The Netflix drama Adolescence has met with record ratings and pretty much universal acclaim. Except for one TV reviewer, however, who slammed the show for, er, being about something else rather than what he thinks it should have been about.
That review was on the Conservative Home website, and penned by noted cultural critic and self-styled Brain of Brexit Daniel Hannan. Rather than the script, direction or performances, none of which Hannan appears to have much interest in, the Tory peer was worked up about the story being about a young boy being accused of killing a girl after consuming hateful misogynistic content online, rather than his own personal hobby horse of Muslim grooming gangs.
“It’s quite an achievement to write a drama about violence against women set in a post-industrial town and to make the culprit a working-class white boy,” he fulminates. “Have we truly forgotten the abuse of thousands – almost certainly tens of thousands – of underage girls in the grooming scandal?”
He added: “No, the documentary waiting to be made is about how some immigrant communities cling to attitudes that are at odds with those of their new country, and how pusillanimous the police, social services and local government are in confronting that fact.”
Leaving aside that Adolescence is not, actually, a documentary, his entire review is fury that its focus is on something completely different from another, unrelated, scandal. Rats in a Sack eagerly awaits Hannan’s review of another recent hit featuring crime in a northern town. “The makers of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl are clearly trying to distract from the failures of the grooming scandal by trying to convince a credulous British public the true enemy in our midst is a penguin passing himself off as a chicken by wearing a red rubber glove on his head.”
