HOW NOT TO BE A TV CRITIC

Photo by Ryunosuke Kikuno on Unsplash

If this beautiful little girl is watching Adolescence I’d like to know what she finds so funny. I watched it through a curtain of tears that has still not lifted. But then I’m an adult and, as the young son of the policeman decides it’s time he told his floundering father in Episode One, adults don’t have a clue what’s going on out there in TikTot.

As TV dramas go, Adolescence has been enjoying extraordinary unanimity of approval. Which might be why dissenters are starting to make their voices heard. I don’t think this little girl is one of those. She would appear to have too sweet a nature. I’m not looking for a fight. Let people see what they want to see. There are worse crimes than being crass about a television programme. Just don’t ask me to name them.

Then again, can you think of anything more crass than this sentence - ‘Each of the four one-hour episodes is apparently shot in one take, which is the sort of thing that thrills male critics but for ordinary viewers can, at times, feel self-indulgent and contrived.’

If you have a spare hour to spend with your children try getting them to count the number of things wrong with that. I’m up to about a hundred and still counting. Here’s just a handful -

ONE Why ‘apparently’ shot in one take? Is someone lying? Was each of the four episodes ‘actually’ shot in a dozen takes by twenty cameramen?

TWO: Why the gender provocation? Why imply that there’s something specifically mannish (note the use of the word ‘thrills’) about technical achievement? Why distinguish between ‘male critics’ and ‘ordinary viewers? Aren’t men ‘ordinary’?

I am not going to name the writer of this piece. I have said I am not looking for a fight. I am not going to name the periodical in which it appeared, for the same reason. I want to live in a happy place like that beautiful girl. But I will say the writer is a woman and call her X. Now -

THREE - if a man had said that an hour-long episode shot in one take is unlikely to ‘thrill’ a woman would he not be considered condescending at best? Indeed, is there a man out there who would dare to imply that the extraordinary technical achievement of shooting four episodes each in one take couldn’t possibly appeal to women - AKA ‘ordinary viewers’ - who are, of course, much more at home watching Bakeoff and the Shopping Channel?

FOUR Among Adolescence’s many subjects is the hostility TikTot brews between men and women. Why, in the context of Adolescence, is X fomenting that hostility further.

And then, because there’s more, there’s X boast that she alone has picked up what not a single other commentator has, and that is that the real devil of the piece, the ‘one thing that we parents can control’. (subtext: ‘I can and do’) is ‘access to smartphones.’

What!

What you alone have picked up!

I must calm down.

It’s not that I want to be that beautiful little girl in the photograph who, rather than tell her friend she has a telly on her head, skips and laughs sweetly, assuming it has to be a joke. But why can’t I feel the same about X? Why can’t I do a little dance and assume she’s having fun, rather than shout ‘Are you on another planet, X? The omnipresence of the smart phone in the lives of adolescents is precisely what Adolescence is about. What the hell have you been watching? The scene at the end where the daughter sits between her parents, ‘gazing gormessly,’ as you put it ‘at her phone throughout’ is distressing precisely because the girl - who isn’t at all gormless, by the way, and it’s brutal of you to say she is - needs the phone to distract her from the anguish, leans on it, as millions do, to numb the pain, distract, not have to meet the confused sorrow in her parents’ eyes. There’s the tragedy of Adolescence. We act in need and ignorance. Even the best and brightest of us. What - you alone don’t? Then employ the wisdom that got you to the eminence you claim to enjoy, to feel for those who are still floundering. And get that telly off your head. You’re not in it. It isn’t about you.