Hearing Jack Whitehall recount his starring moment in a school play, it is almost like he is describing a scene from his sit-com Bad Education.

The 27-year-old comedian and actor, whose own education included Harrodian School in Barnes, told Vibe: “I had one drama teacher who was pretty tricky.

“We did A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I got cast in my best-ever role. I was playing Oberon, King of the fairies.

“I was so excited, my parents were so excited - and at the last minute he decided the theme he was going for with the fairies was an African theme. I had to wear a grass skirt and brown face.

“Because it was fairies and it was mystical, it was not as crass as blacking-up but certainly to the casual observer and to the observer looking back on the school photographs of the play, it looks pretty dodgy.

“It’s pretty dodgy territory, especially in the school I went to which was not particularly diverse.

“It was a bold move.”

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With this kind of wealth of experience, as well as a fertile imagination, it is no wonder Jack had plenty of inspiration to take his BBC3 series Bad Education beyond its three series on TV and onto the big screen.

The Bad Education Movie, co-written by and starring Jack as calamitous teacher Alfie Wickers, is out Friday.

The cast includes Gravesend's Nikki Runeckles and former Chessington Community College pupil Jack Binstead.

Jack said: “It was an opportunity I couldn’t turn down, really. We finished the series and I genuinely thought that was going to be it.”

Then he was offered the chance to write a script with co-writer Freddy Syborn and the pair set about writing something ‘cinematic in scale’.

Jack said: “We wrote this ridiculous script, this action film basically – the characters from the sitcom in an action film, set in Cornwall. We wrote the script basically expecting it never to get made.”

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The money then came forward and the writers were faced with making their movie.

“We were expecting to cut a load of stuff but they wanted the stuff we wrote,” said Jack. “So we ended up filming this incredibly ambitious project and now it is coming out in cinemas.”

He added: “The bit I was surprised we ended up being able to do is the school trip the year before where Alfie goes to Amsterdam and he gets spiked with magic mushrooms in the Anne Frank museum by one of his class.

“He ends up hallucinating and thinking a model of Anne Frank is real and she wants to escape.

“The opening sequence of this film is a title sequence set to me being pursued through the streets of Amsterdam high on mushrooms with Anne Frank under my arm being pursued by security guards.

 “Unfortunately we didn’t have enough money to close down Amsterdam so a lot of people thought it was happening for real.

“There were a few Dutchman who thought ‘I’m going to make a hero of myself today’ and lurched towards me just as the director shouted cut.”

Jack’s list of scenes he didn’t expect to get filmed extends to one where he ‘teabags’ (only Google it if you’re feeling brave) a swan.

He said: “That was another one that was surprising we were able to do it.

“The swan that we used was actually the swan from Hot Fuzz, which meant that at the time of filming the swan had more film credits than I did.

“It was good, I guess, because it was very professional. He knew what he was doing.”

Jack grew up in Putney – he joked about the article as we sat down to chat, “it’s going to be going through my parents’ door, so be f*****g careful” – but was schooled at Dragon School in Oxford and Marlborough College as well as Harrodian.

In the movie, his class goes on a riotous school trip. Jack’s own educational outings weren’t nearly so exciting.

“My school trips were always so lame, so feeble, that nothing ever happened,” he said.

“You always go to a castle. You hear about all of these exciting things that happened at the castle but they were always so long ago. Castles have very much had their day.

“We thought it would be fun for them to go to a castle and for some actual stuff to happen. They go to a castle in Cornwall and it ends up being laid siege to by a group of Cornish terrorists.”

The Bad Education Movie is in cinemas on Friday (August 21)