Fiction is truer than fact

Willing suspension of disbelief is not a good basis for lawmaking

Two books I read in my teens made me want to be a writer. One, Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, appeared when I was in the third year of secondary school and delivered a style of memoir so warm, so funny and affable that I wanted nothing more than to do the same. The other was Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a very tattered tenth-hand copy borrowed from a friend (and never given back, sorry). I was mesmerised.

It was probable that I would have headed down the path to Grub Street anyway, but if you want to blame anyone for my contribution to the discourse, then Harper Lee must shoulder a small part. English wasn’t my favourite subject – that was history, followed by maths, and the profession I first saw myself trying out, after a careers fair in school, was as an actuary. Probability always interested me, perhaps because it feels like a tangible way of understanding a confusing world, and statistics are usually less frightening than one’s imagination. It’s a shame I didn’t stick with that idea, in retrospect.

Harper Lee’s influence was enormous. There was a point during the early 2010s, when I used to read weekly theatre reviews, when I remember noticing that there were four different plays about racial prejudice in the American South showing in the West End. The book and its film adaptation had a huge impact on how audiences viewed racism and the law, and this is hardly surprising, since fictional works have far more influence on public opinion than dry polemic.

Perhaps the most famous example was Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which helped galvanise the anti-slavery movement in the northern United States, leading Abraham Lincoln to tell its author Harriet Beecher Stowe ‘So you’re the little woman that started this great war!’ (in fact that probably didn’t happen, but the story reflected a widespread understanding of the book’s influence).

In Britain, public opinion on abortion was hugely influenced by Up The Junction, the radio play directed by Ken Loach, with its depiction of a back street termination. Loach was also responsible for Cathy Come Home, which influenced elite opinion on homelessness and probably played a part in the 1977 Housing (Homeless Persons) Act; this radically overhauled the social housing waiting list system by giving priority to those in need, with enormous consequences.

Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and its film adaptation had a huge effect on perceptions about serious mental illness, promoting the R.D. Laing school of thought that the mentally ill were best placed in the community rather than institutions - again, with huge consequences.

Fiction has often driven social reforms, none more so than the work of Charles Dickens, whose novels also continue to colour our view of Victorian Britain more than any historian. Drama as a means of shaping the discourse has also seen a revival with last year’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office, and now with the arrival of the Netflix drama Adolescence.

It is harrowing stuff, especially as a father of a boy just a bit younger than its antagonist, and Adolescence has proved a huge hit; watched by six and a half million people in its first week, the biggest ever audience for a streaming television show, it even beat The Apprentice in audience ratings. It is a credit to the writers and the actors, in particular the hugely talented Stephen Graham, who both co-wrote the drama and played the killer’s father with a rare degree of empathy.

It is also a drama quite consciously aimed at driving the discourse, which Parliamentarians have taken up with zeal. The Prime Minister announced that ‘As a father, watching Adolescence with my teenage son and daughter hit home hard. We all need to be having these conversations more.’ Backing Netflix’s plan to show the series for free in schools across the country, ‘so as many young people as possible can see it’, Starmer even accidentally referred to it as a ‘documentary’ in Parliament before correcting himself, and then did so a second time. Kemi Badenoch, meanwhile, has been slammed by radio hosts for not watching the fictional work, one calling it a ‘dereliction of duty’. One gets the feeling that we’ll soon all be out clapping for Adolescence.

So with the backing of the Prime Minister, the programme will be watched in Parliament, where the show’s creators will meet with politicians to discuss ‘online safety’. The drama will also be shown in schools as part of anti-misogyny lessons; the message behind Adolescence, that the small, weird kid is probably a demented women-hating killer, will no doubt have a very positive impact on classrooms.

You might say that ‘Britain has gone from Government-by-Newspaper-Columnist to Government-by-DocuDrama’ But, of course, there is a key difference between Mr Bates and Adolescence – the Horizon scandal portrayed in that ITV series actually happened; Adolescence is total fiction. In fact, not only did the story in the Netflix series not happen, it’s not even likely to happen, as any actuary might tell you. This has not stopped the BBC reporting how the ‘Netflix hit proves necessity of male role models’.

