What a childish dilemma
IWOULD normally run a mile from a programme called THE WORLD ACCORDING TO KIDS (BBC2). There have been a lot of TV shows over the decades with titles like that in which the half-baked, half-understood or downright mysterious utterances of the little folk are paraded before an audience like so many performing seals.
Sometimes they say things so clever you know that they’ve heard an adult saying them. At other times, they say things that are funny if your own children say them, considerably less so if your own children say them twice and more or less entirely unfunny if they come from someone else’s children.
The programme on BBC2 at the moment however is not that type of show. Instead of treating the kids like comic turns, it tries to show us how they navigate their worlds.
Groups of children from settings as diverse as a Berkshire pony club and a boxing gym in Hackney are given moral dilemmas to work out among themselves and are never without a minor, personal journey.
A choir group in Liverpool was asked to decide between peeking at some carelessly mislaid exam answers, informing on the friend who’d already looked at them and keeping shtum. On the faces of the girls fidgeting with the dilemma, personality seemed like something biological, as distinct as freckles.
Eight-year-old Holly (“when I break a rule I feel excited”) was tormented by the need to choose between right and wrong, so visibly that you could almost see a little angel and a devil on opposing shoulders.
She seemed like a different species of girl to the choir mate who said: “In my school, you can get warnings or go on amber or red and I (gulp, shudder, eye-roll) don’t want that to happen to me.”
Sometimes, the agreements worked out between the kids tell you more about the adult world surrounding them. The kids at the Hackney boxing gym who chose to walk away from the briefcase containing a million quid were praised by the grown-ups. Telling the police was an option too as was taking the money and running.
I’m fairly sure in my day, in my cosy neck of the woods, we’d have been told off equally for walking away or taking the cash and only praised if we’d chosen to inform the authorities.
If walking away (also known as saying nothing, not getting involved) is the “right” choice in today’s Hackney, that might say something about today’s Hackney and it might say something about today’s authorities.
Series like THE DETECTIVES: INSIDE THE MAJOR CRIMES TEAM (ITV) are a revelation for TV viewers, especially those reared on a diet of crime thrillers. In those murky plots, red herrings and possible contenders whirl in front of the detectives like horses on a merry-go-round while the genius behind the crime stays one step ahead until the final cliff-top scene.
Few crimes are like that though. Even the meticulously planned murder at the centre of last night’s case was, at the end of the day, carried out by two people who simply didn’t imagine being caught.
The killers of businesswoman Sadie Hartley might well have been truly wicked but the most obvious word to describe them is stupid.
Catching such people though is only one small part of the job. Detectives, as this gritty show demonstrates, don’t catch baddies so much as trawl for the evidence to put them away.