Children Are Entertaining Enough Without All the Gibberish
By IAN BELL
Child of Our Time BBC1, 8.00pm Johnny and the Bomb BBC1, 5.35pm ACCORDING to Professor Robert Winston, scientists believe that “a good part” of our ability to be happy is determined at birth, no refunds. Worse, “optimists on average live 19per cent longer than pessimists”. By that yardstick, I expired a week past Tuesday. Bummer.
This is, after all, the creepy aspect to the otherwise fascinating Child of Our Time. If the BBC sticks with the project, several of the 25 adorable five-year-olds in last night’s programme will be miserable wasters 15 years from now. Lord Winston, grinning through his improbable moustache, will doubtless be showing them clips of their cherubic former selves and asking what happened to their “happy filter”.
Perhaps it has something to do with my inner curmudgeon, but is it really decent to treat infants as lab rats? Is it meaningful, for that matter, to test the inchoate notion of happiness against a bunch of kids who each, to a toddler, seemed healthy, cheerful and loved?
Winston is peculiarly irritating in most circumstances, but at his worst in this study. At intervals he invoked science, “experts”, and the theories some larger brains happen to entertain. Then came sleight of voice. “Some things we’re just born with, ” said his lordship.
A big nose? Ears that are less than symmetrical? Unfeasible curves? Perish the thought. If you believed Winston, your allocation of “exuberance” is part of the inexplicable genetic lottery.
Little Ethan, from Northern Ireland, apparently had bucketloads of the stuff (along with his attention deficit disorder) , while his peers were less well-endowed.
Yet what, pray, is the exact, scientific definition of an exuberant personality? If it merely falls under the broad category “Stuff Happens”, why would Winston feel entitled even to mention the trait as evidence for anything? Child of Our Time was and is a brilliant idea, but Winston’s taste for pseudo-science puts mud in the water.
Possibly my happy filter is on the blink. Perhaps my exuberance levels leave something to be desired. It may be that I failed to hit the psycho-social mark when I was five. It strikes me, nevertheless, that this documentary experiment could dispense with Winston, and those like him, and prosper as a result. Simply film the kids as they grow and forget psycho-babble that was dated even before it was uttered.
“We can all boost out happiness levels by indulging in a bit of f low, ” said the professor. Very roughly, he meant by “f low” the sense of engrossing creativity during which time f lies. Watching Ethan and Helena, and Reuben and the rest in the absence of sonorous gibberish, Child of Our Time managed to flow. With Winston offering remarks such as “cautiousness can be an obstacle to happiness”, you remembered why there is no Nobel Prize for invented science.
The first episode of Johnny and the Bomb was, in contrast, pure invention, in the best sense of the word. Parents of recent generations may have come to loathe Terry Pratchett, his terrible jokes and his, er, slightly-derivative fantasies, but some of his work translates beautifully to the screen. Thanks to a wonderful cast, this was an excellent example.
In this time-travel fable, one problem of kids’ TV has been solved. How do you get around the fact that most child actors cannot, in any useful sense, act? Answer: surround them with veterans such as Zoe Wanamaker, Frank Finlay and Keith Barron. Then let the action involve both abstruse notions and everyday experiences. Where children are concerned, the golden ticket is the hope that a familiar world can be transformed in the wink of a disappearing shopping trolley.
The smarter young viewers then might begin to wonder just why a grizzled bag lady (Wanamaker) is called Mrs Tachyon and why a paradox can ruin your life.
Obviously, I am beyond such hard thoughts. I will always have time, nevertheless, for a Sunday tea-time drama with an unrepeatable offer: “Where your mind goes, your body follows.”