-Jaun's place; the pairs don't match up that way – with tales of his love of hunting, which is all fun and games until he talks about killing a raccoon, and refers to it using only the second syllable of the word. That unfortunate linguistic bump having been negotiated, Waylon gets on with becoming the show's main character, and is utterly fascinating. He has a practical wisdom that makes him seem 10 years older than the British kids, not in spite of but because of the narrowness of his upbringing. He has no time for schoolwork ('I've learned how to build a fence and work cows. That's going to help me way more in life than whatever the heck geometry is.') and isn't interested in exploring other countries, apart from Canada, where he hopes one day to shoot a moose.
When the Elmgreen kids go to the park after school, Waylon gets bored sitting around on the grass, shins up a tall tree, and enjoys a view across London that nobody at the school has ever seen. Back in Mena, his dad, Justin, is introducing Dae-Jaun to fishing and hunting in the stunning Arkansas lakes and forests. Soon, the serenity of the infinite outdoors and Justin's immense kindness – which becomes overwhelmingly moving when we learn that Dae-Jaun lost his dad at the age of four – have brought lovely, thoughtful, nervous 'DJ', as Justin insists on calling him, out of himself.
In the UK, another beautiful relationship develops, but it's one that speaks to what is rotten in Arkansas. Jayla, who is mixed-race, is a pupil at Mena high school and she is quiet and cautious, not because she is naturally that way, but as a direct result of the bigotry of her peers. Jayla's descriptions of her everyday experiences in Mena are hauntingly melancholic – on her trip to London, in a place where the colour of her skin attracts no interest, she lights up. Her travelling companion is her Mena classmate Sailor, a blond, God-fearing, popular girl who now understands the effects of racism more starkly through witnessing how Jayla thrives when that constant hum of hatred is taken away.
Jayla tells a tearful, rueful Sailor that they mustn't write Mena off entirely and, in case we hadn't grasped that point by watching Dae-Jaun find his smile, next week's second episode offers a shaming look at how healthy the Arkansas teenagers' use of smartphones is compared with young Londoners. School Swap: UK to USA confirms some of our prejudices while upending others; in both cases, there are valuable lessons to learn.
School Swap: UK to USA is on Channel 4 now.