17 March 2025
SPOILER ALERT – DO NOT READ UNTIL YOU HAVE WATCHED ALL 4 EPISODES
Let me start by saying the hype is true – the 4-part Adolesence is one of the finest TV dramas this century and will surely be shitting BAFTAs. The acting is truly astonishing, especially from 14-year-old Owen Cooper, a product of drama classes run by former Coronation Street child star Tina O’Brien. He got the gig of his life here after sending in a self tape. Miracles do happen in TV land and I predict a rosy future for this talented teen.
Set over 4 episodes all filmed in one continuous camera take, the drama written by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham (who also stars as the boy’s father) follows the aftermath of the horrific murder of a school girl, who was stabbed to death seven times late at night in a deserted car park.
13-year-old Jamie Millar is arrested in a dawn raid on his house and accused of murder. But is all what it first seems? Subsequent episodes take place in the school where the kids are running feral and the teachers are barely able to maintain discipline, at the detention centre where Jamie is being assessed by a psychologist for the judge’s court report, and the finally episode during a family day out to celebrate Jamie’s Dad’s birthday.
This is landmark TV and should be applauded for its bold journey into a dark and difficult subject: the alarming alienation of some of Britain’s male youths. Andrew Tate and his online poison is referenced and the drama does a good job in showing just how little parents, police and teachers really know and understand about the internet and the vicious on screen world their kids inhabit with its colour-coded symbols and emojis.
I have just a few caveats to the writing. Police procedural dramas are my passion – 24 Hours in Police Custody shows what a scramble it almost always is to catch an early lead in a case – so i know what happens in real life and what is often truncated for dramatic effect in a scripted drama.
1. There is NO WAY that police attending a 10.30pm murder scene would by 6am the following morning have secured CCTV pictures and video from multiple cameras, identified the suspect from blurred images, contacted his teachers and secured his school reports that reveal he is “a great pupil”, got a judge to sign an arrest warrant… and raided his home with the boy in custody by 6.30am.
2. NO WAY would they send in 7 armed officers wielding sub machine guns and dressed head to foot in black fatigues and balaclava masks for a 12-year-old child from a good family in a house on a nice housing estate. This isn’t a dangerous Columbian drug gang!
3. At the school a vicious fight breaks out in the playground in front of two detectives who have just interviewed a young girl. She flies at a boy, hurls him to the ground and starts repeatedly kicking him in the face and head, all the while screaming like a banshee. What do the detectives do? They just stand there with their hands in their pockets. Totally unbelievable.
All minor points, you might say, but they had me shouting at the TV
Otherwise this is gold standard award-winning drama. The sort the BBC used to make.
