(ones that actually cut hair anyway) and cab offices up and down the country. Anyone attempting to buy anything sharper than a spatula from Amazon might soon have to watch a few edited highlights of the show and answer a short questionnaire.
Meanwhile, LBC found a new angle on Adolescence to pursue this week. When Tory leader Kemi Badenoch pointed out to presenter Nick Ferrari that it is a work of fiction, and that there are more pressing issues to worry about, Ferrari suggested that for a politician not to have watched it might be regarded as a ‘dereliction of duty’. His LBC colleague, James O’Brien, went even further. ‘The idea that you would have swerved this programme is unthinkable’, he said. ‘It’s not just the ignorance and the blithe arrogance that’s offensive, it’s the revelling in it’, he despaired, his face like a bag of bewildered offal. O’Brien looked as if he suspected her of not having seen Paddington 2, either, but on this he bit his lip.
Badenoch does seem to have grasped something important that has eluded many others – namely, that ‘the story on which it is based on has been fundamentally changed’, as she put it. Co-creator Stephen Graham has said that one of the real-life incidents that inspired Adolescence was a ‘young girl in south London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop’ – a reference to the 2023 murder of Elianne Andam by Hassan Sentamu in Croydon. Everyone knows that this had nothing to do with the manosphere, and that the backgrounds of the perpetrator and victim were very different from the characters in Adolescence.
The establishment left is increasingly dependent on fiction – whether novels, films or TV dramas – to tell the story it wants to, to obscure inconvenient facts and to drive the discourse it wants to hear.
The undoubted excellence of the acting, and the technical triumph of those episode-length single shots, seem to have seduced everyone into thinking that this must then be showing a powerful truth. As Kemi said though: it's not real, and it's not even an accurate portrayal of what's happening with these stabbings.
It's fiction.
Leave a Reply