My last column for spiked touched on the political class’s excitement over Netflix propaganda – sorry, drama series – Adolescence. It was all of two weeks ago. And I must confess, as I hit send on the usual sorry collection of vitriol, polemic and scorn, my main concern was that by the time the digital presses had rolled, it would be obsolete. Such a pathetic little squall must surely blow itself out overnight? But no.
Instead, the humiliating spectacle of watching Keir Starmer, prime minister of the once and future greatest country in the world, allow a television drama to put a ring through his attention and lead him around like a pet porker is still ongoing. One might almost wonder if a crackdown on social media – which the show heavily implies is long overdue – isn’t something he’s quite keen to do anyway.
Alongside the ubiquitous demands for more social-media censorship, moves are now afoot to make Adolescence not merely free to view in British schools, as Netflix has just agreed to do, but also compulsory. It’s only a matter of time, surely, before it replaces the footy in pubs, barber shops (ones that actually cut hair anyway) and cab offices up and down the country. Anyone attempting to buy anything sharper than a spatula from Amazon might soon have to watch a few edited highlights of the show and answer a short questionnaire.
Meanwhile, LBC found a new angle on Adolescence to pursue this week. When Tory leader Kemi Badenoch pointed out to presenter Nick Ferrari that it is a work of fiction, and that there are more pressing issues to worry about, Ferrari suggested that for a politician not to have watched it might be regarded as a ‘dereliction of duty’. His LBC colleague, James O’Brien, went even further. ‘The idea that you would have swerved this programme is unthinkable’, he said. ‘It’s not just the ignorance and the blithe arrogance that’s offensive, it’s the revelling in it’, he despaired, his face like a bag of bewildered offal. O’Brien looked as if he suspected her of not having seen Paddington 2, either, but on this he bit his lip.
Badenoch does seem to have grasped something important that has eluded many others – namely, that ‘the story on which it is based on has been fundamentally changed’, as she put it. Co-creator Stephen Graham has said that one of the real-life incidents that inspired Adolescence was a ‘young girl in south London who was stabbed to death at a bus stop’ – a reference to the 2023 murder of Elianne Andam by Hassan Sentamu in Croydon. Everyone knows that this had nothing to do with the manosphere, and that the backgrounds of the perpetrator and victim were very different from the characters in Adolescence.
The establishment left is increasingly dependent on fiction – whether novels, films or TV dramas – to tell the story it wants to, to obscure inconvenient facts and to drive the discourse it wants to hear.
There have been dozens, if not hundreds, of novels lately that look at the ‘refugee experience’, for instance, from several by sentimental children’s author Michael Morpurgo to the brazenly implausible Booker winner, Prophet Song, by Paul Lynch. I cannot think of a single one that might illuminate the challenges of, say, a single mother in a small town that finds its one hotel suddenly full of nameless strangers, with no histories, accountability or happy ending in sight.
The same was true when various TV dramas were trying to hammer through the ‘correct’ way to see trans issues – namely, as a contest between brave would-be mermaids and bigoted, misguided parents who couldn’t grasp the truth.
Nor is this new. It is a source of constant exasperation to the American right that Emma Lazarus’s sonnet, ‘The New Colossus’, which adorns the Statue of Liberty, is treated as holy writ in determining immigration policy. The lines, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’, are no doubt stirring, but they were written to aid Lazarus’s tireless campaigning to resettle Russian Jews persecuted by late-19th-century pogroms, rather than to demand a commitment to open borders to all comers, forever.
Shelley famously said that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, but in his day, they were working in the infancy of mass media. Netflix has assumed that role now. It’s only a matter of time, as Steerpike in the Spectator suggests, before Netflix moves on to assisted suicide and produces a gritty drama about a troublesome granny who just won’t die, to help get the British establishment’s dearly cherished assisted-suicide bill through parliament.
Manufacturing consent has a long and dishonourable history and this Adolescence episode is just the latest, maddest example. Most worrying is the determination of this government, and the other cheek of the uniparty before it, to reach for any pretext, real or imagined, for further clampdowns on social-media speech. This must be fiercely resisted. There is no more valuable, fundamental freedom than the freedom to speak our minds and speak as we find. Without it, we are damned to a state of permanent adolescence.
Simon Evans is a spiked columnist and stand-up comedian. Tickets for his tour, Have We Met?, are on sale here.
