On an Autumn evening in 1983 the great American president Ronald Reagan sat down in front of his White House TV. What followed was, without question, the most consequential binge-watch in human history.
Reagan, along with 100m fellow Americans, saw an ABC drama called The Day After, a fictional depiction of how the US would cope with a nuclear attack. Reagan’s biographer said the film had an electrifying effect.
So believable did the former actor find it, so the story goes, that he almost immediately signed the Intermediate Missile Range Treaty, ushering in a new period of detente with the Soviet Union and halting the slide towards Mutually Assured Destruction.
The film acted on Reagan’s imagination as effectively as the ghost of Marley worked on the conscience of Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. And that is the right analogy. Because, in no doubt, fictional stories have the power to change hearts and minds every bit as much as factual accounts can. The novels of Charles Dickens probably did more to alter attitudes in Victorian Britain towards poverty than any number of parliamentary commissions.
But I wonder how many politicians would admit to allowing policy to be shaped, not by dry analysis and careful weighing of facts, but by made-up stories. It shouldn’t have taken a film to darken Reagan’s view of what would happen to flesh and blood Americans if the Cold War turned thermo-nuclear hot. The facts on the page should’ve been bleak enough. It’s hard to imagine Margaret Thatcher, Reagan’s great ally, responding in the same way.
Fast forward from the early 1980s to the late 1990s. Then, I remember being in Jerusalem for Sky TV when Tony Blair visited Israel. He spoke movingly about the Holocaust and how his sense of it had been shaped by Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. It was a very relatable thing to say, befitting a politician who sought to portray himself as a ‘regular guy’.
Why is Netflix obsessed with the villainy of young white men? I have a hunch, says Colin Brazier
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However, I had - and still have - misgivings about Hollywood helping to shape the thinking of elected world leaders. The eponymous Schindler’s List is a tricky one, based as it is on the real-life Oskar Schindler. The dialogue may be imagined, but the events broadly happened as depicted.
It belongs to the same genre - and I draw no parallels in terms of significance - as the recent ITV drama Mr Bates V the Post Office. That was a work of television which prompted real-world revulsion and repercussions. Politicians responded to public anger which, in turn, was provoked by a TV show. The scandal was already well documented and much discussed in parliament. But it took actors to bring home the injustice.
But how can politicians respond to screen fiction depicting events which have never happened - as if they had? We no longer need to ask. Because, as of this week, we know.
At PMQs on Wednesday, Keir Starmer was asked about the recently released Netflix drama ‘Adolescence’. It imagines a misogynistic killing committed by a 13-year ‘Incel’ boy who has been radicalised online. The Prime Minister was asked by a Labour backbencher if the program might be shown in schools as a warning to other teenage boys. He agreed it ought to be and, at one point, referred to Adolescence as a “documentary”.
The show may be brilliantly acted and a critical triumph, but a documentary it is not.
Why does it deserve to be shown in schools any more than other depictions of the effects of radicalisation, some of which are based on actual data and events? Adolescence rightly taps into mounting public anxiety about the dangers females face, without necessarily rooting itself in the real world.
It’s not only that recent murders of young girls have been carried out, not by white boys, but by young men with names like Axel Rudakubana and Hassan Sentamu. It’s not that white teens aren’t capable of violence against women - God knows they are - it’s just that our creative industries have a long track record of upending reality when it comes to depictions of radicalisation. As Ben Sixsmith noted in The Critic this week, that’s how we ended up with Coronation Street giving viewers a grooming gang that was wholly white and Spooks tracking down a gang of terrorists drawn from the ranks of white evangelical Christians.
So far so predictable. But what ought to really concern us is the elision of fact and fiction. Our government is inclined to see the online space as one dominated by ideological threats, predominantly from the right. Adolescence rehearses those fears without requiring the events it depicts to have actually happened.
If ministers were looking to show a program in schools - a documentary based on real events, not art inclining towards propaganda - then it should be asking my old GB News colleague Alex Phillips for permission to show her remarkable film about the epidemic of sexual violence linked to immigration. The hour-long documentary was produced on a shoestring by the New Culture Forum, an organisation with a fraction of the reach and wealth of Netflix.
