Telly Talk: Teen troubles

One of my very favourite things to do is to read award-winning young adult fiction. I’m talking about books aimed at people aimed anywhere between the 11 and 17-year-old age range. Some favourites in recent years, besides the obvious His Dark Materials series from Philip Pullman, include The Knife Of Never Letting Go, The Hunger Games (I read all three books hungrily), and the Artemis Fowl series. Because people in this age range are known to not suffer fools gladly, and be less inclined towards the “it’ll get so much better once you’re six chapters in” rule, the standard in stories and writing can be pretty phenomenal. And I know where to find them. In my local mega bookshop on a shelf clearly marked out as being for this particular age range, this audience whose low boredom tolerance and high expectations deliver me the best. So which shelf holds their TV shows then?

It used to be that around 6pm was a no man’s land between kids’ telly, news updates and those interesting fillers – like The Adventure Game and Monkey Magic. Now the closest we have to that is old repeats of The Simpsons and Big Bang Theory. With all of kids’ TV relegated to an entirely different channel, filled with bright colours, animations and laughter tracks, whatever happened to the Dramaramas, Press Gangs, Grange Hills and Byker Groves that tackled and questioned ideas on both a younger and a more adult way, without the need to sex it up a la Skins or Hollyoaks?

“Perhaps it’s time for Janet Street-Porter to step up again…”

‘Teen’ telly, as far as I can make out as I search for the televisual equivalent of my favourite gripping literature, seems to amount to BBC3’s gum-smacking ‘yoof’, wise-cracking about STDs and getting mullered, with a few cartoons and sitcoms thrown in for good measure. I know I’ve highlighted some quality programmes in the past – Don’t Call Me Crazy immediately springing to mind – but one well-thought out programme does not a genre uphold. Perhaps it’s time for Janet Street-Porter to step up again, as she did in the 80s, to actually fill this void. To be honest, perhaps it’s time for someone else to step up 30 years later.

It’s not as if there’s not a proven audience for these kind of programmes I’m demanding either. Many of the ‘young adult’ books that do well are then found by Hollywood and delivered to the cinemas. Percy Jackson is having a second visit to the multiplexes straight from the page, and even though the Alex Rider series of action adventure stories stalled at Stormrider, the books are still tremendously popular.

It doesn’t have to cost the Earth and rope in a multi-million dollar budget to bring such tales to life. Five seasons of The Tribe on Channel Five imported from New Zealand showed us that. And that a good series made on a budget could earn its investment back and then some – if we’ve learned nothing from BBC Worldwide we’ve learned that.

So why can’t I find the serious, funny, well put together, giving new writers a chance, giving new filmmakers a chance series I used to love? They’ll put it down to austerity, the rise in popularity of disposable television such as Big Brother and Kardashian fodder, and an early onset adulthood making targeted programmes redundant. Yeah. And that’s why the books sell so well.
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