"Wow, It's Just So Surreal"

Through no fault of Owen Cooper's, expect a revival of the calls for Adolescence to be shown in schools. I am as pleased as anyone for him, although Adolescence seems like another life, perhaps because of what has happened to me since, of which more anon.

Adolescence is not about a black boy because it is not about a black boy. It is not about grooming gangs because it is not about grooming gangs. It is not about drugs because it is not about drugs. It is not about the girl because it is not about the girl. If any of those facts bothers you so much, then write your own script and pitch it to Netflix or whoever.

Each of the four episodes of Adolescence is an hour long, and a child's or adolescent's attention span is roughly the same number of minutes as his or her number of years in age. Will six or more hours of teaching time be taken up with this at the Sunday Times Independent School of the Year 2025, Reigate Grammar School, alma mater of Keir Starmer?

The second episode is a ridiculous depiction of a comprehensive school, because they always are on television, but, accurately or otherwise, it portrays teachers who have given up and are instead wont to put on videos. Starmer wants this to be shown in schools. Take as long as you need. And this is to be done, at public expense, through Tender, which was co-founded by Phillippa Kaufmann KC, Starmer's close friend and ex-girlfriend, who was a donor to his Leadership campaign.

People are raving about the third episode, but most of them have missed the most important part of it, when Jamie assumes that the female psychologist is out to trick him into calling his father abusive. That is exactly how boys regard the femocracy of teachers, social workers, health professionals, and so on, as out to get them and all males. Such are the fruits of deindustrialisation and pointless wars, now with the prospect of conscription. Meanwhile, girls are increasingly gravitating towards the anti-industrial and pro-war Green Party, which apparently has no idea how wars on the scale that it envisaged were fought. They are clearly unperturbed by gender self-identification. The opposition to that comes from their brothers.

In the four years between my first and my second spells in prison, one of the most striking changes was that between 60 and 80 per cent of men inside were now there for looking at a woman the wrong way, if we had looked at her at all. My case was the most astonishing that anyone, staff or inmate, had ever heard, but to my mind plenty came close, although people who had spent more time in the system found them run-of-the-mill these days. For example, there was a man whose ex-wife had turned up at his house with the Police already in tow, thereby placing him in breach of his restraining order, in full view of the Police, the moment that she set foot on his doorstep. That was not an isolated incident. The prisons are at breaking point because of this sort of thing.

Far more disturbing in that episode is when the psychologist asks Jamie in detail about how far he had ever been with a girl. Of course teenage boys have those conversations among themselves, but it is a different matter for a 13-year-old boy, and I mean the actor rather than the character, to be interrogated in that way by a woman in her thirties. Would it even be lawful to show that in schools?

The 80/20 rule and the word "incel" are new, but teenage boys have always assumed that most women were not attracted to most men, including them, and teenage girls have never shied away from telling them that they would never get girlfriends. I still do not understand the coloured emojis business or the business with the red pill and the blue pill, which may be the same business, but at my age, why should I?

Adolescence was not made as an educational resource, and it has one of those 15 certificates which, 15 years ago, would have been an 18. Oh, and although the Prime Minister has twice described it as a documentary, it is total fiction. You know, completely and utterly made up. We have not seen the like since Tony Blair and William Hague both demanded the release of Deirdre Rachid.

But not even Blair tried to use that to impose identity cards, whereas the fallback option, when we have all seen through the idea that digital ID might stop the boats, is that it might stop the boys. The real targets are elsewhere. Yes, they do include the working class and the youth, but not primarily while sitting at home. They also include traditional conservatives and the populist Right, trade unionists and anti-cuts campaigners, environmentalists and peace activists, ethnic minorities and the religious minorities that all religions now were. Grow up.