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The Guardian
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Yes, we should celebrate Adolescence – but it comes at a cost to the UK TV industry
Everyone is talking about Adolescence, the television drama focused on toxic masculinity that has triggered a continuing social and political debate. But only a handful of people are talking about what the hit drama says about the real-time crisis unfolding in the British television industry – and that needs discussion too. Adolescence is everything public service broadcasting should be: hard-hitting programming featuring the kind of people often ignored in TV drama – in this case, white working-class families in the north – discussed at the school gate and in parliament. After its British writer, Jack Thorne, met Keir Starmer in Downing Street, it was revealed that Adolescence was to be rolled out for free across all UK secondary schools. The free bit needs emphasising because, unlike traditional public service broadcasters behind classic hits from Cathy Come Home to Mr Bates vs the Post Office, Adolescence was commissioned by Netflix, one of the US-based streamers whose subscription models have appeared like missile-loaded drones landing on cash-strapped British broadcasters. For many of the 66 million viewers who helped make Adolescence the most-watched UK title on Netflix ever, such a statement will come across as typical through-a-glass-darkly Britishness, when such brilliant TV should only be a cause for celebration. Using British talent to tell universal stories to a global audience should be win-win. Netflix also deserves huge credit for trusting the brilliant Stephen Graham, as well as Thorne (who also wrote the platform's recent hit Toxic Town). But Adolescence is still a rarity for US giants like Netflix. Far more common a phenomenon is streamers such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple and Disney ratcheting up production prices for domestic broadcasters such as the BBC and ITV, which are already struggling with declining revenues. In their bid to produce more and more content to keep their global users happy, streamers spent £2.82bn on British-made content in 2024, up £600m in a year. Such investment has driven up production and talent costs, with the total spent on high-end TV produced in the UK up 11% last year, despite more than 40 fewer premium projects being undertaken. So more money has to be spent making fewer shows. Faced with real-terms funding cuts of more than a third since 2010, the BBC announced on Monday that it would cut spending on content by almost £150m in the next financial year. It blamed this 'unprecedented content funding challenge' on the fact that, as well as driving up prices, streamers such as Netflix no longer agreed to share costs and revenues with UK broadcasters in so-called co-production deals. Latest figures from the British Film Institute suggest that total spending by all domestic broadcasters last year fell to the lowest level of investment since 2019, ( once you have stripped out the anomaly of 2020, when Covid shut down all film and TV production). Does any of this matter, given the glories of current British television and the fact that when savings are made on screen, it is often only insiders who notice? Of course it matters. Thorne indicated that one scene on Adolescence which used 300 extras – the school fire drill – would have been too expensive for a public service broadcaster. Peter Kosminsky, the much-garlanded director of Wolf Hall, admitted that on the BBC expensive outdoor scenes had to be axed and the most highly paid people behind the award-winning drama, including himself and lead actor, Mark Rylance, had to take significant pay cuts to get it made. Kosminsky warned that, without intervention, the British TV industry would get squeezed out of the big TV drama market because of 'the inflated cost environment created here by the streamers'. The Producers Alliance for Cinema and Television (Pact) – the lobby group for the whole industry – reveals that 15 TV dramas greenlit by UK public service broadcasters were then mothballed because of escalating costs. We hear about the impact on drama, but no less affected is factual entertainment, and series such as David Attenborough's Planet Earth. They too are feeling the squeeze because of the death of production deals. So what can be done? Kosminsky has lobbied MPs for a 5% levy on all UK subscription streaming revenues, with the proceeds collected for a British cultural fund to spend on television content. This system would not only bring in more money than the existing, slightly complicated tax credit system for so-called high-end TV, but would help end the argument that everything should be done to encourage global streamers and their ilk to invest in UK talent. Politicians must also do their bit. Although keen to have tea with Thorne and the Adolescence creators, Starmer and his government have so far done absolutely nothing to address the issue facing British television, or to harness its soft power potential. Because if not now, when? We stand at one of those moments when a TV show reminds us why television matters: television that is more than entertainment, television that makes us think and reflect on ourselves, television that moves the dial. That never came cheap, it never will – but it's hard to overestimate its value. Jane Martinson is a Guardian columnist
New York Times
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Adolescence' Has People Talking. Its Writer Wants Lawmakers to Act.
