Keir Starmer must look beyond adolescent politics

An industry poll by the British Film Institute in 2000 to find Britain’s best television programme put Fawlty Towers first and Cathy Come Home second. The latter, Ken Loach’s bleak 1966 play about a woman’s downward descent through unemployment, homelessness and poverty, is about as far from John Cleese’s inimitable farce as can be conceived. Yet both made lasting impressions on viewers of very different kinds.

Adolescence’s popularity is down to telling liberal England what it wants to hear, never mind its basis in reality

Watched by a quarter of the population at the time, Cathy Come Home took an uncompromising approach to its subject and provoked wide reaction. Passers-by stopped its star Carol White in the street to hand her money, assuming she really was destitute. It helped a campaign by Iain Macleod – then shadow chancellor, previously editor of The Spectator – to draw attention to the plight of the homeless and led to a change in rules to allow fathers to stay with their families in hostels. Fawlty Towers is not known to have had a similar beneficial effect on the working conditions of Spanish waiters in Torquay hotels.

Yet Cathy Come Home’s impact looks minimal compared with that of Adolescence in 2025. The drama is Netflix’s most-watched programme worldwide, has become the first streaming show to top the weekly UK ratings and its creators have been invited to No. 10. Keir Starmer said watching the drama with his teenage children was ‘really hard’, and he praised the ‘harrowing’ series for shining a light on ‘issues many people don’t know how to respond to’. A campaign to show it in schools has the prime ministerial seal of approval.

This seems to be an unusual instance of Starmer being in tune with the public. Ecstatic reviews have matched the superb ratings. The Times declared it ‘the TV drama every parent should watch’; the Guardian called it ‘the closest thing to TV perfection in decades’ – a bold claim from a paper that gave Clarkson’s Farm only one star.

Co-created by This is England’s Jack Thorne and the industrious Stephen Graham, Adolescence charts the arrest of Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old schoolboy who has stabbed to death a female classmate. It is no murder mystery. The focus is instead on unpacking Jamie’s motives, and the ramifications for his family and social circle. With each episode filmed in one continuous take, Adolescence is absorbing. Yet its popularity is not just down to our national devotion to northern dramas, but to following Mr Loach’s approach of telling liberal England what it wants to hear, never mind its basis in reality.

Adolescence plays upon the fear of a spectre stalking Britain’s boys – that of Andrew Tate. Parents are terrified that, squirrelled away in their bedrooms, their sons are falling under the spell of grotesque misogynistic influencers. Jamie is a bright boy from a loving home. His parents aren’t monsters. When the police bash down his door to arrest him, he wets himself.

Adolescence’s lesson, coming soon to a classroom near you, is that every sensitive young man can transform into a murderer through overexposure to what it clumsily calls the ‘manosphere’. The ‘key difference’ between Thorne and his creation, he has explained, is that he absorbed Terry Pratchett growing up, not the internet. Had he watched the same things as Jamie, he could have been a killer, too. 

That’s a chilling proposition, but is it credible? Not quite. As the writer Ian Leslie puts it, if there ‘had been a spate of murders of girls carried out by mentally stable, otherwise law-abiding boys, the show’s premise would be more realistic’. But there hasn’t.

Cathy Come Home didn’t recreate a true story. But Jeremy Sandford, its scriptwriter, was a reporter who based it on his investigation into the lives of countless homeless families. By contrast, though Adolescence’s co-creators have talked vaguely about youth violence and ‘incel culture’, they have been clear that it is not based on a specific case. It is not a documentary – even if Starmer labelled it as such at PMQs.

Violent boys do not usually resemble Jamie. They tend to come from broken homes, have pre-existing mental health problems, be absent from education and known to the authorities. As Toby Young has pointed out on SpectatorTV, Tate has far less of a hold on adolescents than parents think. Polling suggests that most have heard of the influencer, yet only a quarter have a positive opinion of him. Evidence for an increase in sexism among young men is mixed. In agonising about the ‘manosphere’, it is Thorne and Graham who are a little too online, not the nation’s sons.

Those concerned about social media’s impact on teenagers should be just as worried about girls. The correlation between depressive symptoms and internet addiction is higher among young women than it is among boys. Many will lament that the Prime Minister has not found time to watch the excellent recent GB News documentary on rape gangs, such is his comparable lack of enthusiasm for addressing that threat to vulnerable teenagers.

No one begrudges Starmer for kicking back with some television, worrying about what his children are seeing online or wanting to tackle the evil of male violence against women. But allowing his priorities to be dictated by his viewing habits is ludicrous. Every second spent hand-wringing over Adolescence is one not used to phone the White House to wrangle over a tariff carve-out. Britain survived without Margaret Thatcher convening a Downing Street conference to debate Dirty Den serving Angie divorce papers in EastEnders. We should not be stuck in perpetual adolescence.