Every summer my wife and I conduct an extraordinary social experiment with our kids which, if the authorities got to hear about it, could land us in jail. We take them for a fortnight to a remote house in the Welsh borders, take the fuse out of the plug so they can’t watch TV, and force them to entertain themselves using nothing but books, board games and the outdoors.
‘The Noughties Kids are going back in time. How will they cope?’ you can imagine the voiceover to the accompanying fly-on-the-wall documentary asking in the manner of such previous retro-porn, home-makeover, history-light classics as The Viking House, The Victorian Farm, The Medieval Dungeon, The Eighties Crack Den, and The ’Nam Bunker Where Everyone’s On Acid But The Soundtrack’s Fab. (If anyone makes any of the last three — and I think they should — I’m claiming copyright.)
But actually it would be a rubbish documentary because the kids cope too well.They
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