The British screenwriter and playwright Jack Thorne has written several TV dramas that he hoped would stir political debate. Until last week, they never quite took off. Then, his new show, 'Adolescence,' appeared on Netflix. In the days since its March 13 release, the four-part drama about a 13-year-old boy who murders a girl from his school after potentially being exposed to misogynist ideas online has become Netflix's latest hit. According to the streamer, it was the most watched show on the platform in dozens of countries after it debuted, including the United States. In Britain, the show has been more than a topic of workplace chatter. It has reignited discussion about whether the government should restrict children's access to smartphones to stop them from accessing harmful content. Newspapers here have published dozens of articles about 'Adolescence,' which Thorne wrote with the actor Stephen Graham. A Times of London headline called it 'The TV Drama That Every Parent Should Watch,' and campaigners for a phone ban in schools have reported a surge in support. In Britain's parliament, too, lawmakers have used the show to make political points. Last week Prime Minister Keir Starmer told the House of Commons that he was watching 'Adolescence' with his two children, and said that action was needed to address the 'fatal consequences' of young men and boys viewing harmful content online. Thorne said in an interview that he was glad that the prime minister mentioned his show. Still, he added, he wanted British lawmakers to do more than talk about his drama: He wants them to pass a law that bans young people from accessing social media until they are 16. 'Adolesence' has appeared at a moment of growing global concern about the impact of smartphones on children's health and social development. Last year, Australia barred children under 16 from social media (though the law includes many exemptions). In February, Denmark's government announced it would soon ban smartphones in schools, something France has already implemented in primary and middle schools. There seems to be no appetite for a similar law among Britain's governing Labour Party. But there is a long history here of television shows that transform topics of social concern into the most urgent political issues of the day, going back to the 1960s, when the BBC broadcast gritty dramas like Ken Loach's 'Cathy Come Home.' That show shone a light on the plight of homeless people, a topic that was little discussed at the time. More recently, after the 2024 broadcast of 'Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office,' a drama about hundreds of real postal workers who were wrongly convicted of theft, Rishi Sunak, the prime minister at the time, quickly announced a law to exonerate them. James Strong, the director of 'Mr. Bates vs. the Post Office,' said that part of the reason 'Adolesence' was stirring so much debate was that viewers could easily relate to the show, which centers on a normal, loving family. It also tapped into a social concern that was 'ready to explode,' Strong said. Thorne said he began working on 'Adolesence' about two-and-a-half years ago when Graham, the actor, contacted him to say he had been shocked by a series of murders in which boys had stabbed girls to death, and wanted to write a show that explored why those crimes had occurred. Initially the pair struggled to work out a motivation for the show's main character, Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), until an assistant suggested the pair research the culture of incels, men who see themselves as involuntarily celibate and rail against women online. Thorne said he bought a burner phone and set up new social media accounts on it, then spent six months 'diving into very dark holes' of incel content online. It made him realize, he said, that the grim arithmetic of the incel worldview — the belief that 80 percent of women are attracted to just 20 percent of men, so boys must manipulate girls if they want to find sexual partners — could also seem 'incredibly attractive' to many young men. The research, Thorne said, also left him terrified that his son, age 8, would encounter such ideas when he gets a smartphone. Daisy Greenwell, a founder of the organization Smartphone Free Childhood, said the show spoke to that 'deep sense of panic' that many parents felt, but 'the government is so far behind the public on this.' Supporters had been discussing moments from the show that made them cry in the organization's WhatsApp group, Greenwell said, and many had singled out the series's third episode, in which a psychologist, played by Erin Doherty, questions Jamie about his views on women. During the exchange, Jamie transforms from a sweet, innocent-seeming boy into a snarling, rage-filled teen, and Greenwell said that change had upset and scared many parents. In an interview, Doherty that the actors spent two weeks rehearsing the episode, which, like each part of 'Adolescence,' is a single shot lasting about an hour. They then recorded 11 takes, she said, and the director chose the last one. She could only hazard guesses about why the show was striking such a nerve, Doherty said, but added that some of the appeal could be that the show wasn't didactic. Although many viewers were focusing on smartphone use as a trigger for the boy's murderous actions, the show's script had 'the bravery to not give any answers,' she said. And even though Thorne, the co-writer, has been calling for laws to limit smartphone use in news media interviews, he said his show never laid the blame solely on technology. In 'Adolescence,' he said, the boy's school is underfunded and teachers are too stressed and overworked to stop bullying, the police are ignorant of how teenagers talk to one another on social media and the boy's friends and family were oblivious to what he was capable of. There is an old saying that it takes a village to raise a child, but Thorne said it also 'takes a village to destroy a child.' He added that he just wanted 'Adolescence,' 'to persuade that village to help these kids.'
