Why are young children both especially sensitive to social trends & such difficult creatures to con?
I became especially aware of this soon after the marriage of Charles, Prince of Wales, to Diana. At that time I was myself fairly cynical about royalty & astonished by the excitement generated by the wedding among young 20 or 30 something adults; I expected that the excitement would die down soon after the big day
I knew that something special was going on when I saw a tv news report of Dianas 'introduction' to the people of Wales; commentators were astonished by the crowd reactions to the Princess, who should have been dutifully walking a couple of paces behind her husband - was indeed doing so - but who was attracting far the greater clamour & attention, not least from small children who might have been bewildered but who were clearly experiencing magic
We all know what happened over the ensuing years
The next time I remember noticing this phenomenon - apart from a few short lived fads - was at the time of the Beckham wedding. This much derided event I saw only in a smudgy Daily Mirror front page photo when I went into the newsagents; my own reaction was that, rather than something grown up & vulgar, this was just children playing dressing up, clattering round in mummys high heels, hilariously made up, wrapped in a mish mash of floaty scarves, organdie dresses & feather boas
A few days later I was astonished to witness two 10 year old boys searching the WH Smith shelves of womens interest magazines for a copy of whichever celebrity magazine was carrying the official wedding photos. I bet that that was the first & last time in their lives they went to buy anything like that. But something was going on, as has been clearly proved by Beckhams later career trajectory. The man is special
Teletubbies were greeted by various howls of adult protest, just around the time that my next door neighbours had their first child. The first conversations I ever consciously heard floating over the garden fence with him were repetitions of 'eh oh' - before he was even a year old I think. I thought this must have been his - very gentle - mothers way of warning him of danger, of telling him 'no' or of expressing sympathy when he fell over. It was some months before I realised that this had become an almost universal magic toddler language
A later example was Im a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here - the series with the pneumatic Jordan & ex-royal correspondent Jenny Bond. This astonished many with the size of audience it attracted - I certainly did not see it myself. But just walking along the street one day I overheard a very earnest 5-year old boy in conversation with an older woman who, I would guess from the tone was an acquaintance or neighbour he had just run into; he was explaining, very solemnly, that he liked both Kerry & Jenny but hoped that Kerry would win
All these examples are in one sense trivial, examples of dumbing down, but at the same time important examples of our modern culture. Children are very good at just ignoring adult preoccupations, very good at getting engrossed in their own obsessions - skipping is what you have to do this week, bowling hoops the next, then spinning tops. So does the absorption, the attraction to the magic of adult popular culture really tell us anything about, signal the real importance of, otherwise trivial social trends?
10/04/07 Page 1 of 2
