The television series, Adolescence, about the murder of a 14-year-old girl by a boy of her own age, has a sterling English pedigree.
From Tom Brown’s Schooldays of 1857 to The Boys from the Blackstuff of forty years ago, fictive propaganda has served as a useful substitute for reality. The former propounded imperial values, the latter promulgated pidgin Marxism, and neither in any sense was true to life. Nor was Adolescence. It was superbly-made and brilliantly-acted but it told us nothing useful about England because, like Brown and Blackstuff, it was predicated on a lie, which should have been the subject of furious critical deconstruction.
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