Mad about the girls

It’s not unusual to see a pop concert on TV where teenage girls and a group of middle-aged men are separated by safety barriers, as the glow sticks wave and the band’s name is excitedly chanted. But in Storyville: Tokyo Girls (BBC4, Tuesday), there was one fairly major twist: the teenage girls were the band, and the middle-aged men their swooning fans.

As this jaw-dropping documentary explained, the girls in question are known in Japan as ‘idols’. Their songs tend to be about how demure and innocent they are; and to prove it, they often perform in school uniforms — although with skirts a lot shorter, I suspect, than is traditional in most Tokyo schools. There are now around 10,000 idols in Japan and the industry is worth $1 billion a year, with the money made not just by live shows and webcasts, but also by meet-and-greet events, where the men queue up (and pay) for the chance to shake the girls’ hands and spend a carefully timed minute talking to them.