
It caused a minor splash in the press recently when a girl from a quiet Durham estate recently reduced her parents’ house to the condition of a Lebanese bomb-shelter with a party advertised on myspace. The apparent inspiration for the party? Television. Late night, pornographic, hedonist television? No. Youth television.
My, how things have changed. I used to be so innocent as a kid that I’d flinch if someone said “bloody” on TV. Memories of watching The Snowman on a grainy screen in assembly hall seem impossibly tame in the age of Grand Theft Auto. And it’s a little disconcerting how readily kids’ broadcasting has given the finger to its Blytonesque innocence, ripped off its Blue Peter badge and replaced it proudly with an Asbo and an 18 Certificate. Youth TV now goes around nutting old grannies and kicking in bus shelters. Drugs, sex, violence – what happened? Kids programming today seems to have as much sense of childish wonder as a visit to a crack house.
Is it just me who finds this transition strangely unnerving, like finding one of the Newsround correspondents hunched up in a corner cooking up heroin? Given today’s nonplussed kids, for whom anything less than carving the limbs off their sleeping grandparents with a Braun Plus while video-messaging the whole thing to their friends hardly even counts as an evening’s entertainment, it’s not surprising that the taste bar got raised. And it certainly has, hasn’t it? In my day the worst that could happen was Ant and Dec getting caught sniffing glue round the back of the Byker Grove bikesheds. These days if the Sunday evening family treat doesn’t feature a seventeen-year-old buggering his pet rabbit while mainlining crystal meth through his testicles, it’s considered a bit tame.
In the past most youth programming suffered the affliction of the Generation Gap, whereby ex-public school producers working in broadcast centres would try and ‘think down’ to the kids – a bit like watching David Cameron grab a skateboard and perform backflips at the local parking lot with a spliff in his mouth. Cue drug-addicted ‘Zammo’ being found dead in a car boot on Grange Hill (remember that, 20-somethings?), a storyline so reactionary it could have been written by Margaret Thatcher.
Then a few years ago the producers behind Hollyoaks tried out a show called ‘Hollyoaks Moving On’, a fascinating experiment in which characters who’d spent the daytime edition humorously chasing a stolen turnip round Chester or whatever would now face savage beatings, drug overdoses and gang rape in the evening special. The only time I happened to turn it on I caught the sensitive arty one with earrings beating his girlfriend into a bloodstained smear. It was actually horribly uncomfortable, a feeling of something previously trusted revealing a darker side – like inadvertently catching your much-loved uncle rubbing his cock on the crease of a Daily Mail, or watching the Chuckle Brothers whip their own bare nipples in a sadistic black and white porn video.
A measure of just how much things have changed is recent offering ‘Skins’, in which self-obsessed teenage scum run around committing emotional atrocities on one another whilst snorting the entire output of a starving Colombian village off their GCSE coursework every breaktime. Written with the ‘help’ of ‘young people’, it comes across like the myspace page of an acutely suicidal teenager extended into a full hour of drama. Can you imagine a song by Razorlight in 3D lasting over eight episodes? It feels like that.
They’re fucked, basically. Because life’s fucking fucked up. They’re coping with life and dealing with a whole load of issues and shit. Needless to say everyone is, of course, a vain, manipulative and narcissistic arsehole… Well what do you expect, role models?
What’s interesting is the cult popularity the series garnered despite being kept out of harm’s way on the leftfield E4 channel. Is kids TV really so hardcore that it needs the late night Freeview treatment? Apparently so – and God knows what that means for times to come. At this rate future episodes of Postman Pat will feature the famous mailman dragging a rabies-infested Doberman round a council estate while he yells drunken abuse and urinates through letterboxes. CBBC Newsround will be broadcast from under a mountain to a live Slipknot concert, while several atomic bombs are detonated nearby and the bulletins are projected onto the backs of naked dancing strippers.
After all you wouldn’t want to patronise the kids, would you. They might come and trash your house.






