Like Kemi, I have not watched Adolescence. My reason is simply that the main character is pre-pubescent. He’s still a child – not an adolescent – a grave casting error. I do understand though that Starmer is hosting a round table discussion about the drama (or documentary as he keeps calling it). I fear he has got the wrong TV show. If he wants to better understand British adolescent boys, he, along with policymakers and parents, ought to be discussing instead The Inbetweeners – gloriously created before the age of the smartphone had set in to dampen a generation.
If you haven’t had the pleasure of watching The Inbetweeners, do so immediately. There you will meet four archetypical suburban teenage boys brilliantly created by Damon Beesley and Iain Morris:
Will: Geek, on the look-out for intelligent sophistication; has a MILF single mum.
Simon: Good looking, moons after out-of-reach girl Carly, stroppy to supportive parents.
Neil: Thick, good at dancing, always pulls, gay dad.
Jay: Bullshitter, undermining dad, weary mum.
Over three peerless series released between 2008-2012 we follow the boys through Rudge Comprehensive sixth form as they attempt to have a laugh, pass their exams and pull ‘clunge’. It is inconceivable that such entertaining, cringingly funny TV could be commissioned today. It captures perfectly the best and worst of adolescent boys: the crudity, the laziness, the furious pursuit of trying to have a tug in private, the crap cars, the boredom, the exquisite anticipation and crashing disappointment of parties, the relentless but not quite crushing rejection by girls but most of all, the unhinged ability to have a laugh together. The four boys are both hapless and hilarious and you long for all of them to succeed in spite of themselves.
Laurie Lee describes this period of pent-up potential best in Cider with Rosie: “By now I was one of those green-horned gang who went bellowing around the lanes, scuffling, fighting, aimless and dangerous, confused by our strength and boredom.”
How Will, Simon, Neil and Jay attempt to relieve their “strength and boredom” is by bashing in some daffodils with golf clubs, trying to host a dinner party, going camping and clubbing and other catastrophe-strewn but optimistic ventures. And this is the lesson that Starmer and concerned parents need to take: teenage boys need to just do stuff. They need to have a laugh and bellow around figurative lanes, and for this, they need to hang out together, not remain isolated in their rooms on phones. As I write this, four Year 12 boys, friends of my 16 year-old son, are in the garden supposedly filming something for their Film Studies A-Level. What they are actually doing is spinning two boys together in the hammock until tied in a knot, the others swing the hammock into the hedge, they fall out, and then do it all over again. The bellows of laughter are loud and happy.
In short, teenage boys need to turn outward in all their clumsy, active glory, not inward to become the worst of themselves.
For all its obvious flaws, if discussion around Adolescence encourages more youth clubs to open, venues to welcome the under-16s, a nationwide relaunch of the pool hall, parents to invite more children over for hangouts and parties, rather than leaving them to scroll or game alone in their room, then fine by me, my teenage sons, and all the other Wills, Simons, Neils and Jays out there.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
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