all of his own teachers carrying around, and shouting profanities.Mr Richard Nixon (John Wells) was the headteacher in the first series. Evans observes that he "shows precious little leadership", and the running of the school seems to fall to Slatt. Wells was too ill to participate in the second series, and died a year after its transmission.Mr J.F. Kennedy (Duncan Preston) replaced Mr Nixon as the head in the second series. Like Nixon, Mr Kennedy takes a back-seat in the developments. In the final episode he reads a letter from the former head, which inadvertently serves to show how their characters are identical.Jason Cockfoster''' (Damien Matthews) is a young religious education teacher. He arrives at the school in the first series episode "Both Called Eric", and appears more regularly in the second series. Suzy is immediately attracted to him, making Dan McGill so jealous that he tells the pupils that he is Satan. The character was a deliberate attempt to add some sex appeal to the show. Reception Due to the positive reaction of the studio audience during recordings, a second series was commissioned before the first had started to be transmitted. However, the show was, as Mark Lawson summarised, "widely disliked". The BBC's publicity department compared Chalk to Fawlty Towers in the publicity materials. Critics, though, took exception to a new show being compared to such a renowned and respected programme. The cast point out that Fawlty Towers and Chalk are completely different shows, while Nicola Walker says that the comparison is like being asked to be "compared to a comedy God". Writing for the BBC Guide to Comedy, Mark Lewisohn observes that the critical reception was mixed, with "its detractors pointing out that Eric Slatt was a carbon copy of John Cleese's Basil Fawlty [and] its supporters praising its non-PC, off-the-wall approach and the breathlessly paced plots that delivered moments of high farce." Lewisohn also comments that while some elements of the show resemble Please Sir!, "Chalk more closely resembled the ill-fated Hardwicke House with its concentration on the teachers rather than the pupils, dark themes and overall depiction of the teachers as ... nuts." Tom Lappin for Scotland on Sunday derided the combination of Chris Barrie's Gordon Brittas and Cleese's Basil Fawlty. The first four episodes were transmitted at 21:30, but the final two episodes of the second series were moved to 22:20. The second series received