Finally, I understand ‘online peer pressure’. I now sympathise with the very online young who find themselves besieged by armies of influencers barking: ‘Think this! Say this!’ No, it wasn’t Andrew Tate and the other scum of the ‘manosphere’ who opened my eyes to the dangers of virtual conformity. It was the cultural establishment and its crazy fawning over the anti-Tate Netflix drama, Adolescence.
Just like that, a new received wisdom has taken hold of Britain’s moral clerisy. It’s this: Adolescence is the greatest TV show ever. It is ‘complete perfection’, says Tom Peck of The Times. It is the ‘closest thing to TV perfection in decades’, gushes Lucy Mangan of the Guardian, who’s clearly never seen that episode of Celebrity Big Brother in which Tiffany Pollard thought David Gest rather than David Bowie had died.
I find it ironic that a mini-series about the social contagion of ‘Tateism’ has generated such a cultural contagion. Such a suffocating consensus that insists this drama is technically flawless and morally Christ-like – Keir Starmer says it should be shown in schools to deliver Britain’s young from the ‘abhorrent’ sway of devilish masculinity. I’m going to buck correct-think and say Adolescence is a striking but flawed series, and its contagious anti-Tateism poses a far larger threat to our society than Tateism ever could.
It’s a four-part series that tells the story of a 13-year-old boy in an English town who stabs to death a female classmate. It was created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham. Graham plays the dad, and is typically brilliant, while newcomer Owen Cooper shines as the fresh-faced killer, Jamie. Episode 1, where dad discovers what his boy did, is a taut and heartbreaking hour of TV. Episode 4 is deeply affecting too, with its study of the long shadow a child’s crime can cast over his family’s moral fortunes. Christine Tremarco as Jamie’s mum deserves as much notice as Graham is getting.
But it too often sacrifices its undoubted art at the altar of moral preaching. As with all morality plays, from ancient to modern times, a devil stalks this drama. And it has a name: Andrew Tate. It’s ‘that Andrew Tate shite’, says the female detective when they visit Jamie’s school and discover the influence macho influencers have over the kids. ‘I’ve heard the boys talk about him’, says the teacher, in tones not dissimilar to those of Abigail in The Crucible who says: ‘I saw Goody Osburn with the Devil.’ I cringed at the scene in which the son of Detective Inspector Luke Bascombe (an outstanding Ashley Walters) explains the ‘manosphere’. Walters is 42 and looks 35: why is his character saying ‘Eh?’ like some bewildered Boomer upon hearing there are manipulative wankers on the internet?
Here’s the thing: Tate will love the outsized presence he enjoys in this dramatic rendering of an English town. The writers imbue him with godlike powers, with mastery over life itself. At the end of Episode 2, the camera rises above the town to drive home the point that such frayed communities are easy prey for the internet’s all-powerful masculinists. A cover of Sting’s ‘Fragile’, sung by kids, plays over the sweeping shot. ‘For all those born beneath an angry star / Lest we forget how fragile we are’, their innocent voices croon. Guys, we get it.
The trouble with morality plays is that moral complexity always plays a poor second to moral showboating. Righteous outrage against the devil substitutes for a true and honest grappling with humanity’s own capacity for wickedness. A great drama would never offer up pat explanations for such a calamitous event as a child murdering a child, because no such explanations exist. No, it would invite us into the prickly weeds of the human experience, and leave us to find our own way out, or not. Thorne and Graham seem not to trust us to do that. They just shout ‘TATE’. In the process, they weaken their own drama and insult their viewers.
The desire to Make A Point is a huge drag on Adolescence’s dramatic virtues and its cast’s stellar performances. There is little suspense and little of the open-endedness we might desire from drama, for we are instructed from the start on the source of the evil that blights this town: Andrew Tate. It’s a whodunnit, and whodunnit is Tate. This weakens Episode 3 in particular, in which the psychologist (a fab Erin Doherty) interrogates Jamie about his attitude to women. We already know how this episode will play out, because the producers’ instinct to indict Tateism is so overpowering. It drives out all else; there is nothing left to psychologise.
Thirty years ago our society understood that the murder of a child by a child was a catastrophic event deserving of the most serious moral treatment. It was as if there had been ‘a breach of nature’, wrote Blake Morrison in As If, his classic moral treatise on the killing of James Bulger by two 10-year-old boys in 1993. ‘The tides frozen; stars nailed to the sky; the moon weeping far from sight. Those nameless boys had killed not just a child but the idea of childhood’, he said. Fast forward three decades and no such philosophy, no such poetry, attends the spectacle of kids killing kids. Now we’re told: ‘It was the internet that did it.’ We wrap ourselves in the comfort blanket of idiot explanations to avoid doing what every generation before ours was on occasion compelled to do: peer into the well of evil.
Andrew Tate is a moral menace, there’s no doubt. But there are legions of moral menaces that remain unexplored by our cultural classes. There’s an online culture that entices middle-class gay kids on to a conveyor belt of chemical castration. It calls itself ‘trans rights’. There’s a virtual underbelly of religious hysteria that encouraged literally hundreds of young British Muslims to trek 3,000 miles to join a cult that crucified Christians and defenestrated homosexuals. Where’s that drama, Netflix? We all know that far more male violence and oppression flows from the online subculture of angry Islamism than has ever been authored by Tate. But if you made a drama about it, you’d be cancelled quicker than you could say ‘Allahu Akbar’.
The moral panic about Tate is a moral panic about working-class boys. As Ally Ross of the Sun said of Adolescence, it seems there’s no role in modern drama for working-class boys ‘beyond thug or bully’. Tony Blair, then leader of the opposition, exploited the murder of James Bulger to push a new authoritarianism. Now, like history repeated as farce, his heir, Keir Starmer, is exploiting the fictional murder of a kid to push his petty tyranny of social-media clampdowns. At last, we might get the war on ‘social media-fuelled violence [against] women’ that we need, says an overexcited Guardian in the wake of Adolescence. I don’t need to tell you that they’re not referring to the misogyny of bourgeois trans activists or radical Islamists. Nope, only working-class young’uns like Jamie. Who’s made up.
The elite anti-Tateism unleashed by Adolescence scares me far more than Andrew Tate. His nefarious influence is primarily limited to powerless boys. Anti-Tateism, in contrast, swirls among opinion-makers and lawmakers. On the back of Adolescence, these powerful people are talking about the need for new systems of moral instruction in schools and bans on phones for kids under the age of 16. Really? It’s not 16-year-olds who’ve been using their phones these past few days to pump out illiberal and bigoted propaganda about the masses. Confiscating the phones of 45-year-old men in the media might be more fruitful.
Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His new book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy
