Keir Starmer has welcomed Netflix’s decision to make Adolescence available to screen for free in secondary schools. The Prime Minister, who watched the show with his teenage children, said he found it ‘harrowing’ and ‘really hard to watch’. I wonder how his kids found the experience because watching upsetting television during formative years can have a lasting effect, as many of us can testify. Is screening Adolescence in schools really a good idea?
If the PM found the series ‘harrowing’, why is he so blasé about showing it to others?
Life is rough, so perhaps gritty fiction like Adolescence is a good way of preparing young people for the horrors of reality. But at what price? The issues raised in Adolescence are important and you could argue that no one needs to learn about them more than secondary schoolchildren. But the decision to show it in schools feels less like a considered plan and more like a knee-jerk reaction to a media bandwagon.
Starmer couldn’t hop on that bandwagon quickly enough, but there’s no sign of any plans to make sure it works well. How will teachers make sure that Adolescence doesn’t further stigmatise boys who are already vulnerable? Are staff and parents being prepared for how this dark show will affect the impressionable minds of their children?
I’m still haunted by some of the programmes I watched as a kid. As an 11-year-old, I watched the BBC’s nuclear war drama Threads. The tension of the film’s build-up to war terrified me, the nuclear attack scenes blew my mind and the way it presented the relentlessly bleak aftermath, with its agonising deaths, rape and anarchy, was more than a little too much for my little mind and body.
I was physically sick during the second half of the film and the next morning I tried to unscrew the living room door so I could build a bunker in the cellar, and I joined CND. Within days, my jackets and jumpers were covered with anti-nuclear badges, and I still get a bit anxious about the Bomb.
I was also a big soap fan in the 1980s and I particularly followed the grittiest two: Brookside and Eastenders. I was hooked, but now I can see how these shows were messing with my head.
I grew up in a comfortable home in leafy Putney, but sometimes I had to remind myself we weren’t all on the brink of destitution, because I was so tied up with the misfortunes of the other families I followed on screen. Many of us get jittery about money at Christmas – and often understandably so! – but perhaps the storylines we invested in years ago also still haunt us, like when it all went wrong for Arthur Fowler and the Christmas Club money on Eastenders.
I’m not alone. Scarred for Life is a series of books, podcasts and social media posts about the dark and terrifying pop culture of the 1970s and 1980s in Britain. A jittery generation can remember with a gulp the hideous public information films like The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water, Charley Says and Say No to Strangers.
You could argue that these brutal short films stopped us from drowning, or being run over, or abducted, and that watching Threads and following the lives of the working-class communities in soaps made me more politically aware and empathetic. But the reality is that getting kids to watch TV comes at a price.
Watching scary dramas is unlikely to help kids’ mental health. Starmer is desperate for some good headlines and Netflix obviously wants more hype for its content. But if the PM found the series ‘harrowing’, why is he so blasé about showing it to others? Is anybody actually thinking of the children?
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