Shut down Grange Hill, says its creator
I have to confess that I haven't watched Grange Hill since the illegal invasion of Iraq shifted it from BBC1 to BBC2, before the days of Personal Video Recorders and building up a backlog of programmes to watch, I abandoned it with only a small amount of regret.
Admittedly, reaching the age of 35 is probably as good a reason as any to give up a Children's TV programme, but having watched it from its beginning when I was just about to go into what we called Junior 4, the final year before secondary school, and having watched almost every episode, if not when initially transmitted than on the Sunday morning repeats through the 90s I am a a bit of an expert on Grange Hill.
It went horribly wrong when it moved to Liverpool. I am now saddened and a bit shocked to read that its target audience is 6-12 year olds. I know that children nowadays are more worldly-aware than my contemporaries were at corresponding ages, but the attraction of Grange Hill, whether I was ten or 34 was that they didn't flinch from hard-hitting themes. Even today, I don't think that some of the issues they dealt with in my teens are particularly appropriate for children. This somewhat contradicts my view that children are usually more knowledgeable than adults think. I also don't think that controversial storylines are particularly harmful for children. I think their intellectual grasp of narrative runs well ahead of their emotional capacity, and in any case, what upsets children is often surprising - certain people of my acquaintance decided that they didn't want Father Christmas walking round their bedrooms unsupervised. I don't think anybody would seriously suggest shielding children from the dangers of the Father Christmas story. But I don't imagine that a series that is aimed at 6-12 year olds is going to feature the issues that made Grange Hill a Must Watch for my contemporaries in our teens.
And yet, what is Grange Hill without the controversies? Well, actually, a lot. Better character development than many soaps. A demonstration that so-called Demonised Youth, just like adults, contain a mixture of the good, the bad and mainly, people with complex personalities and worries. I have had criticisms of individual story lines, and Grange Hill contained its fair share of that aspect of too much television - laziness revealing a lack of knowledge of life in the Real World Outside Media.
If Grange Hill is no longer hard-hitting, and is no longer set in a school, it isn't Grange Hill. Scrap it now.
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