The drama recounts the story of Jamie, an intelligent 13-year-old boy from a loving and intact upper-working-class family. His father has never seen the inside of a police station before but Jamie, influenced by ‘that Andrew Tate shite’, as the female detective phrases it, and the beliefs of the online manosphere, murders a girl who calls him an ‘incel’.

As Ian Leslie wrote, ‘At the centre of the story is a boy who stabs a girl to death in a fit of rage, driven by fear of masculine humiliation. Jamie is intelligent, and while he has problems controlling his anger, he is not mentally ill. Jamie’s normality is crucial to what you might call the argument of Adolescence. We have seen dramas about children doing terrible things before and invariably it turns out that the children’s parents have done terrible things to them.

‘Adolescence toys with this convention, leading us to expect a shocking revelation of parental abuse. The only shock turns out to be that Jamie’s parents are decent and loving. They are not the problem; the problem is in the phones. Jamie’s mind has been poisoned by the online “manosphere” (a concept clumsily introduced in a scene between the lead detective and his son). This online culture is to blame, rather than parents, teachers, or the kid himself. The manosphere performs a role that we used to assign to evil spirits, arbitrarily taking possession of vulnerable souls and acting through them to commit awful deeds.’

Jack Thorne, the show’s writer, said that Jamie ‘comes from a good background, like me; he’s a bright boy, like I was. The key difference between us? He had the internet to read at night whereas I had Terry Pratchett and Judy Blume.’

As Leslie points out: ‘Your beloved son could be the next Jamie, the story tells us. This is a terrifying and riveting thought. It is also, let’s be clear, quite mad. I don’t believe for a moment that if Jack Thorne had had access to Andrew Tate videos he would have turned into a rage-fuelled murderer, and in general there is no empirical support for such a proposition.’

It is because the show is targeted at concerned parents that the killer is so improbable in every way. Small and sensitive, his best subject at school is history and his favourite character Brunel, as is so often the case with teenage killers; honestly, I’ve almost lost count of the number of times Isambard Kingdom Brunel is cited by knife attackers in crime reports.

He’s a child we can worry about. But, from a probability angle, he is wildly unlikely to commit a crime, and looks far more like the type of boy who comes home holding back tears because he’s been mugged rather than one who lashes out violently; indeed young men are the most likely of any demographic to be victims of violent crime.

That is not coincidental. Conor Fitzgerald observed that ‘to the limited extent that such crimes ever even happen, the perpetrator is usually Jamie’s total opposite. Stephen Graham (the show’s lead actor and creator) has cited a number of stabbings as the inspiration for the show’ and all have a sort of pattern: ‘the deprived background, the premeditation, the history of violence and explicit signs he was willing to harm women.’ In none of these cases was the ‘manosphere’ a factor.

Being a father is a tough job, and there are your salt-of-the-earth working-class men like those portrayed by Graham whose sons end up lawbreakers; but as any actuary will tell you, the odds are heavily in their favour that their children will turn out just fine. The old ‘straight-and-narrow’ guidelines of the past were precisely aimed at placing probability on your side: learn a trade, stay off drugs, avoid the company of petty criminals and don’t get a girl ‘in trouble’ before you’re ready to commit. Follow these basic rules, and you’ll likely avoid poverty or prison.

Adolescence is aimed at a modern liberal audience who consciously reject those old values, yet who are also subconsciously quite conservative, indeed reactionary in many ways. The picture it paints of modern youth is bleaker than even the darkest corners of my conservative imagination. ‘These kids are impossible – what am I supposed to do?’, the bedraggled teacher complains, while the year head talks of metal detectors in school and is told to ‘shut up, miss’ after telling a boy to put away his phone. The school stinks of ‘vomit, cabbage and masturbation’, while DI Bascombe suggests that ‘Does it look like anyone’s learning anything to you? It just looks like a fucking holding pen…’ (well, I have a solution to that).

