The end is in sight

Channel 4’s When I Grow Up had an important lesson for middle-class white males everywhere: you’re never too young to be held up as a git.

The series, billed as ‘a radical experiment in social mobility’, gets a group of seven- and eight-year-old children from different backgrounds to work together in a real-life office setting — which in Thursday’s first episode was, rather unexpectedly, Hello! magazine.

The editor-in-chief Rosie Nixon began by announcing, in the tones of one making a brave stance against prevailing social attitudes: ‘I do feel passionately about diversity.’ And this, of course, was also the brave stance taken by the programme itself and its on-hand experts, who included Faiza Shaheen, activist, prospective Labour candidate and all-round Jeremy Corbyn fan — although the programme captioned her simply as ‘economist’.

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Faiza (PPE, St John’s College, Oxford) duly lamented the perniciousness of racial, gender and class-based privilege in British life. Yet, even with her on board, the programme left nothing to chance, carefully casting the children involved so as to reach its preordained conclusion.

In this process, Exhibit A was Charlie — from ‘affluent Berkshire’, as the narrator damningly informed us — whose obliging bumptiousness constantly conjured up images of the production team rubbing their hands with glee at having found him. (Luckily, if the thought ever crossed their minds that there was anything questionable about making a TV hate figure out of a small boy, they managed to suppress it.)

‘I’m good at teamwork,’ Charlie explained, ‘but I know how to take things over nicely when I need to’ — and, sure enough, he often needed to. The group’s first assignment was to host a batch of apparent celebrities at a Hello! theatre evening, where the team leader was supposed to be Samuel, a sweet and shy black child.