The impending elections to the Welsh Assembly have caused the "national" media to pay some much-needed attention to the horrendous record of that body, recently voted more powers on a pitiful turnout only because most people there are fatally resigned to the thing as they watch their children move to England.
The condition of the NHS in the land of Bevan is particularly shocking. But also more than worthy of note is the abolition of school Sixth Forms in favour of giant FE Colleges. Say what you like about The Inbetweeners, but at least it was set in a school Sixth Form, an institution otherwise completely ignored by media types who are themselves mostly products of it and who would go to practically any lengths to secure it for their own offspring.
In Wales as a strikingly large example of a longstanding and pernicious trend at more local levels, we may safely assume that neither the commercial schools favoured by Tories and Lib Dems, nor the achingly exclusive pseudo-comps favoured by well-heeled Labourites and Nationalists who can afford the house prices or negotiate the admissions process, will be stopping at 16. Thus are everyone else's children literally kept in their place.
In spite of everything I enjoyed The Inbetweeners because it was so unlike things like Skins. Most boys especially never see their real lives reflected on television, it is all achingly good-looking people drinking freely, taking drugs and having loads of sex. You are right that the public schoolboys in the media ignore the school 6th forms that they themselves went to and got them into Oxbridge. Even on the soaps the most improbable teenage characters are given social lives and love lives that they would never have in real life. The Inbetweeners was a bit rude but at least it was a counterweight to that.
ReplyDeleteThe actors were too old, of course. But so what? It worked.
ReplyDeleteYou are right, of course. How many girlfriends has Peter Beale had on EastEnders? He is supposedly 17 but he has slept most or all of them, and more besides. There are 17-year-old boys like that, but Peter would not be one of them. Perhaps the actor has turned out too pretty for the character, although I think that he is a good actor all the same.
He is also at "college" even though, rather improbably, Walford High has a Sixth Form, or did have a couple of years ago.
Maybe they are lining up Peter Beale for a seat on the Borough Council or in Parliament and know that that would be wildly unrealistic if he had not been a supercool teenager and twentysomething with no interest in politics or community affairs.
ReplyDeleteI realise that we are straying off topic, but people like that cannot acquire the necessary experience. They have too many other calls on their time, which are so much more attractive at that age.
ReplyDeleteYet municipal and parliamentary life is more and more restricted to them. Why do they even want to be in it? Whatever happened to football, or pop music, or whatever it is that they do?