The most implausible scene comes when the detectives tell a classroom about the murder, which the boys all treat with levity, when in reality I suspect that many would be in tears. This is a worldview in which young males are barbarians and a problem for society to deal with, while in contrast the agents of the state are all portrayed sympathetically. The strong, brooding black policeman who’s a devoted father; his gobby but smart female northern sidekick; the saintly black immigrant mental health worker (a trope that owes a lot to Harper Lee); the tough but sensitive female clinical psychologist who asks the killer ‘what do you think about women, Jamie?’

In reality, one of the recurrent themes of the many recent tragedies which have darkened the mood of Britain, in particular the grooming gangs scandal, is how cruel the system is to ordinary people, how callous its agents. They weren’t doing what’s right; they were following the system and its ideological goals in a heartless way. This is a drama which doesn’t question the system, except to call on it to do more to fight counter-cultural and anti-social outside forces - the hallmarks of what progressives used to call ‘moral panic’.

The reality is that there is not a huge societal danger about boys becoming dangerous from internet use. Teenagers are much less violent than their forebears in the 1990s; indeed the troubling thing about the youth of today is how passive they are, how withdrawn and nervous.

The social problems Starmer wishes to confront do exist, just not in a way that makes audiences feel comfortable. In the week that Adolescence was being watched by millions, a school in Elm Park on the London/Essex border held a party which was overrun by knife-wielding teenagers. That was close to where a real teenage girl was murdered by two real teenage boys in 2019. You’ll notice that none of the perpetrators resemble the star of Adolescence, because teenage knife crime in Britain is predominately a problem with young black men. This is testified by the fact that, according to Graham, who both wrote as well as acted, the show was inspired by the fatal stabbing of Elianne Andam by Hassan Sentamu, as well as other real-life cases. These are unpalatable realities, and audiences for drama don’t like them.

This is why actuaries could not write compelling dramas - the plots would be predictable and depressing, and make the audiences feel bad about themselves. Fiction writers, instead, have a tendency to portray implausible scenarios which give comfort to liberal audiences; in its school scene, Adolescence even features a white boy trying to mug a black boy for his lunch money which, as a teenager growing up in London, I can only say takes a willing suspension of disbelief.

Even the baleful influence of Andrew Tate and ‘toxic misogyny’ is, again, disproportionately a problem among minorities, as Rakib Ehsan pointed out, and ‘there are several issues that may make young black men more likely to be drawn to Tate’s rantings’, the obvious one being fatherlessness: ‘Young black males are a group disproportionately impacted… This means young black men are the least likely group of young men to have a positive male role model living with them at home – a world away from Jamie’s nuclear family, as depicted in Adolescence, in which the boy is “radicalised” by online influencers.’

Almost half of children in Britain reach the age of 14 without their biological father at home, but this rises to more than three-quarters for those who end up in custody. Indeed, Ashley Walters, who plays DI Bascombe, blames his own fatherlessness for his past behaviour. Social media and smart phones have downsides – I strongly suspect that they are making us stupider – but the obvious risk factor for young boys is fatherlessness.

The problem with the political messaging behind Adolescence, its overt attempts to shape the discourse, is that it will spur lawmakers to miss the point once again. Like with the woeful Martyn’s Law introduced after the immigration mistakes that led to the Manchester bombing, or the Government’s attempt to blame Amazon for the state’s failures over Southport in which, unlike with Jamie, the authorities had plenty of warnings about the killer’s violent behaviour. There is indeed a problem at the moment with violence in schools, and a huge rise in pupils assaulting teachers. yet the current government has also declared its aim to reduce the number of pupils being excluded. Lawmakers are loath to address problems effectively precisely in part because they watch so much fiction and have come to look at the world in a semi-fictional way; their instinctive mental shortcut is to think of the hard cases, a key focus of scriptwriters, rather than raising the probability of positive outcomes. How many shows and films can you name about the wrongly accused or mistreated, sympathetic criminals, and how many about the people they victimise?

