Teenage Kicks (Drinking Girls, Young and Loaded, Lock Up Your Daughters) C4
Harrow: The School on the Hill ITV
Dispatches: Unforgiven C4
The very first credit at the end of Lock Up Your Daughters, in C4's Teenage Kicks series last week, was for the music consultant. As far as I can make out, being a music consultant on a documentary about teenage girls mostly consists in waiting for a shot of some clean-limbed young lovely lighting a Marlboro while staring wistfully out of a window, then immediately selecting Dido and pressing Play. Top job! How can I become one?
Dido's mournfully catchy ditty popped up in Young and Loaded, too, so it's obviously the toon de nos jours for sulky twentysomething music consultants as well as sulky 15-year-old girls. This, indeed, is one of the very few differences between this generation of sulky 15-year-olds and mine, because we had the Undertones - 'I wanna hold her, wanna hold her tight, get teenage kicks all through the night' - to accompany our sessions of hair-crimping and apple-flavoured lipgloss application, secure in the knowledge that the kind of people who were old enough to be music consultants on television documentaries were definitely still listening to the Eagles. Other than that (and the fact that nobody I knew was ever trailed by a camera crew asking about oral sex and how many Pernod and blacks they had consumed last Friday night, more's the pity), the lot of sulky, hormonal 15-year-old girls has hardly changed at all.
I could be wrong, but I think we were meant to be shocked and alarmed, chastened and sobered (and doubtless somethinged and, er, somethinged else) by filmed evidence, courtesy a slew of Alices, Amys and Alexes (variously up the duff, out on the tiles, swilling vodka and shopping up a storm) revealing that teenage girls can be horrible little sluts with all the morals of alley cats in kitten heels - an all-round delicacy of disposition traditionally bolstered by zero-zilch-nada self-esteem and disguised with fruity pouts and the sort of lairy schmutter (it might be expensive but it damn well better make you look cheap) that helps one order lurid cocktails at inappropriate nightspots in bad company at the very earliest opportunity. Readers, let's face it - if this series is anything to go by, practically nothing about teenage girls' behaviour has changed in, at the very least, 25 years.
Aside from the bottomless bucketfuls of precious sleep, of course, one of the great advantages of being a childless adult is not yet having undergone that spooky parental lobotomy whereby persons with sordid pasts are born again as responsible, mature grown-ups with selective amnesia about anything to do with what it was really like to be young. Thus, for those of us still umbilically connected to the absurdities and anxieties of youth, it doesn't matter how many pension plans, email addresses or off-road vehicles one acquires, because fundamental irresponsibility is, for better or worse, still the order of the day.
For wearisome kidults, then, the most depressing/ worrying/revelatory thing about watching Teenage Kicks while wearing pink mules, gasping on a high-strength snout and nursing a Bacardi Breezer, was discovering that Bacardi Breezers are so , like, two years ago. What is an 'aftershock', anyway? And if I drink enough of them will I look good in an off-the-everything dress made from skeins of fluorescent dental floss?
As Pink Floyd so incisively sort-of put it, back when I was a teen, Hey, Mister C4 documentary-shaker- maker, leave those kids alone.
Alternatively, they could just go and make another docusoapy series about teenagers, only this time for ITV. Despite having nearly OD'd on young people last week, I tuned into The School on the Hill with mild excitement because I grew up in Harrow-on-the-Hill and thought it would be nice to see it again on telly. Even though I had no direct connection to the school, it so permeated my youthful consciousness that I remember when The Old Etonian restaurant opened on the high street in the 1970s to something approaching local outrage (irony had yet to filter up the Hill in those days; may not have got there yet for all I know).
And then there was the fact that, until I was about 10, I assumed boys everywhere habitually wore top hats and tailcoats on Sundays (indeed, I trace the genesis of one job, editing a men's fashion magazine, right back to this early sartorial brainwashing: God, how I love a neat lapel and a crisp turn-up!). Anyway, thanks to young James Robson, whom we saw being kitted at the outfitters by his moist-eyed mum and dad, we know that uniform costs the best part of £2,000, on top of the whopping £16,800-a-year fees, and only the biggest boys now wear toppers on Sunday.
Despite 400 years of history (it started as a charity school for the poor) and having produced seven prime ministers (including Churchill), standards in top-hattery are not the only ones in decline for, unlike Eton, Harrow is now a school with a distinctly Tim Dim reputation, having languished outside the top 100 in the league tables for yonks (the most famous name connected with the place these days is David Elleray, the football referee and lucky young James's housemaster). Still, I'm biased: if you're a rich and stupid boy I can't really think of a nicer place in which to wallow in arcane rituals, bonkers uniforms and absurd degrees of privilege in order to prepare you for a life of importing fine wine, becoming an internet start-up whizz and indulging in a little discreet white collar crime, or whatever it is they all go on and do.
So, I shall watch the entire series nursing a warm nostalgic glow, even though it looks to be about as enlightening as five years spent playing cricket in the shadow of St Mary's, the lovely 1,000-year-old church where the teenage Byron used to bunk off double-alchemy to sit on gravestones and scribble: 'I'm a poet and they don't even know it.'
After watching Unforgiven, a documentary about James Bulger's killers, Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, the comparisons between a school like Harrow and the kind of lavishly appointed secure units where they have lived, separately, for the last eight years - all-weather floodlit football pitches, computers, gyms, single bedrooms (you have to share at Harrow), all at a cost of £3,000 per week to the taxpayer for each boy - are obvious, and the sort of thing that particularly exercises the members of the Justice for James campaign, who claim that access to an all-weather football pitch must mean that the young men, now 18 and due for parole this summer, have surely never really been punished.
The tabloids' disgustingly vengeful and near-medieval approach to the attempted rehabilitation of Venables and Thompson has been one of the least edifying press campaigns in recent history but, happily, this balanced programme attempted to do justice to the potently emotive subject matter. It won't have won many converts in Liverpool, however, where newspaper headlines like 'Bulger Fiend Tries to Kill Again' (a lie) continue to fuel the raw vengefulness of a community that has never stopped grieving and for whom the circumstances surrounding James's death are maybe too close to home, literally and metaphorically. Still, it hasn't just been eight years of football and shopping trips - both boys have undergone lengthy and intense psychiatric evaluation. If it's tough being an average teenager, it is impossible to imagine the difficulties of growing up and coming to terms with a past like theirs: Thompson is, according to his solicitor, 'a remarkably thoughtful young man - to a degree that is in my view quite exceptional amongst 18-year-old people'; while, in Venables's case, we were told his therapy resulted in a series of nightmares in which he 'dreamed of giving birth, to somehow bring James back to life', which sounds like punishment to me.
Either way, the Home Office will decide the pair's fate this summer. A new responsibility (and an ironically literal case of the blind leading the blind) for David Blunkett, who will be spared the recent pictures of Thompson said to be circulating on the internet (in an alleged attempt to make sure he is 'hunted down', as the Justice for James campaigners, including James's father, assume is inevitable, perhaps even desirable). At the end of Unforgiven, one could only wish all parties involved the best of (British) luck, whatever that's worth.
