Adolescence and the problem with government by Gogglebox
Calls for Netflix’s Adolescence to be shown in schools reveal the dire state of our national conversation, says Emma Revell
For years I have joked that reality TV may be the only way to get some people to understand the severity of the housing crisis. Find an over-confident Boomer who is still harping on about having double-digit interest on a mortgage they’ve long since paid off. Have them switch lives with a twenty-something living in a box room in Fulham and paying £2,000 a month for the privilege. Then see how long it takes them to crumble.
Turns out, I might be on to something.
In the 1970s a group of Conservative thinkers, including Margaret Thatcher, recognised that in order to address the critical issues facing Britain they needed to understand the complex and often unrecognised ways those issues were interconnected. Only once that had been mapped out could solutions be found that would actually work, rather than deliver superficial change.
That project became known as Stepping Stones and it went on to become the blueprint for the achievements of the Thatcher era – tackling the power of the unions, freeing industry to thrive, creating an economic boom and cementing London as a global financial centre for decades to come.
Netflix now decides the Prime Minister’s priorities
Today, the Prime Minister appears to decide on his political priorities by watching Netflix.
That’s not to say Keir Starmer is alone in being caught up in government-by-Gogglebox. The last Conservative government was as energised by ITV’s ‘Mr Bates vs The Post Office’ as the current Labour leader seems to be by Netflix’s Adolescence. But nevertheless, it says a lot about the dire state of thought leadership in this country if the entire national conversation can be shaped by half a dozen episodes of fictionalised TV drama.
A Downing Street roundtable hosted by the Prime Minister should be a serious affair, not something dictated by our TV viewing habits. It only got more farcical when it was announced that Netflix had subsequently agreed to make the show available for all secondary schools to show to their pupils.
Somehow, as a nation, it doesn’t seem to bother us that we’re treating a TV drama as if it’s a documentary, or that our solution to kids being glued to their screens (a surefire shortcut to a life of crime, apparently) is to force them to watch… a different type of screen. In fact, it was Kemi Badenoch who inexplicably copped the most flack for telling LBC that she hadn’t seen the show and that “creating policy on a work of fiction, rather than on reality, is the real issue.”
This programme-to-policy pipeline is concerning for several reasons.
First, it gives politicians the appearance of acting on a major national issue without any of the hard work. It goes without saying that increasing hostility towards women among young men and boys, driven in part by what they see and hear online, is a problem. But a bigger problem is surely that highlighted by people like Miriam Cates and Richard Reeves, organisations such as the Centre for Social Justice, and by decades of statistical evidence – that there is an increasing divergence between the educational attainments and subsequent employment opportunities of boys and girls.
Somehow, as a nation, it doesn’t seem to bother us that we’re treating a TV drama as if it’s a documentary, or that our solution to kids being glued to their screens (a surefire shortcut to a life of crime, apparently) is to force them to watch… a different type of screen
The CSJ has found that since the pandemic, the number of men aged 16 to 24 who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) has increased by a staggering 40 per cent, compared to just seven per cent for women. White working-class boys are some of the least likely to get 5 A*-C grades at GCSE. These are issues schools are directly concerned with.
Second, TV shows cannot encompass every nuance of a given issue, nor should they be expected to. The creators of Adolescence were no doubt concerned about the impact of social media on children and the rise of misogynist influencers like Andrew Tate. But between 2021 and 2024, black Britons were three times more likely to be a victim of murder than white.
Of course, that isn’t the story they were trying to tell – and there are plenty of shows that do tell those stories. But when politicians use TV as a shorthand for the problems we as a nation face, you can forgive people for pointing out just how fictitious this work of fiction actually is.
Unfortunately, unless the Kemi Badenoch approach wins out, it feels likely that activists will begin to see TV as a key route to influencing the political process. So Channel 4, if you’re reading, let’s have a meeting about this house-swap idea. There might even be a ministerial roundtable in it for you.
Emma Revell is external affairs director at the Centre for Policy Studies