Telegraph
23-03-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
What Plato can teach Starmer: art is not truth
They should never have put cameras in the Commons, it only encourages them. 'Everyone is talking about Adolescence,' said an MP at PMQs, to prove that she's listening: should this Netflix drama about a 13-year-old boy who kills a girl be shown in schools to discourage 'online male radicalisation?' The PM agreed with the sentiment. 'It's a very good documentary,' he said – then corrected himself to 'drama'. Policy shouldn't be set by what politicians saw on telly last night, and there's a delicious irony in a show about the dangers of confusing fact and fiction itself being confused for fact. But it's an easy 'mistake-a to make-a'. Thousands of years ago, Plato warned that art is a mimicry of reality; an impossible task, so it distorts the truth and, to sell tickets, imitates, exaggerates and promotes our worst behaviour. Think of Coronation Street, which purports to be a slice of life, yet half the street has been to prison and even Billy the Vicar held up a petrol station with a gun. Plato worries that the audience imagines this is how things are and copies it, which, again, is the very theme of Adolescence. In one scene, the killer, Jamie, is asked by his psychiatrist if he's ever had sex. He describes an unlikely encounter, perhaps viewed online; says he enjoyed it, then that he didn't, finally that he made it up. We realise one of the evils of letting kids see porn is that it tells them sex is something they should desire and that everyone else is doing, even though they are far too young to obtain it or understand it. The parallels with sexual grooming are strong. But if you view Adolescence as didactic – saying 'here's what social media does, so please ban it' – you're missing a trick. Instagram doesn't explain pre-internet child killers such as the murderers of James Bulger. Other recent dramas about the phenomenon didn't raise questions in parliament. Adolescence has cut through because it is unusually well-made art, utilising the vérité style of film-making pioneered in the 1960s. Concerned that TV had become artificial and detached from social conditions, radical filmmakers set their dramas in the present – on factory floors or at the kitchen sink – often with non-actors, workshopped scripts and a camera that observes rather than directs our gaze. The classic example is Cathy Come Home: Tim Farron says this 1966 film about homelessness inspired him to enter politics. Contemporary critics pointed out that the non-contrivance of vérité was itself a contrivance, presenting propaganda as if it were news-reel fact. In 1983, the American network ABC aired a TV movie called The Day After about a hypothetical nuclear attack on Kansas, mixing naturalistic scenes of farm chores or a wedding with firestorms and radiation poisoning. Ronald Reagan's secretary of state appeared on ABC afterwards to point out that it is administration policy to deter, not encourage, a nuclear exchange, but something about an official in a suit insisting an attack is not imminent convinced many viewers that the missiles were already in the air. One of them might have been Reagan himself. In his diary he said the drama was 'powerful… very effective' and left him 'greatly depressed.' It's speculated that The Day After was one of the reasons why he pursued disarmament with Gorbachev. Artists do not, cannot, tell the whole, unvarnished story: they edit and make choices. The creators of Adolescence chose to make the killer white. This has triggered the most depressing backlash among some conservatives, alleging that the show ignores the prevalence of black knife crime, stigmatises white kids, is fake, cheap, lazy and junk. Never have I felt less conservative myself. This is exactly the kind of anti-art nonsense we accuse the Left of, questioning motives, even deploying the card of racial grievance. Alas, the Right's take on free speech is often dictated by taste: JD Vance accuses Europe of silencing dissent, then cheers the deportations of anti-Israel protestors from his own country. I don't get it. I can disagree with something but appreciate its technical qualities, just as I can enjoy a good joke even if I'm the target. In 2001, the cause célèbre was Paedogeddon!, the satirical Brass Eye special, which politicians thought made light of child abuse. The rest of us could see it lampooning those in Westminster or the media who exploit fear for attention. Either way, Plato was wrong. Whatever an author intends, adult audiences are not sheep. Politics affects to offer clarity: it says 'Here's what I believe, so you know where I stand.' But we also suspect the buggers are lying – or, at least, we can never be sure what another person is really thinking or feeling. Is the Mona Lisa smiling? Or grimacing? I've always thought 'she probably has bad teeth'. Either way, great art is frequently ambiguous, transforming spectator into participant as we try to comprehend what we've seen. Television is the perfect medium for this because there is – usually – no inner-monologue, so we must decode what's going on from dialogue. This is why Adolescence should be shown in schools. Not as dumb propaganda serving the latest moral panic but because it is cleverly, subtly made such as to generate conversation. Mum and I debated that psychiatrist scene for days. I say the boy is terrified; I felt pity for him. She thinks he's a psychopath: throw away the key. The truth in Adolescence is never settled. In real life, it rarely is.
