ONCE in a generation, a TV drama appears that electrifies our nation.
It happened with Boys From The Blackstuff in the Eighties.
It happened with Cathy Come Home in the Sixties.
Television so important that looking away is not an option.
TV so compelling, so blindingly contemporary, that everyone from the Prime Minister to the police are expected to have an opinion about it.
Now Adolescence has touched the same national nerve as those iconic productions and provoked furious national debate about toxic masculinity, online bullying, knife crime, misogyny, role models, incels, young male violence and the poisonous influence of the online world, where the children of today find their dangerous playgrounds.
So touched was Keir Starmer by the four-part series, which he watched with his family, he has now backed a move by makers Netflix to screen the show in schools.
But the ultimate reason the drama is being talked about is because this story of a 13-year-old boy who is accused of murdering a female schoolmate asks one devastating question: How do we save our sons?
Young males are in crisis. From day one in primary school to the last day of higher education, boys lag behind girls in the classroom.
Young men are more likely than young women to be NEETs — not in employment, education or training.
Bombarded by social media images of the rich and famous boasting about their perfect bodies and perfect lives, how could an ordinary boy not feel inadequate?
Whining feels unmanly
The gap between our sons and daughters is growing.
Online, in this country and the rest of the western world, it is boys who are increasingly drawn to extremism of every ugly kind.
Men are far more likely to commit suicide than women.
Yet men and boys are reluctant to talk about how hard it is to be male in the modern world. Whining feels unmanly.
For here is a stark reality beyond the depressing statistics about being a young male in 2025.
Boys no longer know who they are meant to be.
When I was a boy, and my father was in his mid-thirties, my dad saw a man beating a woman on a dead-end street in Dagenham, Essex.
My dad threw himself at the man. Moments later, he found that the man and the woman had joined forces to assault him together.
And while my family chortled about my dad’s attempt to do a good guy thing, we knew he never regretted it for a moment.
Because my dad had very clear ideas about what a man should be.
A man, in my dad’s belief system, NEVER raises his hand to a woman.
I looked at my dad for the 62 years of his life and, without us ever needing to discuss it, I knew exactly what a man should be.
A real man was both tough and kind. The great provider for his family, and their great protector, too.
If he ever used his fists, then it would be for a good and noble cause, such as defending those he loved — or a woman who was being abused by a man who should know better.
The man my dad was, the man he inspired me to try to be, was capable in every way imaginable.
Economically, physically, emotionally. He did not doubt himself or his view of the world.
He usually came from a much harder, poorer world than his children, and he tried to be a better man than his own father had been.
These men still exist. The character that Stephen Graham plays in Adolescence is very much one of these real men from the old school.
He is a working man with a van. He has built a nice home with a wife and two children. He loves his family. That is never in doubt.
Graham’s character, Eddie, is what would have been my dad’s definition of a real man.
But his son Jamie is not like him. His attempts to get Jamie to play football like a real lad have been a failure.
Being a boy is no longer quite so simple.
Jamie picks up a knife not because he is tough, but because he is weak.
Because he feels worthless. Because he believes the world thinks he is pathetic.
The final, heartbreaking scene in Adolescence, where Stephen Graham’s character tucks his son’s childhood teddy into bed, aches with an overwhelming parental love.
We have a generation of boys who are growing up learning about sex and intimacy from violent, sadistic porn that was created to humiliate women.
The troubled boys of today are loved just as we were loved.
But what if our love is not enough? Knife crime in the real world inspired Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham to write Adolescence.
And in the same week that their series exploded on Netflix, Nicholas Prosper, 19, was sent to jail for the murder of his mother, sister and brother.
Prosper was obsessed with murderous violence.
His dream, thwarted only by chance when he was stopped by two cops at the end of their night shift, was to massacre a classroom of tiny children and then kill himself.
Warped ideas
Prosper’s father said that, over the last year, his son had “withdrawn into an online world” — words that will have chilled the heart of millions of mothers and fathers.
Because our children are all growing up in that online world now.
In Adolescence, it is in that online world where photos of a half-naked girl are passed around the classroom to mocking laughter, and where merciless bullying takes place, and where humiliations are dealt out.
And where murderous rage starts to grow. We know already that nothing warps our boys, that nothing stops them growing as they should, like that online world where there are very dark spaces around every corner.
The Centre for Social Justice says in its new Lost Boys report that children first see online pornography at the age of 13, and 88 per cent of content depicts acts of physical violence against women.
We have a generation of boys who are growing up learning about sex and intimacy from violent, sadistic porn that was created to humiliate women.
Prosper’s chilling internet searches
THE court was told Prosper was “continuously” on his phone between midnight and 4am on the morning of the triple murder.
He searched for “shotgun injuries to the neck” as well as other sadistic terms.
These included:
- What will happen on 13th September?
- Do you die if shot in the neck?
- Does sex with a corpse feel good
- Man shoots woman in the head at close range
- Woman raped and killed
- How lethal are neck gunshots
Prosper also searched for the murder of Sarah Everard.
These boys who get their sex education from woman-hating porn have ludicrously warped ideas about penis length, how long sexual intercourse lasts, what is pleasurable — and even what happens on the average date night.
The CSJ report quotes a specialist teacher who reported that many boys thought it was true that, “it is common to ejaculate on a woman’s face after sex”.
There was no porn-on-tap when I was a lad. If there had been, I would probably still be in my bedroom in Billericay.
A real man was both tough and kind. The great provider for his family, and their great protector too.
And in all seriousness, what would a diet like that have done to me? Nothing good.
A central theory of Adolescence is that 80 per cent of women are attracted to 20 per cent of men, a statistic that strikes an excruciating chord with shy, awkward, self-conscious boys who fear they will never get a girl in the real world.
This notorious 80/20 statistic fuels the kind of misogyny that has been so successfully exploited by influencer Andrew Tate, with his ten million loveless followers on X.
Tate is namechecked and then dismissed in Adolescence. One schoolmate suggests that Jamie has been “indoctrinated by voices a lot more dangerous than Tate’s”.
Blithely blaming what ails our boys on the professional women haters of the “manosphere” feels hopelessly inadequate.
If Andrew Tate had never been born, the internet would still reek of misogyny. What can be done to save our sons?
Adolescence co-writer Jack Thorne has said that smart phones should be treated like cigarettes and banned until the age of 16 — a digital age of consent.
It sounds like a great idea. In Australia, there are already heavy fines for social media platforms that do not prevent children under 16 from holding accounts.
Few parents — worried sick about what their kids are looking at behind all those closed bedroom doors — would object.
But a Safer Phones Bill, that would have given headteachers the legal right to ban phones in school, has already stalled.
Jack Thorne’s son is eight years old. Jack has yet to experience just how all-consuming the online world is for a growing teenager in our time.
Try taking a phone away from a 14-year-old, Jack!
What is so powerful about Adolescence is that there is nothing inherently evil about Jamie.
“Neither good nor bad, just a kid like you,” Hank Williams sings in Lost Highway, a song about a young man who goes astray.
Neither good nor bad, Jamie’s life goes tragically wrong after making too many bad choices.
In his blank, unformed features, you can see the frustration, confusion and rage of an entire generation of lost boys.
Jamie could be your son; he could be mine. And that is why we must find the space to let our boys grow.
This generation of boys, like any generation, still need to be able to celebrate their youth, to let off steam and enjoy being a boy.
And we must teach them that being a man does not mean resenting, fearing or hating women.
Even in these changing times, it means exactly the opposite.
“This is a man’s world,” James Brown growled a lifetime ago.
Not any more.
