-----Who wants to go back to school?-----
No one right?! Remember all the teen anguish, pimples, sweatiness, worrying about if people liked you. School was a tough time for a lot of people, but apparently there are thousands every week who want to go back and relive it at SchoolDisco.com at Po Na Na nightclub in Hammersmith (Aka, Hammersmith Palais).

I personally loved school. It was a great time for me. However I did not enjoy School Disco nearly as much as I had hoped. For months we had been planning to go there but it was always called off for some reason or another, but for my friend Louise's 24th Birthday we decided to make the special effort and get a group together (of 11 people, both genders) and go all out and pay for VIP tickets. Usually tickets cost £13.50 with a handling charge of £1.50 and you are encouraged to buy them in advance as they always sell out at this venue, and only keep about 500 tickets on the door (out of the 2500 they sell every friday and saturday). So that's £15 for a normal ticket. 2 of my friends had been a few weeks before and had said that there were huge queues even for people with tickets. So we decided that for a special occasion we would pay £18.50 (plus the obligatory £1.50 handling charge) and receive the VIP package which includes, and I quote "Q-Jump, Priority cloakroom, access to the VIP area and bar throughout the night". So in total we paid £20 x11 = £220.00. (It would have been cheaper to hire a hall and a cheesy DJ and had our own fancy dress party!)

We all love dressing up, and it is mandatory at School Disco to wear school uniform, PE kit or dress as another school character (dinner lady, teacher etc). If you aren't dressed up you don't get in. So we girls spent several hours dressing up in our shortest skirts, funky black tights/over the knee socks, white shirts and school ties and put our hair in all manner or different plaits and bunches. We all decided to wear trainers as we knew it would be a long night with lots of dancing. You can't normally wear trainers in clubs in london so we thought we'd take the opportunity to last the whole night for once! The boys just slung on some too short trousers, shirts, ties and little school boy hats to finish the ensemble.

Getting to Hammersmith it a bit round the houses for anyone unless you happen to live in Hammersmith. We went to London Bridge station and took advantage of the relatively cheaper drinks in the bar there whilst we waited for some other friends that were coming from a different place. Then we got two tubes straight to Hammersmith arriving at about 10.45pm. The doors opened at 10pm and by the time we got there the queues were mostrously huge. Imagine a 1000 people all dressed the same queueing in a street, all a bit drunk and in high spirits! Thankfully because we had paid extra our queue was relatively short and only took about ten mins to get through. This was because the VIP groups were ushered in by a guide, after going through security checks, which was checking bags and running hands down bodies. From what I've read on other reviews people thought that security there was tight, but to be honest, they didn't check my group very carefully and any of us could easily have been carrying drugs, if we had been that way inclined (which we are not by the way!)

The drinks in Po Na NA are all around the standard london prices of about £4 a drink. I'm not quite sure exactly how much they are each but a round of 6 cost us £23 (but one of those was a bottle of water!) . The bar closes for alcohol at 2am (the club doesn't close till 3am) and they only serve water thereafter. All the drinks are supplied in a plastic cup, I presume to avoid having to wash thousands of glasses and to prevent accidents or using glass as a weapon. As I only bought drinks in the VIP bar I'm not a very good judge on how good the service was in the rest of the club, but I generally only had to wait about 5 mins to be served in VIP.

The music being played is 60's, 80's, 90's and some new chart songs, but in general its all cheesy. Me and my friend Ben had a fab time doing the entire routine from Dirty Dancing to "I've had the time of my life". The dancing part was great fun, but the whole aspect of dressing up in school clothes had lost its appeal about half an hour after getting into the club. It was stiflingly hot in the VIP area which was on a mezzanine floor. I found that this was because the ceilings were covered in curtain type fabric, with no visible ventilation (which I happen to know from my work is a health and safety hazard). The heat made it impossible to dance up there, and after a few alcoholic drinks, it was too hot to drink anything other than water, and forced my friend and I to take a trip to the loo's to take our tights off!

I wanted to go to School Disco as I had heard it was a fun night out. I was having an ok night until the end which completely ruined it for me. But to try and be objective I would say that the atmosphere was generally good and the music was enjoyable. There wasn't nearly as many desperate randy blokes going around as I was afraid there would be, and 2 of my mates pulled. (I'm attached myself and boyf wasn't out with me that night). The average age was about 20 I think, but it's over 18's and I saw a few 40 year old wandering about (Yes I did cringe) However I have had better nights out at other clubs that play cheesy music but don't have fancy dress, and have cheaper drinks. We didn't get out of Po Na Na till 3.40am and didn't get back home until 5.55am, having to get 2 night buses (and we spent 15 mins trying to find the bus stop!). All the hassle of travelling so far just to dress up as school children and buy overpriced drinks was just not worth it for me to do it again or to recommend the experience to others. Even if I hadn't had the negative experience at the end I wouldn't recommend going there.