How long before Kemi Badenoch has a cardboard placard hung round her neck, Cultural Revolution style, to let the world know she still hasn’t watched Adolescence?
It’s getting to that stage. First Nick Ferrari of LBC accused her of a ‘dereliction of duty’ for failing to watch the Netflix drama. Then professional tit James O’Brien said it is ‘unthinkable’ that she has ‘swerved this programme’. And now the BBC is grilling her. ‘Have you watched Adolescence yet?’, its presenters barked in McCarthyite tones this week. No, said the sinner. Quick! Shave her head, drag her to the square, parade the Adolescence avoider before the eyes of the apoplectic!
It is getting ridiculous. There’s a trade war, there are real wars and there are real crimes – rape gangs, anyone? – and yet the Beeb thinks the most pressing thing to ask the leader of the opposition about is a TV show. Her inquisition took place on BBC Breakfast. ‘Have you watched Adolescence yet?’, asked host Charlie Stayt. Yet. His truculent utterance of that word left no doubt: anyone who wants to keep sweet with the elites will have to submit eventually and imbibe this holy drama.
When Badenoch said she hasn’t watched it – and, even more blasphemously, that she probably won’t – the other host, Naga Munchetty, looked about ready to fetch some holy water. But it’s about ‘toxic masculinity’, she cried. And ‘smartphone use’. ‘Why would you not want to know what people are talking about?’, she demanded with priestly exasperation. Badenoch’s comeback was excellent. ‘I don’t need to watch Casualty to know what’s going on in the NHS’, she said.
The past week’s Salem-lite hounding of Badenoch for her moral transgression of failing to watch a Netflix show has been a truly mad spectacle. It confirms that Adolescence has become a kind of neo-religious tract for the cultural establishment. To them it’s more than a TV drama – it’s a deliverer of divine revelation, the opener of mankind’s eyes to the sinful plagues of our time, especially toxic masculinity. To avoid it is sacrilegious. It is ‘unthinkable’, as O’Brien says, that high priest of the wankerati.
There’s a delicious irony in all this falling at the altar of Adolescence. This is a drama that explores the cultural contagion of manosphere guff and the impact it can have on boys like Jamie, the 13-year-old at the heart of the story who commits a dreadful crime. And yet the show has birthed its own cultural contagion, one that makes all that ‘Andrew Tate shite’ look like small fry in comparison.
One by one, Britain’s movers and shakers have bowed to the gospel of Adolescence. It is ‘complete perfection’, says The Times. It is ‘such powerful TV’ it ‘could save lives’, cries the Guardian. Behold your salvation, children! It should be shown in schools, says Keir Starmer, to lift boys from that devil’s pit of masculinity. The cult of Adolescence scares me more than the cult of Tate. The teenage boys I know harbour a healthy scepticism towards that misogynistic prick. For real indoctrination, to see how delirious people can become following thoughtless bending to false idols, look not to teens browsing the dumb internet but to these proselytising zealots of the Oxbridge classes who dream that a drama might save our souls.
Now, courtesy of the hounding of Badenoch, we know what barbs await those who spurn the revelations of Adolescence. Her non-viewing even makes headlines. ‘Kemi Badenoch reveals she’s not seen Adolescence’, says one. If you are ‘in any way concerned with public conversation’, then you have to watch this show, says O’Brien, as if it were the law of the land. Maybe it will be one day. If you can get 31 months in the clink for writing a vile tweet, why not for saying ‘I ain’t watching that shit’ about Adolescence?
All this talk of ‘public conversation’ is driving me mad. Munchetty told Badenoch she must watch Adolescence if she wants to ‘know what people are talking about’. I’ll tell you what people are talking about, Naga: ‘grooming gangs’. Those gangs of mostly Pakistani Muslim men who exploited and raped white working-class girls in towns around the country for decades. Once again, the government has let down the victims of those sick crimes, this time by saying it might not proceed with the inquiries it promised. And you want us to talk about a crime someone made up?
That those BBC hosts interrogated Badenoch about Adolescence the day after the government said it wouldn’t be holding inquiries into ‘grooming gangs’ is mind-blowing. Nothing better captures the aristocratic aloofness of the BBC, its unworldly disregard for our concerns, than the fact that it badgered Badenoch about a fictional crime on the day the rest of us were talking about the real crimes inflicted on working-class girls under the noses of mercilessly blithe officials. If a fictional assault on a fictional girl troubles you more than the horrors those real girls endured, you are lost. Your neo-religion has rendered you heartless.
This is where we are at. Discussing the very real rape gangs is ferociously discouraged while lamenting an invented crime on a Netflix drama is all the rage. The elites take refuge in a fantasy world of dangerous boys to avoid the real-world problems of multicultural tension and social malaise. They’re more comfortable wagging a virtuous finger at a kid that doesn’t exist than they are in grappling with the discomfiting truths of 21st-century Britain. Watch Adolescence or don’t watch it – I don’t care. But the cult of Adolescence? Let the blasphemy begin.
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
