Girls on film

To mark the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage — if a little oddly — Channel 4 on Tuesday brought us a special girls-only edition of The Secret Life of Five-Year-Olds. The cast were a mix of new faces and old hands from previous series: among them Jet who, like a primary-school version of a traditional Hollywood actress, has been playing a five-year-old on the show since 2016.

Still, you can see why the producers keep calling — because, by now, Jet has got the tomboy role required of her down pat. ‘It’s hard to make friends with just girls,’ she declared early on, hitting the word ‘girls’ with exactly the right degree of scornful emphasis. She was also very good at looking genuinely baffled by everyone else’s desire to play with dolls.

In this, of course, she met with the feminist approval of the people with perhaps the cushiest job on television: the two child psychologists who watch the action on a laptop and provide such expert insights as the fact that Jet appeared not to want to play with dolls. Less to their taste were those participants who, within minutes, were marrying off the prettiest female doll to the most handsome male one.

But even if the girls’ girlishness was a bit of a disappointment to the experts, the programme definitely retains its considerable charm. At the risk of going out on a limb, I sometimes think kids say the darnedest things — and on Tuesday, we got some especially cute responses to the question of what they wanted to do when they grew up. One girl opted for being an inventor, ‘but only on Sundays — the rest of the days I’ll be a vet.’ Still in full method mode, Jet explained that, ‘My dream is to have an evil enemy so I could fight him.