Boarders: The black students taking on elite education in comedy show

The scholarship students of St Gilberts are back for the second season of Boarders, the hit comedy drama that sees five black teenagers swap their inner-city education for an elite boarding school.

At the almost exclusively white private school, Toby, Jaheim, Leah, Omar and Femi find themselves once again fighting against microaggressions, racial stereotypes and tone-deaf peers.

The battles their characters fight are not too dissimilar to what some of them have had to go through in real life.

Josh Tedeku, who plays Jaheim, attended a private school growing up, so knows what it feels like to “be in the minority”.

“I wasn’t beaten up like my character in Boarders is, but the feeling of not fully belonging was always there – I felt a bit like a fish out of water and isolated at times,” he tells the BBC.

Describing his schooling years as “tough”, he says he’s now “proud that we’ve given a safe space to people who felt like they were in the minority at school”.

The 21-year-old, who has also starred in Rapman’s Netflix superhero series Supacell, says Boarders is also an important show as it “represents all different types of black people”.

Myles Kamwendo plays Omar, one of the more introspective scholarship students, who finds himself exploring his sexuality and learning to accept who he is.

The 22-year-old says the “characters are really differentiated in the show and the beauty is that everyone can relate to a different character and see themselves in them”.