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The Independent
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
Michael Sheen may be a real-life Robin Hood in Port Talbot, but campaigning TV doesn't get results
M ichael Sheen is visiting Bulldogs, a boxing gym in Port Talbot. He's talking to the gym's manager Ceri, a full-time worker and a single mum. Ceri has £12,000 worth of credit card debt and at various points, has been forced to use food banks. She'd love to own her own home but, as you might gather, despite a reasonably positive career trajectory, that's currently a pipe dream. How did basic survival become so ridiculously difficult in what remains a fundamentally wealthy country? And can television, with a touch of star power onside, help to address this question? While TV dramas, from Cathy Come Home in 1966 to Mr Bates vs The Post Office last year have had some success in shifting the conversation around scandals and social issues and prompting real change, the record of campaigning factual TV has been patchy at best. The presenter Vicky Pattison 's recent salvo against revenge porn, for example, was a misfire. Jamie Oliver 's attempts to address Britain's terrible school dinners ran into a toxic slew of issues around both culture and basic economics. Is it possible that television simply isn't cut out to make a difference on these terms? What the actor is attempting i n Michael Sheen's Secret Million Pound Giveaway seems both simple and terrifyingly complex. He wants to use £100,000 of his own money to write off a million pounds worth of personal debt. In so doing, he'll help a bunch of blameless, struggling individuals while making a series of wider points – firstly, that a whole ecosystem of bottom-feeders has developed around Britain's cost of living crisis; secondly, and most pertinently, that these sums of money are essentially hypothetical. Liabilities are sold on, becoming less valuable as they sink through the dank, shark-ridden waters of the secondary debt market. This process seems (and in fact, is) incredibly dull and no amount of slightly patronising explainers using tiny cardboard cut-outs of George Clooney can mitigate that. But it's also deadly; leeching off those least able to defend themselves and sucking the life out of them. It's capitalism at its absolute rock-bottom worst; resulting in obscenities like the 19-year-old cited in this programme who borrowed £500 and ended up paying back more than five grand. Nice work if you can get it. It's important to stress that Sheen's motivations here are unimpeachable. Born in Newport, he has never lost affinity with his roots in South Wales – and he's put his money where his mouth is often enough to be given the benefit of any doubt that might exist. These are his people and he feels their pain – at one point, as he's sitting in the local cafe pondering the decimation of Port Talbot's steel industry, he's unable to hold back tears. But the problem is, this isn't just a local issue. It's systemic and nationwide. It's a problem that's been decades in the making. What happens to people and communities when wages and opportunity don't keep pace with the cost of food and energy and housing? For all the relief that must be involved in learning that your debt no longer exists, catharsis would be inappropriate here. There's a grammar to TV shows (from The Secret Millionaire to Undercover Boss) in which munificence is bestowed by the powerful onto the powerless. It would be horribly out of place here and thankfully, it never comes. Sheen will never know whose debt he's bought and written off and thank goodness for that. This subject matter i s too raw and too profoundly widespread to fit the formula for emotional pornography. It would be like celebrating finding an Elastoplast to apply to a compound fracture. Much more fitting is the conclusion; surely one of the most anticlimactic climaxes to any programme of this type in living memory. This is a problem that demands political engagement. Sheen talks to Lloyd Hatton, an MP who is pushing a Fair Banking Act. He enlists the help of Gordon Brown who he hopes will get him through oak-panelled Treasury doors. 'I will ensure you have the meetings you need,' the former Prime Minister says. And then nothing. The government's financial inclusion committee is going to meet this month, we're told, with affordable credit on the agenda. A call to action is met by a shrug. And there's the rub. This actually feels like a perfect illustration of the problems facing this kind of campaigning TV. Change is glacial if it happens at all. It bumps up against government inertia, vested interests and the febrile news agenda. It runs out of steam. The one major argument for involving celebrities is that their presence might open doors as well as minds but that doesn't seem to have worked here. Sheen, we can be certain, won't be giving up and given the bleakness of the situation, what a joy it would be for me to eat these mildly sceptical words. At the end, we revisit Ceri from the gym. Have her circumstances changed for the better in the 18 months it's taken to make this programme? Not so much. She's moved back in with her parents, which, in 2025 seems to be the only default option for members of the British precariat lucky enough to have parents with a spare room. No magic then; just confirmation that there are wounds here that no amount of small screen good intentions can heal.