If politicians wanted to deal with the real problems raised by Adolescence, they could wage a campaign of encouraging people to follow the ‘straight and narrow path’, and aligning tax and benefits incentives in its favour. That would be controversial, and disagreeable to consumers of fiction.

Indeed, one of the biggest drivers of the increasing numbers of lone-parent families from the 1970s was the same Homeless Persons Act which prioritised single mothers in housing – one reason why the number of lone parent families went from 7 per cent in 1971 to 22 per cent in 1998. Similarly, many of the most horrific knife murders, such as those in Nottingham, were a result of the law making it harder to section the mentally ill – again downstream of fiction, and its portrayal of hard cases.

None of our lawmakers can confront these issues because they are also averse to the idea that their own post-60s worldview might be to blame for what’s gone wrong with children. In episode 3, the psychiatrist is disturbed, and the audience is invited to be disturbed too, about a 13 year-old-boy discussing his desire to touch a woman sexually. That is indeed too young, but then one of the undercurrents behind the grooming gangs scandal was that agents of the state were enabling underage sex, a result of the Gillick competence; admitting that a Christian prude like Gillick was right about child sexualisation would be as painful as accepting that Mary Whitehouse was right about pornography, something many middle-class parents clearly believe, but feel it is too low status to admit.

Instead they’ve found new moral evils to focus on in the form of the manosphere or online hate, and the agents of the state even sympathetically view Jamie as subject to forces outside of his control. Misogyny is part of the pyramid of harm, that strangely gormless worldview in which tiny infringements of social codes are linked to far more serious problems (edgy banter at work > > > something something > > > the Holocaust). The boy’s father doesn’t have female friends and sometimes loses his temper; his son murdered a girl. Can’t you see the link there, between behaviour typical of perhaps 50-90 per cent of men and one characteristic of 0.001 per cent?

One reason that society now feels so uncomfortable with young men is because social norms have moved to a more feminine centre, focussed on empathy and harm-prevention, one major cause of the Great Awokening. It is a way of seeing the world, and of organising human relationships, which many males indeed find difficult to negotiate, but contrary to the fears about men suffering from smartphone use, the data shows that social media is disproportionately harming girls, ‘and is more likely to cause depression than radicalisation.’

A society in which norms are more female-orientated is just as likely to worry about its children as the patriarchy of old, and the response to Adolescence clearly has the feel of moral panic, similar to those around video games and comic books. Jack Thorne, the show’s writer, has even called for teenagers to be banned from social media to ‘stop [the] pollution’ of misogyny online, while the government is clearly using the series to promote its Online Safety Act.

As with so many instances where adults have a particular political goal, children have been called in to push the drive, with pupils supposedly calling for Adolescence to be shown ‘in schools to help pupils understand the dangers of social media, knife crime and toxic influencers.’ Teenagers are the most conformist section of the population, something well understood by authoritarian rulers of the past, but what many older liberals fear is a terror familiar to many societies – that they are losing their young men.

As Fitzgerald correctly observed, this is the very reason why the ‘Jamie’ demographic is targeted. They ‘are not just troublesome because of the retrograde sexual attitudes they might have, or the threat they pose to women and girls. They are troublesome because they are aligned to the upward surge in exactly the kind of political activity that is most disruptive of the status quo. The post-Adolescence discussions being held in parliaments and on TV are best understood as an intensification of the ones around dis- and misinformation. The utility of this discussion for governments and activists everywhere is not that this will help get phones out of schools, but that it will give a second wind to these attempts to reign in inconvenient political speech on the internet.

‘Some groups are more in need of this kind of control than others. This is the heart of the matter; the idea of Adolescence as a call to action has been embraced because it presents a chance to interfere with and oversee the inner lives of the demographic that Progressives are worried about the most - quiet, smart young white men.’

Indeed, what Adolescence really suggests is a society – especially a society of middle-aged, middle-class liberals – which worries not that their boys are growing up to be killers, but that they are growing up to reject their progressive values. In this, as with previous moral panics, their fears are not totally unjustified.