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.